Fripp, Shephard, Vai, and Satriani: Transparent Guitar

There sits the lone aesthete, Robert Fripp, on the Harborlights stage dispassionately diddling his synth-guitar and a stack of electronic boxes. The sounds coursing out -- long singing loops dappled with occasional chimes and groans eked with slight caresses from his Les Paul-shaped guitar synthesizer -- had begun at 5:30, 90 minutes before post time last Sunday, with Fripp playing to vendors and parking attendants, then to the crowd as it filed in. With his side to the audience, he let us know he wasn't there to entertain -- as if he were ever out to entertain anyone but himself -- but to provide aural color.

Indeed, it was better to view the sailboats wafting by or watch ticketholders in their summer-concert plumage than look at Fripp plumbing the ambient music bag he and producer/sound wiz Brian Eno perfected with the early-'70s albums No Pussyfooting and Evening Star. Back then, the sounds were conjured by Fripp's guitar and a pair of reel-to-reel decks. Today, it's boxes with dials that Fripp twiddled more than he played.

His soundscapes were a pleasant prelude to a blizzard of technique in June -- a white-out swirl of guitar billed as G3 in which metal, jazz-rock fusion, and blues met via Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Steve Vai, and Joe Satriani. The idea of this package tour is to tap guitar freaks for their cash and move on to another town after collecting the receipts.

As a cult artist -- billed here as a "special guest" -- Fripp is rarely cut in on such deals. He's followed a twisty river since he debuted King Crimson in '69, dipping into new wave, presaging techno, playing dance pop, helping Bowie crystallize his vision, rekindling Crimson, devoting himself to teaching and exploring microtonally inclined tuning, and playing crappy-sounding Ovation acoustic guitars until his ardent electric fans wanted to throttle him. But always seemingly taking the turns at his own rate.

In a way, the 51-year-old Fripp's dispassionate delivery was more honest than the posturing of Shepherd and Vai. He avoided acknowledging the audience, started early to avoid any welcome, played no riffs, and signaled his departure by grabbing what looked like a shaving kit and a guitar and walking off stage as his loops loped along. Fripp's was transparent music, played transparently.

In contrast, Shepherd's blues were merely transparent. At 19, he's good, but so utterly in thrall to Stevie Ray Vaughan that he brings nothing of his own to performances. Like so many other good blues guitarists -- and there are plenty on the Bucket o' Blood circuit who play as well as Shepherd -- he lacks his own vocabulary: signature phrases, the personal tag on vibrato, attack, tone, and sustain that define a guitarist's voice as surely as they define a singer's.

Vaughan understood that in spades, and maybe someday Shepherd will. Meanwhile, he might reconsider his sluggish band and work on lyrics ("Oh, what a tangled web she weaves/I was a-losin' my mind"). Then again, maybe not. Rote imitation and lookin' good in blond hair and shades has gotten him a gold-selling major-label debut. His summer job is considerably better than sweating it out at McDonald's.

Steve Vai? Well, he displayed so much control over his six-string (yes, he's dropped his seven-string custom axes) that he forgot to play any songs except for something about an alligator that lives in the jungle. (Crocodiles, not alligators, live in the jungle, but who the hell cares?) His instrument whinnied, cooed, shimmied, and blared its way through a display of pyrotechnics that, unlike fireworks, rarely coalesced into anything beautiful. Although they might have if Vai hadn't chosen to waddle in mud puddles of disconnected chopsmanship.

Satriani was the right man for mop-up. He remains a strong melodist, even after shaving his head, and when he veers out into the often-numbing extended speed runs, feedback soliloquies, and clots of zingy sounds his guitar-fetishizing acolytes demand, he'll always return to the sweet-toned melodies that are the meat of his music. Hearing his notes sing over the night-lit waters of Boston Harbor, or gently echo back from the tall buildings that form a concrete canyon wall west and north of Harborlights, was an urban pleasure.

-- Ted Drozdowski