How to go
Who: Tommy Emmanuel
When: 7:30 p.m. Sept. 30
Where: Kuss Auditorium
Tickets: $20 and $25; visit pac.clarkstate.edu or call (937) 328-3874 to order.
SPRINGFIELD — The thought of Tommy Emmanuel getting his big break playing session guitar for Air Supply is awfully hard to swallow.
After all, the guy’s a bona fide guitar hero — a cat voted best acoustic guitarist twice now by the readers of Guitar Player magazine.
So, what, are we one day finally gonna find out that Yngwie Malmsteen got his start playing for Seals and Crofts, or that Steve Vai once backed up England Dan & John Ford Coley, too?
But you know what?
It’s 100 percent true that Emmanuel played on “All Out of Love” and “Lost in Love,” among others, for the Australian kings of soft-rock.
“I saved those people a lot of money,” Emmanuel chirped recently, “because I did things so quickly.”
When Emmanuel plays locally at Kuss Auditorium on Sept. 30, about the only thing he’ll have in common with Air Supply is the Aussie heritage.
Then again, so does AC/DC.
Emmanuel is probably more akin to the latter — which is saying a heck of a lot, considering he’s typically the only guy on stage, and he usually only plays acoustic.
“The acoustic guitar is like an orchestra,” Emmanuel, 56, explained. “It’s got everything. It sounds completely self-contained. There’s nothing missing.”
If anything, Emmanuel is the acoustic version of Jimi Hendrix — a man who commands a guitar like a giant squid does a tentacle.
Fans of both will be psyched to learn that “The Guitar Wizard of Oz” has been playing his version of “Purple Haze” on this current tour.
He most recently topped the Guitar Player readers’ poll last year.
Not bad for a guy who can’t read music.
Emmanuel meets fans at every show — “I sign their guitars, I sign their brassieres, whatever” — which allows acoustic guitar aficionados to totally geek out.
“Every now and again,” he said, “you meet people who can’t stop vibrating.
“I do everything I can to make people feel loved and relaxed. I know what it’s like. I’ve been in their shoes many times.”
Even heroes have heroes — and for Emmanuel, his was Chet Atkins, the legendary Nashville instrumentalist and session guitarist.
“He was the greatest example of how to treat people,” Emmanuel said.
Emmanuel first heard Atkins and his famous fingerpicking style as a kid.
“The moment I heard him, it gave me high blood pressure,” Emmanuel recalled. “It was a sound that was so unique. It wasn’t one thing. It was everything.”
Atkins, who died in 2001 at age 77, had himself heard Merle Travis in the late ’30s, picking guitar on Cincinnati’s WLW with his thumb and finger.
Atkins started using his thumb and two fingers.
Emmanuel uses all 10.
The two first met in 1980.
“When I first played for him,” Emmanuel said, “I was so afraid that I’d just sound like a bad version of him and he’d hate it.”
On the contrary, Atkins noticed everything that made Emmanuel unique.
The two bonded like a father and son.
Emmanuel had been without a father figure since 1966, when he lost his own dad to a heart attack at age 10.
“He had a daughter, but I think always wanted a son,” Emmanuel said. “We both fulfilled that for each other.”
The two ended up making an album together, 1997’s Grammy-nominated “The Day Finger Pickers Took Over the World.”
It turned out to be Atkins’ last.
“We had plans for more,” Emmanuel said, “but he just didn’t have the health.”
Atkins, according to Emmanuel, already had been a five-time cancer survivor.
“Not many people survive once,” he said.
While he’s a household name Down Under — he was honored with the Order of Australia medal in 2010 — Emmanuel has only been a guitar hero in the U.S. for little more than a decade.
He was virtually unknown in this country until 2000, when he was featured in the closing ceremonies of the Sydney Olympics.
He’s wasted no time making up lost ground.
In 2006, he picked up a second Grammy nomination for best country instrumental, and his new PBS special, “Tommy Emmanuel and Friends: Live From the Balboa Theatre,” has been airing nationally since June.
He’s also featured on “Much Too Soon,” the final track on Michael Jackson’s final album, the posthumously released “Michael.”
“People here are either blase, they’re entertained to death and they’ve seen everything,” he said, “or they’re looking for something and they don’t know what it is, and then they come to a show and they find it.”
He still could use a lesson in American geography, though.
“We are playing two Springfields on this tour,” he said. “There are probably six of them in America.”
Try 34.
Contact this reporter at amcginn@coxohio.com.
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