Monster mash

Taking the stage in this company was the 14-year-old guitarist formerly known as Little Mikey Welch; Aykroyd anointed him Monster Mike for the occasion. And it was clear that Welch would be heir to one of those traditions -- it just wasn't clear which one. His technical chops and teenage charm have since garnered him a fast if not quite free ride. He's gotten at least as many prestigious gigs as the seasoned blues artists who live in town; overblown words like "phenomenon" have been thrown his way. But the jury's always been out on whether Monster Mike belonged to the real- or fake-blues camp -- whether he was a genuine artist in the making or nothing more than a Blue Kid on the Block.

Much of the evidence to date hasn't been good. I've caught maybe a half-dozen of his shows over the years, and I haven't found enough substance in his playing to justify the showboating. He's gotten better over the past year; he's also begun to rely on the timeworn trick of strutting though the audience while playing. (A fellow writer who saw him and his band backing up Junior Wells reports that Welch was so flummoxed by Wells's eccentric chord changes that he shrugged his shoulders and stopped playing.) Lately he seems to be borrowing some of his guitar tone and a lot of his stage demeanor from Stevie Ray Vaughan, which doesn't exactly place him in a minority. Vaughan, like Hendrix, was a player of flash, passion, and innovation whose scores of imitators get only as far as the flash.

Welch's debut album, These Blues Are Mine (Tone Cool), was released this month, complete with liner notes insisting that he's not a hotdogger or an imitator -- a pre-emptive critical strike if there ever was one. The good news first, and it's a surprise: Welch wrote or co-wrote (with rhythm guitarist George Leroy Lewis) all 12 tracks, and his songwriting isn't half-bad, mostly recycling standard themes in convincing enough ways. The title track is the sort of gung-ho blues anthem Wishbone Ash or Ten Years After might have delivered in their heyday. (Appropriately, Welch adopts a British accent -- "Don't try to woiste my toime" -- when delivering it.) "It Might Not Be Me" likewise recalls an English band, Fleetwood Mac, in their Elmore James-obsessed days (though it's hardly lowdown enough to sound like James himself, even with the trademark slide). "Honest Love," "Keep On Doing," and "Lover and a Friend" are all good, gutsy R&B numbers that a much older singer could cover without embarrassment.

The bad news is that Welch's guitar work hasn't gotten any more interesting, and the guitar is still the main hook of his act. The opening "Freezer Burn" is a salute to Albert Collins's string of instrumentals with ice-related titles; but part of what made Collins's discs special was his tasty, unpredictable rhythm lines. Welch, by contrast, comes out spewing notes all over the place and never stops; it's a brief piece that becomes a blur long before it's done. Likewise, "Cold Poison" is the album's stab at an extended (11 minutes) slow blues. And if a guitarist is going to pour everything out, a slow blues should be the occasion; this is where we want to hear heart and sweat and lifeblood (all of which a gifted 16-year-old should be able to muster). What I hear on "Cold Poison" is a lot of notes, and a long solo that gets softer and louder but doesn't vary much in terms of emotional dynamics. What I hear on These Blues Are Mine is a still-budding player who could well justify his buzz someday. But these blues won't truly be his until he gets through school -- and I'm not talking about high school.

Reached by phone at his home last week, Welch came across as a savvy and sincere guy who answered the tough questions as though he'd been expecting them. Grilled about his gunslinger approach, he shoots back: "I don't think I've ever been a flashy kind of player. Certainly I played loud and in-your-face and aggressive, but I was never flashy because I didn't have the technical expertise to do that. Before I had this band, my loud aggressive playing didn't have any direction. But you have to remember that I just played what I felt, and I really was just a screwed-up, immature little kid. Now, you take someone who's just coming to grips with being a little kid, who's just hitting puberty and starting to go through things -- when he plays, there's going to be a lot of aggression coming out."

Note that he puts much of the above in the past tense. Welch claims he's come a long way since his current band (with Lewis, bassist Jon Ross, and drummer Warren David Grant) was formed last year. He admits that Tone Cool rejected the first album he turned in, prompting a move from straight blues covers to R&B originals. "Being this gunslinger prodigy is all well and good, but let's give this some focus. I spent my first three years cultivating that image; when we were an unrecorded band, sometimes the age thing was all we had to push. We compressed all our dues-paying into a couple of years. Now I'm not so much into proving I can play blues guitar, shoving it into everyone's faces -- I've done my time with that."

He does, however, challenge the idea that he's taken anything from second-generation blues players, especially Stevie Ray Vaughan. "People always tell me I should listen to Peter Green, Mike Bloomfield; everybody's got their white revivalist players they think I sound like, or their favorite Vaughan brother they think I resemble. But it doesn't come from any of that."

Even on "Texas Girl," which has the Vaughan Brothers' Family Style album written all over it?

"No, what I was actually thinking of there on the rhythm guitar is Eddie Taylor, the guy who played on all the Jimmy Reed records. For the lead, maybe there's some of whoever played on the Billy Boy Arnold records. Believe it or not, all the relationship songs on the album stem from messed-up relationships I've had in school."

What comes through clearest is Welch's love for his chosen style, and that may be the best reason to give him the benefit of the doubt. "People ask how I learn the blues, and I say, `Listening, enjoying the music, feeling it.' The directness was probably what got me. One day I heard Albert King and I said, `Oh, I get it. This is what a guitar is supposed to do, and this is what speaking from the soul is supposed to mean.' "

ALEXANDER'S RETURN

I've been hoping for years that Alexander would make one more flat-out rock-and-roll album for the road. His just-released The Holy Babble (Tourmaline) isn't that, but it's the best of the handful of spoken-word albums he's done, giving free rein to the side of his muse that's informed by Kerouac rather than Jerry Lee Lewis. Recorded over the past 11 years, it features jazz-ish back-up and includes Alexander's wry observations on life's most loaded topics -- love, sex, addiction, death, and Elvis. There's a bit of outright weirdness and a couple of instrumentals (the best of which is a Birdsongs of the Mesozoic homage), but the standouts show off some of the most evocative writing anyone's done about living the local music experience. "Zone Show" is a cranky but affectionate recollection of a suburban gig with the Well Babys; "Waiting for B.C. Kagan" finds him reliving his local history with mixed emotions over a photo shoot for Stuff.

COINCIDENCE OF THE WEEK

COMING UP

Funkateers unite: the awesome guitarist Leo Nocentelli, from the original Meters, makes a rare local stop at the House of Blues Saturday. Meanwhile, Dennis Brennan and Talking to Animals open for Groovasaurus at the Middle East, Eve's Plum and Miles Dethmuffen are at T.T.'s, and a fine Celtic band from New York, Rogues March, are at the Phoenix Landing . . . Breaking in new material in a low-key setting, Jen Trynin plays Charlie's Tap on Monday. Meanwhile, Nigerian dance music in all its glory hits town when O.J. Ekemode plays the House of Blues . . . Two pop acts worth discovering Tuesday: Boy Wonder, the new outfit fronted by former Drop Nineteens/Hot Rod member Paula Kelley, play Bill's Bar, and Love Nut are at the Rat.