AGAINST THE GRAIN:
A CHAT WITH ADRIAN LEGG:
By Todd Ellison

LIKE ALL GENUINE ORIGINALS, Adrian Legg is tough to categorize. He is an able composer of original instrumental music laced with melodic and rhythmic hooks. And while he downplays technique, his smooth, energetic playing belies a mastery of the machine. Considering himself a nominally acoustic guitarist, Legg is anything but a purist. The sounds coming out of his trademark modified Ovation guitars usually have more than a hint of electronic augmentation, and with them he manages to evoke the sounds of pedal steel, harp, and banjo.

Stylistically, Legg freely traverses the territories of country, jazz, rock, and folk, managing to make it all work gracefully. His five albums all reflect this diversity and have won him such accolades as Top Fingerstyle Guitarist in a 1993 Guitar Player magazine poll and Guitarist of the Decade (1984–1994) by readers of Guitarist magazine earlier this year. Not bad for a man who played for a slew of "horrific" English country bands earlier in his career.

My own first encounter with Legg was through his 1981 book Customizing Your Electric Guitar.  A very down-to-earth, practical guide to bastardizing electric guitars, it’s not exactly what you’d expect from one of the premier solo acoustic guitarists of the 1990s. But the book is an interesting window on Legg the artist, revealing a kind of ruthless pragmatism that is all too rare in the sometimes pretentious world of the acoustic guitar.

I recently spoke with Legg during a brief space between tour dates in New York. We talked about his unorthodox guitars, his unusual playing techniques, and his philosophical slant on music and the music business.

For an acoustic guitar player, you can sound pretty electric at times. Is this a violation of unpluggedness?

LEGG:  It seems that a lot of the ethics of acoustic-ness [dictate] that you should have some wonderful instrument that sounds absolutely incredible in your kitchen with three other people, and when you take it out on stage it really should sound as shitty as possible.

So you’re not too taken with the acoustic mystique?

LEGG:  Isn’t it rubbish? I think it’s actually a bit of a red herring, I really do. You have to consider it philosophically before you start, and say, "What do I want to do with this music? Do I want to have a wonderful sound in the kitchen or do I want to play for people?" You have to decide what it is about the acoustic [guitar] you like and what elements of that character you can have on stage; the most significant one, it seems to me, is diffusion.

The acoustic guitar is very diffused. Sound comes off it in different phases, at different rates, and in different directions. As soon as you go into a speaker, you lose that. The speaker is very directional. So if you establish a stereo pan, span a reverb across it, and then split the guitar signal in the reverb, you at once regain that diffusion.

Is this the philosophy behind the kind of--for lack of a better word--processing on your recordings and in concert?

LEGG:  The use of toys? Yes.

What’s the purpose of playing a guitar? The purpose is to go on stage and communicate with people, to deliver some kind of emotional message, to affect their lives emotionally at that point. Whether it lasts doesn’t so much matter, as long as something changes in them at the point when you play.

When you wrote Customizing Your Electric Guitar, were you in a mostly electric phase?

LEGG:  Yes. That was the thing I was experimenting with at that time. I’m reluctant to draw lines between electric and acoustic guitars, because technologically all we’re doing with the [amplified] acoustic is reinventing the electric from a slightly different angle. Instead of going to magnetic pickups, we’re desperately trying to stay with picking up body sounds and picking up the harmonic richness, which is another thing you can actually do. You can actually deliver the harmonic range of an acoustic guitar. You may not be able to deliver it with quite the color you want; that is part of the reason why I go for that diffusion, because I’m losing color.

I’ve always tried to look at a guitar as a spectrum and to explain it to myself and to other people in that way. Put on the left the straight acoustic, which is harmonically very rich and has this wonderful tone. It stands alone as a solo instrument; you can play it polyphonically, and it will sound complete. At the other extreme of my spectrum I put the electric guitar, which is a soloing instrument; it’s something that is capable of delivering nice linear things at incredible volume within a band. And it has problem-free volume, by and large. Somewhere between those two points it’s possible to make a trade-off, because at the extreme right of the spectrum the electric is not capable of standing alone--unless [the player] is someone like Joe Pass, where you’re dealing with an electro-acoustic essentially, and you’re also dealing with an absolute genius. Very often an electric guitar played on its own simply sounds like the rest of the band hasn’t shown up yet. By and large, there is a lack of tonality in the electric or a very narrow range of tonality, a very exaggerated tonality. It doesn’t lend itself to solo play. If you look at Chet Atkins’ classic things or the Merle Travis things, it was nice when there was a bass player and somebody playing drums around; they were filling in bits that the electric pickup itself didn’t actually deliver. That’s something I’d put maybe a little to the right of center in my spectrum.

So I’d say what you have to do as an acoustic player is to travel as far along this spectrum from the left as you can in order to take your music onstage. And the bottom line is that you must be able to take the music onstage, not the guitar. The first imperative for the musician is communication, not with other musicians but with other people. So the line is: How am I going to do that, how am I going to deliver this kind of emotional message on a stage?

Let’s go back a ways. If I recall correctly, you started playing guitar when you were 19 and played a lot of electric guitar in country bands.

LEGG:  Actually, my first guitar was an acoustic guitar. It was a disgustingly cheap, horrible catalogue thing, and it was a box. It was a conscious choice to have that box so that I could have sound in my arms without having to be dependent on something else like an amplifier.

My first real guitar was a [Gibson] B-45 12-string I bought because I wanted the harmonic richness that I could pick up and hold. There it was, harmonic richness in a box.

When I started playing in a band in Liverpool, my next guitar was a Gretsch, a hollow-body Gretsch. So it was a very reluctant shift towards the electric. Though once I got there, I did enjoy it, so I ended up with a Telecaster. I finally got rid of that in favor of a very cheap Les Paul copy. Then I got into the business of exploring tonality with wiring and pickups, because that was an area where you could do an awful lot without being particularly skilled. Basically anybody could get into a guitar and stick a few capacitors into it and rewire it to change the sound without necessarily destroying the guitar. You could always take it all out again; as long as you hadn’t dropped solder on the paint, it was OK.

I suppose that was the point I was at just before I wrote that book. I was playing electric in bands--cover bands, Irish bands, country bands--just to make a living. And I was also playing acoustic and composing on the acoustic, and the two things were terribly separate. It was a problem because I was using a little wide-neck acoustic guitar and a narrow-neck electric; I could get good at one at the expense of technique on the other. I hated that, and I found I was writing things on the acoustic that didn’t go, that really belonged to the electric, but on the electric they didn’t have the body to stand alone. I kind of gave the whole thing up and went into the instrument industry.

That would be what, in the late ’70s?

LEGG:  That was '79. By '78 I was doing a consulting thing for this company called Rose Morris. It was a wonderful escape because I had this warehouse full of guitars and I got into the technology of the instrument--to a large extent from a quite selfish point of view, because I wanted to see what was in the instrument that I could use. So I was playing with the toys every day. I had this opportunity to make all the possible mistakes you could make with the technology around the guitar. That’s the way you learn, by making mistakes. Who was it that defined an expert as "somebody who made all the mistakes there are to make in a very narrow field"?

Let’s talk about some of the pieces that make up the Adrian Legg "signature" sound, such as the banjo-style Keith pegs you use in getting that steel-guitar sound.

LEGG:  I’ve always had a kind of affection for banjo; it’s such a lovely, perverse, noisy instrument. I looked for Keith pegs for years and years, and finally I found them at a trade fair in England. I put one on the first string, because I just wanted to drop the first string down to D so I could get my steel licks better. By the end of the fair I had six pegs on the guitar, and I was having a wonderful time in the demo booth. I was irritating people like nobody’s business. One of the salesmen came in and said, "What’s the point of all this, Leggy?"

I said, "Well, look, you can change tunings really fast."

He said, "We know that; you’ve been doing it all week. What else?"

"Well, you can play tunes on them," I said.

He said, "Go ahead and show me."

So I made up a tune on the spur of the moment where I didn’t have to touch the fingerboard; I just played with the tuning pegs between a G tuning and a D tuning. We put it on one of the first albums I did.

Are those now a permanent fixture on your guitar?

LEGG:  On one of them. You have to string fairly light for them to work. I don’t use them on the heavier strung guitar. But I can only take one guitar on the road, so it tends to be that one.

How do you compose?

LEGG:  I’ve spent a lot of time convincing my wife that sitting in the kitchen looking completely vacuous is an essential part of the creative process. The only thing I understand about it is that there are two things that come together to make a composition. There has to be some kind of technical vehicle and some kind of emotional idea. So you have the means of delivery and the thing to deliver. It could be that the technical vehicle comes first or that the emotional idea comes first. So long as those two things ultimately coincide, there is a piece. If they don’t coincide, there is nothing.

How does this process relate to the different tunings you use?

LEGG:  Tuning is part of the technical vehicle. And sometimes you can find something very emotional simply by exploring the possibilities that a technical vehicle has.

What tunings do you play in?

LEGG:  They vary considerably. "Celandine" on the new album [High Strung Tall Tales] is in C tuning, but it’s actually Bb because the guitar is tuned so low. That was frightening, because on the cans [headphones] I thought it was a bass and I kept stopping to see who was playing the bass--and it was me. It was just kind of over the limit as far as weight was concerned. It stopped being the bottom of the guitar and suddenly became a bass. That was the first time I used CGCGCE, a lovely tuning but very confusing; a bit like a G tuning but offset, so it can really screw you up.

There’s DADGAD and also one that Joe Gore showed me, which is what "Queenie’s Waltz" is in: DADGAD with a C and G on the bottom. I’ve used that as a G tuning with a low subdominant.

There are a couple on Guitar for Mortals where I used half capos. "After the Gig" was done with a half capo at the D fret (the tenth fret), with the first and second strings open but dropped down a tone. And I dropped the fifth string down a tone. I used them there as drones. It’s a strange sound when you use wound strings stopped that short; they have an almost harpy kind of quality to them. All the melody in that tune happened on the first and second strings.

Then I thought it would be nice to explore the possibilities halfway down the neck, so I set the half capo up on the fifth fret, and I wrote “Pieta” in that. And that was an extraordinary experience, because it really was exploring a technical vehicle, but it delivered very emotionally. “Pieta” was--for me at least--a very emotional piece of writing; it hit a nerve.

When you write, do you see the end tonal color - what might come out of your effects unit, for example - as part of the composition?

LEGG:  I’m not sure. Certainly in "Brooklyn Blossom" [on High Strung Tall Tales] the processing was part of it, because that had a full capo at the third fret and a half capo doing strings two, three, and four at the fifth fret. And it was in regular tuning, which gave me a kind of C tuning. I wanted a banjo sound very specifically, which was why I capoed the whole lot up, so I could get into the banjo pitch area. And to get into the frailing tonal area, I set a peak at about 500 hertz on the Zoom [effects processor] to get that kind of honky thing--a bit like a Strat out of phase. It produces the sound of an old-time banjo. So that’s actually crucial to the piece, but that’s not always the case.

When I originally wrote "The Irish Girl" [Guitars and Other Cathedrals], the second verse was simply a repeat of the first with less echo--just dried out. And then I wanted to play it without effects, but I realized I’d just created a boring piece of music that I had to rewrite. So I went at it from a technical point of view and thought, well, I’ll simply cut the bass out. So I cut out the fifth and sixth strings.

Have you had any classical training?

LEGG:  No, but I have some classical experience. I played oboe in orchestras and such in school. I think I was lucky that when I was very small I was put in a church choir that was actually a very good one. I sang the treble lines all the way through, but I was also a component of solid four-part harmony. So when I started, notes never existed for me as just a tune, without some kind of harmonic implication. It gave me this lovely kind of intuitive, hands-on experience of harmony.

Do you see yourself as an intuitive musician?

LEGG:  Yes--which makes me an appalling teacher. I have to figure out what the hell it is I’m doing before I can tell anybody. Because I stole things from and learned from the people who went ahead of me, I feel it would be appalling for me not to try to put something back. I think the columns I do for Guitar Player magazine are an attempt to put back what I can.

What about right-hand technique? Have you played fingerstyle all your career?

LEGG:  On the electric, I started with a flatpick, and then there was somebody in Liverpool who could do double-stopping with a flatpick and his first fingernail. My nails were terrible at that point, so I used a flatpick and two fingerpicks. And I got a surprisingly long way with that. The reason I stopped with it was not because of technical limitations--although they were there, obviously, with hindsight--but because I actually discovered after quite a long time that I didn’t like the sound. It was terribly hard to make that decision to throw away a whole stack of techniques that had been acquired painfully and slowly over ten years or something.

Do you use your nails or the fleshy part of your fingers?

LEGG:  It’s a mixture, I think. I seem to be coming off skin on to the nail. I actually need to keep the nails kind of short; if I let them get too long, they tend to get tangled up.

How many fingers do you pick with?

LEGG:  It varies. Most all the roll stuff is thumb, one, and two. But I’m quite happy to use the little finger when I need it; it adds a different dimension to the tonality. I grow that nail a bit longer, and sometimes I use it for a kind of flatpick stroke on pieces where the thumb and three fingers are blocking [chords]. In "Green Ballet" [Mrs. Crowe’s Blue Waltz], there’s a section where the little finger is going double time to play the tune, and the others are blocking.

How do you see the new album, High Strung Tall Tales?

LEGG:  I think it’s a natural evolution. I haven’t thought about it beyond the extent of saying it would be nice to have some live stuff because that’s what it’s all about. But a whole live album has a kind of falsity about it. I did want to get the "High Strung Suite" down for a long time, but I had to find a time when I would be off the road for a month to get it together. I needed to go into training for that tune. I used to use it as a measure of where I was; like, if you run around the block three times and you’re really out of breath, you know you’re out of shape. If I can get all the way through that tune without too much of a cock-up, then my right hand’s in reasonable shape. If I can’t, I need to address myself to it.

What are your musical roots? What do you listen to?

LEGG:  If I look at the things I know, some of the most formative things have come from women, like "Freight Train" (by Elizabeth Cotten)--I cut my teeth on "Freight Train." The influence of women on the guitar is very important, and their influence has generally been on the acoustic side. Women bring to the guitar a collaborative thing; all the women I’ve found involved with the guitar have had that collaborative sense. Whereas however nice the blokes have been--and they have been great--there is ultimately a competitive thing. The collaborative thing is less . . . there.

At the moment I’m listening to very little. I like the chance thing about music. I go through phases of being very hungry and generally end up with lots of classical. I need the kind of emotional power [from classical music] that I’m not finding in any other place.

Did you play folk music when you were starting out?

LEGG:  The folk thing? No. I’ve always been very suspicious of it. It’s dreadfully cozy, and there’s a snobbism about folk music that I find very offensive, very destructive.

Is that part of what you call the “politics of the acoustic guitar”?

LEGG:  Yes. There is that danger, that obsession with purity, that I think is a very big mistake. Purity has always been an extremely dangerous thing; the Nazis were extremely concerned with purity and tried to wipe out the Jews on this basis. The church has always been concerned with purity and wiped out millions because of it. I think it would be very easy for acoustic guitarists to destroy the acoustic guitar itself with notions of purity. I reserve the right to throw bricks at anything smacking of purity as soon as it rears its head. I’m an impure person, and I delight in that.

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