POP MUSIC REVIEW : Flamboyant Guitar Slinger Pounds Out Blues

Walter Trout marked a milestone Wednesday night with his first show as a headliner at the Coach House, but the performance’s eruption of passion and hyper-driven energy is almost a standard night’s work for this uncommonly dynamic Orange County blues player.

Trout’s path to top billing at the county’s leading concert club wasn’t easy. When he first came here from Philadelphia in 1974, looking to establish himself as a hot guitar slinger, he couldn’t find a niche in the local blues scene and had to settle for twanging in country bands. But he persisted, and touring stints with Canned Heat and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers established him as a well-traveled, well-regarded sideman.

The Huntington Beach resident left Mayall to go solo a year ago. While he has made progress in Scandinavia with several tours and an album release, Trout is still trying to establish himself as a big fish in the American blues-rock pond.

Judging from his show Wednesday night, all the qualifications are in place. For one thing, Trout is a legitimate keeper of the blues-rocker-as-gladiator tradition handed down from Buddy Guy to Jimi Hendrix to Stevie Ray Vaughan, achieving a showman’s flash as well as an ace player’s precision. Trout also has a strong, flexible natural voice that he embellished with a husky blues growl or a Little Richard falsetto cry. And his band was first rate. Dan (Mongo) Abrams, on Hammond organ, and drummer Allen Adams both stood out when they got the spotlight. Abrams consistently created parts that were nimble but meaty, recalling the Band’s Garth Hudson.

The two-hour concert ranged widely, from Trout’s driving, dark anthem about street violence, “Life in the Jungle,” to jaunty barroom blues-rock excursions, to emotive readings of agonized classics like John Lee Hooker’s “Serve Me Right to Suffer” and Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain.” Trout, who dedicated the show to the memory of Sarah Vaughan, reached for the unexpected with a moving, achingly soulful version of Bob Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country.” It’s a dimension that Trout should have explored further with “The Mountain Song” and “Frederica,” two fine wistful numbers from his album that went unplayed.

Slimmed down considerably from his paunchy Bluesbreakers days (Mayall used to jokingly refer to Trout and the band’s other guitarist, Coco Montoya, as “the belly brothers”), Trout put on a show that was equal parts visual excitement and sonic sizzle. He wielded his Stratocaster guitar like a trophy or a lance, with all the paroxysms of battle showing on his face and in his playing stance.

That Samurai guitarist approach can be dangerous: battalions of would-be heavy metal heroes have made ridiculous spectacles of themselves with moves similar to Trout’s. The difference is that Trout’s flamboyance springs from the emotions of the moment, not from some calculated attempt to strike a guitar hero’s pose. It’s a natural thing, like the frenzy of a salmon on its last headlong run.

The other risk in Trout’s approach is the prolific amount of playing he does. His guitar style is fast, propulsive and accelerating--on slow blues as well as quick-paced shuffles and rockers. Trout saved himself from the tedium of overplaying by working his speeding stream of notes into clean, coherent phrases that always made melodic sense. But his cornucopia of near-continuous soloing became, after a while, too much of a good thing. Confronted with so much sound streaming from Trout’s guitar, one began to long for space and spareness, the eloquence of the pauses between notes. He did achieve contrast with quieter passages in which he worked the strings to achieve a tone reminiscent of a bowed violin. But Trout resorted to that trick a few times too many.

Trout’s fast musical metabolism seems to be an inbred part of his makeup--the natural fuse that sets off his exciting performances. Perhaps economy and restraint are just not part of that makeup. But if he could create a tension between restraint and his natural wildness, the excitement might become even greater.

There’s not much excitement in an unknown band copying a famous band that isn’t worth copying. That, unfortunately, is what local newcomers Love of Fire did by fashioning an opening set that did INXS to excess. Singer Roger Benes echoed the reedy tone and drawling voice inflections of INXS pinup Michael Hutchence. But instead of matching the Australian singer’s lively stage presence, the languid Benes was only slightly less placid than a disc jockey working the overnight shift. The five-member, keyboards-dominated band was precise and polished with its neatly scrubbed rock-funk, but its 40-minute show fell into a mid-tempo rut of unremarkable songs about romance. One song, “Stand for Me,” had a taut, pleading tone that gave it enough of an edge to sustain interest.