Welcome to the Cruel World of Ben Harper

Originality is a rare and precious quality. So many influences go into the blueprint for a style that it can be exceedingly difficult not to wear them on one’s sleeve, like a proclamation of taste and experience. When a new artist’s music jumps out of a speaker fairly screaming something unique, even the most jaded ears can be taken aback.

Such is the case with singer/songwriter/guitarist Ben Harper, who will play Wednesday night at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano. Harper’s debut album, “Welcome to the Cruel World” (Virgin Records), is a bold statement of vision and conviction. His sense of moral outrage at the world around him unfolds through a group of well-crafted, memorable tunes featuring his delicate, melodic slide playing coupled with soulful, idiosyncratic vocals.

This personal, decidedly non-commercial artist is taking his bows on a major label with a self-produced album--significant testament both to his formidable talent and to his steadfast refusal to be manipulated by the corporate mind-set.

“People have come along in the past--demons--saying ‘you have to have your hair a certain way, you have to dress a certain way, we want to rewrite your songs,’ ” Harper mused during a recent conversation from his home in Los Angeles. “I laugh at these people. ‘How do you see your image?,’ they’d say. ‘How do you see your image?,’ I’d say right back. These record companies try to change people’s connection to the spirit through music. They try to change who people are and to make people something they want them to be.

“So much of what we are is spiritual, and the key to spirituality is through creativity. Our creative and spiritual selves are what make us human. When that is suppressed and not allowed to grow, I think it really alters who we become, and we see evidence of that every day.”

Harper, 24, grew up in California’s Inland Empire, a desert region 50 miles east of L.A. Born to a musical family, he soaked up and learned from the eclectic variety of sounds to which his parents exposed him from early on.

“There were always instruments in the home; there was music in my house, always. I grew up with old 78s as well as my family playing music themselves. Blind Willie Johnson, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Dylan, Tim Hardin, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Marley, Little Feat and on to groups like Nirvana and a lot of hip-hop--I just love good melody, good music.

“Music has no barriers, except those we restrict it with. The spirit of music is more powerful than all of us--it’s stronger than humanity. Without music, I think we’d all be dead.”

Harper experimented early on with standard bottleneck playing but soon came to rely on the Weissenborn, a single-piece, hollow-neck lap slide guitar made of rare Hawaiian koa wood. Only a few of them were ever built by luthier Herman Weissenborn in the 1910s and ‘20s. The instrument’s plangent, mournful quality accounts in part for the unusual sound that Harper produces.

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“Aside from its incredible resonance, it sounds great because of the wood,” Harper said. “The age of the wood separates the good sounding guitars from the great. That’s what separates a Stradivarius violin from the rest. If this guitar was constructed in the 1910s, then the tree that produced the wood is from the turn of the 1800s. So the wood is extremely aged and gives it a unique sound.”

But perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of Harper’s music is the righteous anger he expresses toward a society whose morals, he says, are spiraling toward the drain. Unlike the blind fury voiced by so many hip-hop and punk/alternative groups, Harper’s outrage is tempered by introspection and responsibility, as in the haunting “Don’t Take That Attitude to Your Grave”:

So you can move your court case way across town .

You can move it across the whole wide globe .

But it ain’t gonna help your court case

Up in the sky. . .

And you dare the children to stay off drugs .

Now I dare you to stop letting them in .

And how dare you point your finger

At a gang out on the street

While it’s you who is committing the sin?

Now while there’s still time to be saved,

Don’t take that attitude to your grave.

Most of Harper’s songs probe similar territory, whether the subject matter is topical or universal, earnest or playful. America in 1994 may not host the friendliest climate for his socio-political vision, but he said he remains nonetheless driven to express his ideals through his music. “What I say has to be said.”

* Ben Harper sings Wednesday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano, with the Aphids and the Woodbys. Show time: 8 p.m. $12.50. (714) 496-8930.