Enter … Brian

Here’s both the pitch and the truth:

The North-east of England invented the guitar hero.

Then - as with the steam engine, the railway, electricity, hydraulic engineering, ship-building, the modern production of steel and coal, progressive football and most of the modern world, less self-effacing regions and people took all of the credit for it and have been dining out on it ever since.

Farewell, dour South Yorkshire parochialism; do one, Mancunian chippiness; go back to the sound of the Bow Bells, London. Viz nailed you first time out. Big Vern is coming for you all. You’re all a footnote to Tyneside.

I’m here all week. Tip your waitresses, try the veal. An animal died for your lunch.

[Drops mic].

It’s true, though.

Without the efforts of a Geordie called Brian, there would have been no ‘Clapton is God’ graffiti on London walls; no lauding of the laudable Peter Green; no eulogies to the stylings of Jeff Beck. There would have been no shrines across North America in the 1970’s and beyond to Jimmy Page, a low-slung Les Paul and the recycling of old blues riffs as original material that was Led Zeppelin. There would have been no Eddie Van Halen - the last player to revolutionise the instrument and a giant of a player no matter how you feel about rock music.

This is not the beginning of some sub-Monty Python routine: He’s not a guitar hero, he’s a very average musician … Anyone who quotes comedy has no sense of humour. That’s a fact, as is the reality that you should stay well away from such people unless your life has reached such a sad nadir that you really, really want to hear someone reciting a sketch you already know to you word-by-word in a public place before expecting you to laugh.

I’m bringing attention to the above because I think Brian, through no fault of his own, is the cause of the deep fracture that exists in guitar culture where the guitar is positioned as wand and its practitioners as all-mighty sorcerers that is the mythologised cultural narrative of the guitar hero and the reality of the instrument: that it’s there for people to make music on. I’m doing this because as an artist, as an academic, as a person who engages with the things I do, I think about these things. That last bit - that the guitar is first and foremost an instrument to make music on - might sound like an obvious point, but unless we explore how the former rather than the latter became the dominant cultural trope about what the guitar is and does, the instrument will remain stuck in the constant repetition of its past glories that currently defines it.

And I care too deeply about the instrument and what it can do to let that happen.

So, let me introduce Brian.

Brian was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1941 - a part of the world where to this day the idea that all the men are lads, all women are lasses, all the lads are called Jackie (and so too are most of the lasses), and we’re all teak-tough canny Geordies who endlessly kick casers around on the steep cobbled streets that run down to the Tyne, the Tyne, the mucky Tyne the Queen of all the rivers while waiting to be called for wor tea of stottie and pease-pudding persists beneath the surface of the steel and glass that now adorn the city centre.

Brian’s given name was Brian Rankin - a solid enough British name for a solid enough time in British history, but not one that rang to the new sounds that were beginning, as the cultural commentators would have it, to sweep across the country as he was growing up in the 1950’s: the three chords played with a beat that was rock n’ roll …

Sounds that prompted Brian to swap his banjo for a guitar.

Sounds that prompted Brian to change his name …

Why?

Because Brian doesn’t sound very American.

The period immediately after the Second World War was the point where America took over from Britain as the world’s dominant player and culture. Reams have been written about it, so I won’t add to it beyond noting that America has always been a country of inherent contradiction and tensions. It was then as it is now a place the simultaneously celebrates the modern and the old; a place of cool, new sounds and cool, new types of people and roots and archetypes.

Brian’s America, brought to him on the big screen and through the airwaves was a place of Cowboys and Indians on the plains and skyscrapers and bright city lights; of settlers and immigrants. Brian’s America was big band song-and-dance numbers in Technicolour and the black-and-white of mobsters and gangsters in the prohibition-era and the frontier settlers … all at the same time. Brian’s America was the Second World War, heroics in Europe and on the sands of Iwo Jima even as it was still coming to terms with its own Civil War, ongoing segregation and racial injustice. It was green Kentucky hills, the breadbasket, Arizona deserts, Texas plains, Montana big skies, Southern swamps and Northern wildernesses. Brian’s America was simultaneously ragtime, gin joints, jazz, swing, big band, dancehalls and rock n’ roll, rock-a-billy, skiffle, folk, bluegrass and Appalachia.

But what it boils down to was this:

America was where it was at. It was bright and new and swinging and powerful and modern and looking ahead - while Britain was falling in love with the idea of continually looking back to its past.

America - whether in music, clothes, cars, culture, movies or whatever - was where the real-I-am came from.

Which is why Brian changed his name to Hank.

Hank is a very American name.

Hank Marvin even more so.

Brian Rankin became Hank Marvin, and as Hank Marvin invented the guitar hero.

I can imagine what you’re thinking: Hank Marvin? Speccy bloke? Wasn’t he a Jehovah’s Witness? Didn’t he play with Cliff Richard? You’re saying he was the first guitar hero?

Yep.

Hard though it might be to believe, without Brian, from Newcastle, there’s no Holy Trinity of the 1960’s British Blues Invasion and assorted lesser deities. Without them, without him, there are no guitar heroes of the 60’s and 70’s and then no guitar anti-heroes in the punk movement of the late-70’s and 80’s. Without Brian, from Newcastle, there’s no Eddie, no tapping, no divebombs, no powersquats, no pointy headstocks and none of the eighties and nineties generation of players. There’s no Johnny Marr. No Kevin Shields. No Edge. Without Brian, there’s none of them.

And without Brian there’s no obsession with gear and gizmos and specs and licks and tricks.

None.

And so it logically follows that without Brian, from Newcastle, and those who took their cue from him (and those who took their cue from those who took their cue from him), the guitar wouldn’t be stuck in the cultural cul-de-sac that it currently is: a heritage hobby for weekend reenactors rather than being a vital part of the contemporary musical landscape.

Here’s why.

Pre-Brian, the guitar was part of the band; part of the collective; part of the overall machinery of making music. It might step out occasionally to take a break, but so did everyone else.

Post-Brian, the guitar was a solo instrument. Taking solos on instruments has been a part of every musical tradition, of course, and exceptional soloists have always been celebrated. But Paganini didn’t start calling himself a ‘violin hero’, or Beethoven a ‘piano hero’ after writing the Caprices or another Sonata and nor did they start thinking of their instruments as weapons, swords or mystical objects either.

No, it took guitarists to start calling themselves guitar heroes and to cast their equipment in quasi-magical and heroic terms.

And it was Brian, from Newcastle, who was the first guitar hero of the boys who would go on to become guitar heroes themselves.

Here’s how it happened:

Brian, now Hank, and his friend, Bruce Cripps, now renamed as Bruce Welch, headed to London in search of a start in the music business.

It’s a sign of both the world as a more trusting and open place or perhaps the disengagement between the post-war generation and their parents that their parents didn’t try and stop them. Both were grammar-school boys, which meant that for the first time in British history they had the chance to be more than their parents had been via newly-opened and accessible pathways in Further and Higher Education. And yet both rejected the opportunity in favour of striking out for the one-in-a-million chance that is material success in music, despite knowing nothng about the business and having no ‘ins’ or patronage - as important then as they are now.

After nearly starving to death, however, their ship came in.

Hank and Bruce found themselves becoming part of the backing band for a boy called Harry Webb, who, as Britain’s answer to Elvis, changed his name to the more brooding and rugged Cliff.

Cliff Richard.

It says a lot about the differences between Britain and America that America’s Elvis was a dirt-poor, white trash shotgun shack hick who embodied all of the societal, musical and racial contradictions and tensions of the American South in a once-in-a-generation package of voice, sex appeal and material without knowing how he did while Britain’s version was a born-again Christian on the make whose every move, note and spontaneous outburst was pre-rehearsed.

Nevertheless, suitably packaged and sold, Cliff was a hit, and as with Elvis, attention began to spill over to his backing band, The Shadows. The music business has always been a business, and there was a commercial opportunity to be had in The Shadows trading on their success with Cliff by recording under their own name, so they did, recording instrumentals for the same company.

And that’s the point where the split between guitar as part of the ensemble and guitar as solo instrument; and guitarists as muscians and guitarists as ‘guitar heroes’ begins to occur.

Here’s how and why:

I’m sure I’m not the first person to point out that guitarists are like golfers.

No, not in the sense that they tend to be middle-aged men who do a pointless thing with highly-specialised equipment with other men on a Sunday afternoon … (although yes, that is true).

Guitarists are like golfers in as much as they / we all believe that we’re only one more piece of kit away from achieving perfection.

Like golfers, we all think that we’re only one more pedal, one more amp, one more guitar, one more piece of kit away from middling it, splitting the fairway, getting on the green and holing out.

Rather than point out that we’d all stand much more chance of doing that and being better players if we just, you know, actually put the hours in, manufacturers prey on this tendency in both tribes.

Can’t find the fairway? We changed how drivers are built, so you can change how you play the game. The tee box is yours. Swing away with our new [insert macho name here] 2. We’ve pushed past the limits of titanium, producing a more forgiving head that gives you more fargiveness …

Searching for the sound in your head? With period accurate bodies, necks and hardware and meticulously voiced, year-specific pickups, our American Heritage / Vintage / Original / Reissue / Whatever series captures the revolutionary designs that altered the course of popular music forever …

Although one is selling the future and the other the past, the language is exactly the same.

If we really wanted to hit a 300-yard drive, backspin our wedge approaches to within a foot of the pin and hit the back of the cup we’d go to the range or the short course and hit a ball ten thousand times.

If we’d really wanted to master the guitar, we’d take whatever we’re playing and put ten thousand hours into it.

Because there really is no high road to the Muses.

But none of us wants to hear that.

We want the secret.

We want the trick.

We want the hack.

We want the silver bullet.

Why?

Because.

Because we don’t believe it when we’re told its in the fingers.

Because we want the reward, not the journey to it.

Because we don’t really want to find our own voice. After all, that’s a hard, high lonely road to walk with a good chance there’ll be no recognition and approbation waiting for us at the end of the path. Why bother doing that when we know we can get props just for successfully apeing someone who sounds like someone who sounds like someone who did actually do the miles?

Guitarists are like golfers in another way too:

We believe that if we have the kit our heroes have, we’ll perform like them.

We know that it isn’t true.

We’ve been told its in the hands a million times.

But that doesn’t stop us thinking if only we had the new Taylor-made wedge / VOS spec Les Paul / Strymon Cloudburst pedal … that’s how x, or y or z gets that control on their approach or that sound …

To be fair, Brian / Hank was no different.

He’d grown up on Buddy Holly and the Chirping Crickets - still the ground zero template of what you can do with a guitar, three chords, some friends and a garage.

What was on the cover of The ‘Chirping’ Crickets?

Buddy’s Fender Stratocaster.

Nowadays, like the Les Paul, the Stratocaster is sold on what it was. It’s now a heritage instrument where people pay top dollar to get an instrument exactly as it was made in the 1950’s and early 1960’s - down to the weight, wiring, capacitors, and pickups.

This is complete idiocy. You don’t find an EDM artist telling their record company that unless they’re provided with a Bakelite radio with original valves and static hiss they’ll walk. Only guitarists are stuck in this timewarp that what’s cool and hip and current is something that their grandparents thought was cool and hip and current seventy years ago.

Because the guitar then was cool and hip and current, make no mistake.

In the 1950’s, the Stratocaster looked like it had come down from another planet. It was a song of sleek, sensual futuristic design. It looked like a rocket ship, like a jet aircraft, like a supercar. It had to be ordered from California - the land of Hollywood dreams. It took months to arrive, and cost £120 - which was what the average working man then earned for three months work.

And when Brian / Hank’s did arrive, it was, literally, the first one ever to arrive in Britain.

Hank Marvin had the first Fender Stratocaster in Europe.

When Cliff and the Shadows gigged, people would come to see the band - which is important. Previously people went to dance to bands. They still went to dance, but now, increasingly, they just went to look and watch.

Girls would come to scream for Cliff - and Hank too, which for a deeply religious boy from Newcastle brought up on wartime values must have been slightly disconcerting.

And a certain type of boy would come along to take note of the equipment that Hank was using: that the Stratocaster had a tremolo bar, that allowed Hank to bend and wobble notes expressively. That he used a Vox AC-30 - an amp whose unique voicing gave his licks and runs a vocal, lyrical quality. That he used a primitive tape-delay to get the slap-back and echoing sounds that early rock n’ roll recordings had deployed so effectively.

And that certain type of boy would notice that girls were screaming for a fairly ordinary Geordie boy because that fairly ordinary Geordie boy had been transformed into a figure of cool, a figure of appeal simply because he was playing the most modern, cool and hip instrument in music: the electric guitar.

And they’d want to be that person, making that sound, getting that attention.

Just like that, a generation of boys who would never ever be within touching distance of ever being cool suddenly found a way they could be: all they needed was a guitar.

A friend of mine who was in London’s best unsigned band three years in a row back when that meant something (somewhere after Britpop and before Razorlight) once said about his lead singer if the audience loves him as much as he loves himself, we’ll be millionaires.

That the audience did but the record company didn’t didn’t change the essential truth of that statement.

Lead singers are narcissists. No-one who is secure in themselves and their identity stands up onstage and demands that a room, a club, a theatre or a stadium full of people adore them night after night after night if they aren’t.

Lead guitarists, however, are spods.

Lead guitarists tend to be quite serious young men who aren’t very good with girls who lose themselves in obsessions with equipment and specs and kit and gear because it fulfils a deep, profound inner nerdiness - a deep, profound inner nerdiness that is soothed by tinkering with equipment and specs and kit and gear; a deep, profound inner nerdiness that never, ever goes away no matter how many girls their obsession brings them.

Just as there is no difference between the language of marketing golf clubs and the language of marketing guitars, there is no difference between guitar culture’s language of licks and runs and brands and gear and the language of trainspotting or stamp-collecting. Like English Literature as a form, it’s not a living language that is adding to the culture: it’s a game of Top Trumps where you win by knowing or having what the other person doesn’t: a stamp, a rare steam engine, a lick the other person doesn’t know, an obscure reference.

When Brian unleashed his sound through his equipment all of those people found a home: if you have that equipment and can make that sound, or something like it, you can be onstage, you can be someone.

If you don’t believe that lead guitarists are spods, look at the names of those who came after:

Eric Clapton …

Geoffrey (Jeff) Beck …

Keith Richards …

Peter Green …

Peter Townshend …

George Harrison …

James Page …

These aren’t the names of children whose parents are them expecting to conquer the world and reshape the cultural landscape. There are no Storms or Thors or Jaguars here. These are the names of kids whose parents are expecting will go on to comfortable jobs in the Civil Service. No wonder Keith rebranded himself Keef and took a ton of heroin as soon as he could. Anything to blot out his deeply-known and understood reality that he wasn’t cool and never would be. He was just a spotty Dork from Dartford with an unhealthily stamp-collector-type interest in old blues records.

And a guitar.

For boys who grew up on model railways and Airfix kits, on goodies and baddies, Tommys and Nazis, and Cowboys and Indians, the guitar was the next thing after a Colt 45 cap gun and a Hornby set. The cap gun allowed you to be a cowboy in your dreams while a tennis racquet and then a guitar allowed you to be Brian in your bedroom. As boyhood heroes changed from figures on screen to musicians, so to the focus on the equipment needed to act out the fantasy changed.

This reached its zenith when Hank and the boys released Apache. It sounds nothing like an Apache warrior band on the eve of battle, because Apache warrior bands on the eve of battle didn’t have guitars and drumkits. But it’s endured to this day because it was never rooted in reality, only in fantasy, the celluloid idea of what Cowboys and Indians looked like - and in fantasy, it was and remains fantastic. For people brought up on the golden age of Hollywood, Saturday morning cartoons, the magic of the airwaves and bang, bang you’re dead it must have sounded incredibly exotic and exciting: an Ennio Morricone spaghetti western theme before Ennio Morricone spaghetti western themes entered the cultural narrative - all played on the most modern, cutting-edge instruments available.

It was a smash. Every boy who had previously dabbled in model train sets wanted to be in a band, and in the guitar they found a way they could be in one without needing to overcome their inherent spoddishness. They could hide behind the guitar, because the guitar was cool.

And being in a band also gave boys a gang to belong to. Like everyone else, boys like to belong, and gangs give that - alongside all of the issues that later become the hallmark of bands making and breaking up: there’s always a charismatic leader (usually the singer); there’s always an ambitious deputy jockeying for the top spot (the lead guitarist); there’s always the butt of the jokes (the keyboard player or bassist); and there’s the meathead muscle (usually the drummer). As in all gangs, there are intiations and rituals, declarations of loyalty, brotherhood and being together forever - and as in all gangs, when the police or success come around, it all fractures like cheap pottery in an earthquake as one for all and all for one becomes every man for themselves faster than they can blink.

It was girls drove the first wave of pop music - in the same way they drove the first waves of literary success, art, and other musical forms. Girls screamed at Elvis without realising why they were screaming at him. Elvis, without knowing how or why, or what he was doing or what he was channelling, awakened things in girls precisely as things were awakening within them. That’s where the lightning in a bottle happens - when it’s real, you know it without being able to say why it’s real. It was happenstance and circumstance colliding - and it created the Big Bang mix of music, youth and excitement in the 1950’s which everything since has been an echo of.

It was boys and their obsession with equipment and kit that drove the second wave, a wave that crested and broke with the British Blues Invasion, when serious young men armed with equipment made by other serious young men in sheds successfully sold a decades-old American music form back to America. I’ve written elsewhere about how musicians only get to be ‘serious’ artists if they’ve first been commercially successful pop figures first. The Beatles and The Stones were both singles-based boy bands before they became ‘rock stars’, and their enduring success is not based on their cultural commentary or relevance but a commercial success driven by the fact that they once upon a time wrote catchy tunes that you could dance to - and girls liked them. Never, ever forget that. It’s the most important ingredient for success in all of this - that girls crushed on them even as they sang along.

This is a social reality. Girls are out in the world and making things happen while boys are still labouring under the impression that pulling a girl’s pigtails and running away is the best way of telling a girl that you like her. It was boys who followed girls into the pop arena because boys noticed that girls really liked pop musicians.

With that, and with the invention of the guitar hero and the importance of equipment, however, comes the age of bands for boys. The Shadows, no matter how deeply uncool they became later in the sixties, were a band for boys. Just as punk had to hate Pink Floyd to be relevant, the Yardbirds and the Bluesbreakers and the Deep Zeppelins and Led Purples had to hate The Shadows when their moments in the sun came because it’s the easiest way to appear new and cool. But scratch the surface and everyone from Eric to Mark admit that Hank and his guitar was what first hooked them. Without Hank and The Shadows, none of what happened next would have happened.

Because as well as giving them a way into music, Hank and The Shadows gave something for boys to get obsessive about. Boys like being obsessive about … stuff. It’s easier than dealing with real life. That’s why grown men used to talk about mileage per gallon and the best route to Kidderminster and now talk about vinyl reissues and bumblebee caps. Because mastery of detail was, in the industrial age, a sign of status. Transfer that to music and you have a state of play that hasn’t changed since the sixties. Do you know this lick? Well, do you know this one? Ok, you do, but do you have right equipment to play it on? Do you have the ‘authentic’ equipment - when the reality is that it can’t be the authentic kit if it’s kit that has only just been invented. The stuff debate is all about establishing who’s in the club and who isn’t.

Girls screamed at Elvis because he moved them; they sang along because they liked the tune.

Boys talked about what made the sound - not the sound.

The distinction is why I personally believe that girls are the dominant species. For boys, our glory is all in biology - when we’re young and strong and full of vim and vigour. It’s also when we’re at our least articulate and stupidest. And we tend to hold onto that point, because the ego stops at the point when it was most powerful and recognised. That’s why you see forty and fifty-something men wearing the same indie-band t-shirt and jeans combo they did at Uni or in their teenage years while collecting the vinyl of the same bands they listened to then too; all to replay their youthful obsessions over and over again. We become old, our strength wanes and we become querolous and wattly and start dyeing our hair and dating women who are too young for us. Just look at Paul McCartney. In the meantime girls grow up, become mothers and parents, raise children, do a job, maintain and expand friendships and social groups, try new hobbies and interests and then decide to sell the house and take a punt on becoming a farmer / stained glass window-maker / sky-diving instructor.

Girls grow up to learn from life and become articulate and wise.

Boys tend to grow up to be older boys.

They might have more pocket money.

The toys and obsessions might become more expensive.

But it still boys, getting granular about equipment and judging other boys on what they know about the equipment; about the equipment they have; and about what they can do with it.

Which is why guitar culture is where it is now: the spec not the songs; the kit not the music; the brand not what it’s used for.

And it’s all because of a boy called Brian.

From Newcastle.

You’re welcome, world. ©℗ A. I. Jackson

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Origin(al) Stories was first launched to show some of the thoughts, decisions and processes that went into the writing, recording and release of the Northumbria album.

Following the launch of The Landing Stage, which brings together some of the things I do, I’ve continued adding to Origin(al) Stories.

Origin(al) Stories has none of the features beloved of self-help and influencers: how-to guides, lists, essential hacks.

Drawn from my personal diaries and journals, the posts might often seem unconnected, elliptical and fragmentary. Showing, as they do, my explorations of ideas and approaches and processes as I do things, they are best viewed as glimpses of my workings.

They show my mistakes, the false trails I’ve followed, and the blind alleys I’ve gone down - all of which are intrinsic parts of finding a path through to doing something.

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