POP MUSIC REVIEW : Montrose Performance Lacks Personality

Ronnie Montrose certainly plays a lot of guitar, but these days who doesn’t? While no less capable a fretman than when he provided the rampaging ax on Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein” 16 years ago, Montrose’s 14-number set at the Coach House on Thursday evening was largely eclipsed by the array of picking peers he now has to contend with.

From James Burton and Link Wray through Joe Satriani and Johnny Marr, the rock scene is clotted with four decades of guitar heroes, and Montrose failed to display a prowess or, most important, a musical personality sufficient to set him apart from the throng.

Montrose had his curiously-shaped guitar hooked up to a MIDI rack to rival Steve Morse’s, but that’s about where the comparison ends. While both players are formidable technicians, particularly considering the intricacies of computer-patched guitars, Morse uses his craft to delineate a rich sense of composition.

Montrose did achieve some impressive effects, at one point coaxing shimmering plateaus of sound from his strings with each stroke. But more often than not his playing seemed to promote technique for its own sake. And that’s a crowded field.

It’s not particularly damning that Montrose is outshone by the complexity of Morse, Satriani and others--beyond a point a computer becomes necessary just to sort out the notes--but where his music really suffered was in that lack of personality. Where a Jeff Beck or Stevie Ray Vaughan play with such style and undiluted emotion that a couple of notes are all that is needed to identify them, Montrose was a musical John Doe, running predictable, signature-less speed patterns over his neck.

Except for an encore number vocalized by his trio’s bass player, the set was wholly instrumental, drawing on the current “The Speed of Sound” album, “Territory” and others, and introducing several selections from a disc due in January. A couple of numbers only served up convoluted Zeppelin riffs, but “Windshear” and one or two other of his own compositions allowed Montrose a modicum of melody.

Before he unleashed Sammy Hagar on the world with his self-named metal band in the early ‘70s, Montrose was known as a pretty melodic player, enough so to land a job with Van Morrison on his “Tupelo Honey” and “St. Dominic’s Preview” albums.

The strongest hints Thursday that Montrose may still have some of that in him came on his covers of Gene Pitney’s “Town Without Pity” and the Tornados’ 1962 “Telstar.” On the former particularly, Montrose showed that given a strong melodic line to work from, he can still let rip with solos that sing instead of sputter.