ALLSTON-BRIGHTON - From under the bed, covered with a zebra blanket, comes what looks like a keyboard case. The owner, her curly dark hair pulled back in a zebra band and clips to keep it from falling in her face, clicks it open. The process is like unearthing treasured letters or sharing a precious family heirloom.

In a way, it is both. What emerges is a beauty - a solid wood cherry-color Guild electric guitar with the signature of Brian May, once Queen's lead guitar man and now a solo rocker, scrawled in gold on the pick guard.

''I love this guitar,'' says Catherine Capozzi, who may be petite but maintains a metal-pedal foot and a taste for Les Pauls and dance grooves. Capozzi is lead guitar player in two bands, All the Queen's Men and Universal You. Or you can hear her trade riffs with Bill Braken in ''Jesus Christ Superstar,'' the rock opera now playing at the Massachusetts College of Art through Nov. 18.

For the Boston rocker, who prefers to keep her age a secret, years of lessons, practice and band rehearsals paid off. She won the trophy guitar in a contest hosted by Tower Records, Hollywood Records and WBCN in 1994.

''I was petrified,'' admits Capozzi, recalling the audition that was videotaped at Tower Records on Mass. Ave. ''I was ready to back out.'' But she didn't. She just started playing something she made up on the spot.

She competed with 104 others. Ten finalists' videos were sent to May, who selected the winner.

On the wall in the apartment she shares with a roommate and three cats (Elvis and Cheetah are hers, Corey is the roomie's) hangs a black and white photo of her and May, literally a rock giant who had to kneel for the photograph. (Even on his knees, he looks like he's standing, with Capozzi coming up to his chest.)

May's guitar is featured in a collage of guitar rockers at the Museum of Fine Arts' current exhibit called ''Dangerous Curves: Art of the Guitar.'' May is among them, fingering the guitar now in Capozzi's possession.

Suzi Lee, the ''Jesus Christ Superstar'' band leader and keyboardist, called Capozzi after Joe Stump got pulled off the job when his tour dates conflicted with ''JC.''

It was one week before the band was supposed to start rehearsals in October. ''I remembered she was a solid player,'' says Lee, who first saw Capozzi play four years ago in Universal You. ''And obviously, I like the fact that she's female. That's a big thing for me. She rocks.''

Indeed, being a female rock guitarist, Capozzi has cut her own path. She concedes that there were no women guitarists she aspired to be. She quips: ''Gosh, I want to be Jimi Hendrix, but I'm not a tall black man.''

Though she never thought of the male-female thing holding her back from playing, she is aware of the stereotypes. One is that people expect her to sing, which she doesn't; and two, the fact that she's female and can shred elicits different reactions.

''You play like a man, that's my favorite one,'' says Capozzi, sarcasm seeping out of her bright smile. She hears it less now, but admits it's a standard line that, in the year 2000, still amazes her.

Lee said another reason she hired Capozzi was her professionalism. She was reliable and not a flake. ''I needed people we can count on,'' says Lee.

And take it seriously, Capozzi does. She canceled plans for a Los Angeles trip so she could join the ''JC'' band, and she juggled late-night rehearsals with All the Queen's Men, a high-tech day-job for supplemental income, and her own practice sessions at home.

''To me, the guitar is a lifelong instrument,'' says Capozzi, who still takes guitar lessons and also gives them. ''It's not, `Oh, I know how to do that, I don't have to do it any more.'''

For her, guitar-playing is an art and craft - a craft in the sense of practicing and developing a style, and as art, a discipline.

Bruce Bartlett, who heads a trio bearing his name, has taught Capozzi for the last three years, and in that time says she's become a stronger musician as well as a better guitar player.

''I think Cathy has her own personal stamp on the way she approaches playing, which you can't learn in a book,'' says Bartlett. ''As a musician, she's not trying to repeat something that's already been done.''

Her creative ingenuity is also something All the Queen's Men manager Daryl Sanders, a former music critic and president of Nashville-based Treason Records, saw and heard right away.

''I can't think of anyone who can touch her in terms of her chops and her soul, which, by the way, most guitar players have one or the other,'' he says. She is also one of the most driven musicians Sanders says he has ever met.

Capozzi, brought up in an Italian-American household in Waterbury, Conn., began what she would call, tongue-in-cheek, her musical career at 7 with violin lessons. By 10, she was taking guitar and violin, somewhere picking up drums along the way. At 12, she dropped violin to focus on drums and classical acoustic guitar, followed by electric guitar.

Her brother walked her to lessons in a music store every week. The guitar teacher began giving private lessons at his home, and Capozzi was one of the few students he kept.

When the original soundtrack to ''Jesus Christ Superstar'' came out (she says she was about 12), Capozzi bought the album, recognizing the opening riffs as something easy enough to learn on her own. About the same time, she purchased ''The Exorcist'' soundtrack with her own money.

''I liked the haunting theme of the tubular bells,'' says Capozzi of The Exorcist theme, ''and the rock of `Jesus Christ.'''

With her Gibson Les Paul Deluxe, she cleans out the vamp in the musical's overture, the piece she learned when she was 12. ''

Many people think rock is dead; I don't agree with that,'' says Capozzi, who owns five guitars and keeps a knapsack so full of electronic gadgets for sound effects that it weighs as much as a bowling ball.

All the Queen's Men is trying to take elements of rock while exploring new beats, electronica, loops and Middle Eastern melodies. The group is working on its third recording with periodic trips to Nashville.

Near Capozzi's bed is a Marantz portable cassette tape recorder, her scratch pad for recording ideas and practicing. Two votive candles, one labeled Prayer for Positive Cash Flow and the other Powerful Elvis Prayer, sit on a coffee table in the living room, an unruly stack of guitar magazines under an end table. Her CD collection runs the gamut from A (All the Queen's Men and Ani DiFranco) to Z (Led Zeppelin), and favorites in between: Fatboy Slim, PJ Harvey, Patti Smith, The Very Best of Cream, and, of course, Jimi Hendrix.

''I'm always searching out new sounds,'' she says. She takes the May guitar from its case. ''Yeah, this is a great guitar. I love this guitar,'' she says, and rests it on her bent knee. Head bowed over the strings, she runs her fingers over the frets like water, strumming and picking.

Was winning the guitar a highlight of her career?

Capozzi smiles.

''My career is not over with, yet,'' she laughs. ''I can't say that's the highlight - yet.''

But when it's time to retire, she says you can find her at Ron Jon Surf Shop in Cocoa Beach, Fla. ''I'm going to be a 90-year-old surfer rocker guitar player.''

This story ran on page 9 of the Boston Globe's City Weekly on 11/12/2000. © Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.

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