Surrendering to the power of the guitar

DURING the late 1980s, I played guitar in a pickup band, a shifting amalgam of friends and fellow travelers that gathered on Saturday afternoons to bang out ragged chords and rhythms for a couple of hours. Like any self-respecting would-be rockers, we had a few originals, although we mostly filled out our repertoire with oddball covers -- a punked-up version of Suzanne Vega’s “Luka,” a power-pop take on Talking Heads’ “Heaven” -- and idiosyncratic jams.

Occasionally, we came up with something that felt almost revelatory, like the day we discovered that Keith Richards’ slash-and-burn guitar lines from “Sympathy for the Devil” fit perfectly over the changes for “Dear Mr. Fantasy.” Mostly, though, the real revelation was the joy we felt in playing together, in taking a song we knew -- or even better, one we’d written -- and thrashing it out until it became uniquely ours.

Will Hodgkinson’s “Guitar Man” revolves around a similar sort of experience; it culminates with the author’s first gig as a guitarist in a band made up of his friends. I’m not giving anything away here, since that performance (along with the question of whether Hodgkinson is ready) drives the narrative of the book.

Subtitled “A Six-String Odyssey, or, You Love That Guitar More Than You Love Me,” “Guitar Man” means to investigate a certain kind of obsession: male guitar hero madness, the lure of the power chord, of the pose that blends into music, the idea that guitars can change the world.

It’s a childlike fantasy but it continues to have resonance because, like so many people, Hodgkinson has become an unwitting adult, with responsibilities he’s not sure he can handle -- two kids, a marriage, the need to support a family. As a result, his plunge into the world of guitars has a quality of the road not taken, of the counter-life. “The possibilities of life are infinite,” he writes, “limitless and exciting before you start attempting to do something. But as soon as you apply yourself to learning a new skill, you are confronted with the severity of your limitations.”

This notion of “a new skill” makes Hodgkinson distinct, for until the action in the book begins, he’s never picked up a guitar in his life. No air guitar, no posing before a mirror with a tennis racket, no lessons, none of the usual initiation rites; it’s as if he’s lived apart. Even his guitar heroes are off-track -- Bert Jansch, not Jimi Hendrix; legendary British folkie Davey Graham as opposed to Jimmy Page.

But if all that gives “Guitar Man” its own idiosyncratic personality, it’s a personality that doesn’t emerge completely on the page. For one thing, Hodgkinson is a pedestrian writer, whose scenes never take three-dimensional form. Whether describing encounters with such players as PJ Harvey, Roger McGuinn and the Smiths’ Johnny Marr or detailing his wife’s growing annoyance at the way his acoustic plinking has taken over their small London home, he can’t quite get at the heart of the situation. These are less set pieces than sketches, quick takes, hit-and-runs.

Equally problematic is the fact that, as “Guitar Man” progresses, Hodgkinson’s upcoming gig seems more like an impediment than a centerpiece, a limiting influence rather than a source of discovery. He worries about performing, wonders if he’ll have the chops or the playlist and fears that he’ll embarrass himself. Such concerns are certainly legitimate, but in the context of the larger story, they serve to narrow his focus, reducing everything else to a kind of heightened show-and-tell.

The trouble is that you can see the contrivance; the whole thing seems as if it were being staged for the book. Nowhere does Hodgkinson explain how he got his gig, nor does he admit that it is, perhaps, a bit backward to learn to play for the purpose of performing instead of the other way around.

Indeed, much of his so-called “odyssey” (which takes him from the British guitar underground to the American South) feels like a collection of dutiful journalistic profiles, patched together to form the simulacrum of a narrative. This is especially true when Hodgkinson pays the obligatory visit to the Mississippi delta, where he seeks out, like far too many acolytes before him, the legacy of Robert Johnson and searches for the crossroads where the bluesman purportedly sold his soul.

As it turns out, the site is hardly elusive. “I expected a lonely, isolated spot surrounded by flat expanses of cotton fields,” the author tells us. “What I got was a brightly lit intersection.... There was a stream of traffic and a dirty tin sign featuring two guitars crossed together, under which, in case anyone was left in any doubt, was the word ‘Crossroads.’ ”

Yet rather than explore the irony, Hodgkinson plays out an amorphous riff about selling his own soul, which he has no intention of doing, even if he could. Leaving aside the legend of Johnson’s soul-selling -- which I’ve always considered misguided, if not racist -- it’s a radically wrong turn that highlights many of the book’s problems, leaving us to wonder just how deeply rooted, how essential, Hodgkinson’s guitar fascination really is.

Surprisingly, “Guitar Man” does manage to come together, coalescing around its author’s unlikely gig. It’s not much, a short section at the end of the book, but here Hodgkinson finally gets at the ragged glory of the instrument, the reasons it exerts such a pull. He describes the joy, the transformation, the sheer emotional power of getting up and playing music -- missteps, inadequacies and all. “It became obvious after a while,” he reports, “that the mistakes didn’t really matter: the key was to remember that there was an audience out there, that you are not doing this in your bed-room.”

It is precisely for this experience that generations of wanna-bes have picked up guitars and headed for a million garages, basements and rehearsal studios, to live out, at whatever level, their rock ‘n’ roll dreams.

david.ulin@latimes.com

David L. Ulin is book editor of The Times.