Shut Up And Play Yer Guitar…

This is going to be somewhat long, and will contain a certain amount of statement and restatement as I’m trying to work something out for myself - what guitar culture currently is, my place in it and my relationship to the instrument as I look to record my next pieces of work.

The algorithims recently brought me Tim Pierce explaining why David Gilmour’s guitar solo in Comfortably Numb is one of, if not, the greatest guitar solo ever played.

Now, Tim is a magisterial musician who has been a first call session musician for about as long as I’ve actually been playing - and you don’t get to be a first call session musician anywhere without being able to play. You don’t get that gig unless on any given day, at any given time you have the ability to give the producer, the label, the song and the ‘artist’ exactly what they want, or in the case of the ‘artist’ (and some producers) more usually what they’ve heard on someone else’s song recently and now really, really want on their song too first crack out of the box.

I mean, Tim can play, and if his Youtube persona is anything to go by, he seems a seriously nice guy to boot as well.

But as I listened to his breakdown of Gilmour’s solo, I thought his explanation of why it’s considered one of the greatest ever got it wrong - and I think that the reasons why Tim got it wrong are the reasons why guitar culture and music is the way it predominantly currently is: a backward-looking heritage industry producing music you’ve heard before via note-perfect pastiches of genres, styles and sounds that were once original, fresh and vibrant.

Tim starts off by talking about Gilmour’s black Stratocaster, going into forensic detail about its history, repairs and modifications.

He talks about the amp rig: a 100-watt Hiwatt half-stack, a Yamaha RA200 Leslie speaker; Big Muff and Dyna Comp pedals on the floor and a ton of room sound / reverb.

Now, in one sense, this is fine. Tim is a first call session musician. The ability to conjure the exact sound that a producer asks you for, which will usually be a reference to someone else’s sound and playing (like Gilmour’s) is a consequence of knowing exactly what equipment is needed to create that sound and how it needs to be set up. In this context, Tim is providing the sort of information for anyone looking to recreate Gilmour’s sound. But isn’t one of the reasons that this solo is so powerful because of the uniqueness of Gilmour’s sound? And aren’t we always told as musicians to find our own sound and our own voice? It is identifiably Gilmour. Shouldn’t we be identifiably us? Is it not concerning that guitarists are desperate to recreate someone and something that was first played half a century ago rather than being desperate to create something new now?

In case you’re wondering, the kit Gilmour used is not why the solo is great or powerful.

To use an analogy, it’s part of the pyramid, it’s part of the building of the pyramid, but it’s not why the pyramid represents such a monumental cultural and historical presence.

Tim then goes on to talk about Gilmour’s note choices against the chord progression.

He outlines Gilmour’s use of chord tones, his development of themes, his building of tension and then resolution, and his timing against the beat (laying back … ).

And says that all of this is what makes it such a great solo.

I don’t agree.

The Comfortably Numb guitar solo isn’t so powerful, so climactic, so moving because of Gilmour’s choice of instrument, his signal chain, his touch, his note choices, or his use of repetition, tension, resolution and motivic development … although those are all contributory factors.

Want it in one?

The Comfortably Numb guitar solo hits so hard because it’s happening in a song.

Now, let’s unravel that.

The solo in Comfortably Numb hits so hard because …

Because it happens in the context of a song …

Because it happens in the context of that song’s narrative and structural development …

Because it happens in the context of that song’s position in the album …

Because the whole of The Wall album has been leading precisely to this climactic moment … the moment when the protagonist seeking to escape the pressures of fame, of his trauma, of life is shot full of drugs and floats away from it all.

Because the solo in that context is an aural representation of someone coming up on drugs.

Because (it could also be argued) the whole of Pink Floyd’s career had been leading to this moment, the gap between Roger Water’s concepts, the band’s music and the groups’s relationship to their fame, status and money (which they fairly obviously enjoyed) and the things that come with it (which they fairly obviously didn’t) having been narrowing ever since Syd Barrett left the band and David Gilmour joined.

Because this was their high-water mark, and this song the topmost point of that high-water mark, and this solo the topmost point of that high-water mark’s high-water mark.

And because, as a significant guitar-driven band, they existed within the context of the first and second waves of guitar-driven music. Pink Floyd are a seventies band in the way that The Beatles are a sixties band and The Police are an eighties band, even though they arrived in the late seventies. But the most important fact is: they were a culturally visible band.

And all of the above were needed and needed to come together for that moment to happen.

And that’s the thing that Tim missed.

Every great guitar moment, by which I mean the intros that get you heading to the dancefloor on a night out, the riffs that make you play air guitar, the solos that get your hands in the air, singing along with your eyes closed in an arena … all happen in the context of a song, in the context of a band, in the context of that band’s music, in the context of that band’s position within the surrounding musical culture.

And every single great guitar moment, by which I mean the above, happened during the periods when the guitar was the predominant way music was made.

It now isn’t.

The guitar’s timeline in popular music goes like this:

The guitar in the fifties was new.

The guitar in the sixties was cool.

The guitar in the seventies was ubiquitous.

The guitar in the eighties had split into tribes.

The guitar in the nineties went back to the sixties.

The guitar in the noughties stopped competing with the way musicians were making music, put its head in the sand by looking back to the past and became a heritage instrument.

These are all blanket statements, of course, but there’s a truth in each of them. I’ve written elsewhere on Origin(al) Stories my own particular takes on guitar culture, what it means, where it’s ended up, and where it’s going but it can be summed up like this: when Leo first landed the Stratocaster he was landing a spaceship on an unsuspecting world, all sleek hitherto unseen curves and futuristic potential. Providing the AK-47 for the cultural revolution that was then in progress, it was new, exciting and cutting edge. Now …

Now?

It’s a heritage instrument.

Apart from classical music, which guitar music is fast becoming in its recital of the same licks and the same progressions that its musical progenitors developed on the same instruments that they played, there is no other contemporary musical form whose practitioners hang so desperately onto the past. It’s a line I’ve used before but electronic music musicians aren’t demanding the kit their grandparents used in order to make their music.

Get me a bakelite radio, a cat’s whisker and full set of vacuum tubes or I can’t make the album is not being said in EDM record company meetings, studios and bedrooms up and down the land.

It really isn’t.

Tim focused on the stuff that guitarists are interested in: kit and caboodle. I’ve written about this, as I believe that even though they want to be cool, and sometimes are, guitarists are fundamentally trainspotters, focused on what makes the sound as much (and often more than) the actual sound itself. Guitarists are nerds, basically. They want to be cool. They love the cachet that comes with being the ‘guitar hero’ of a great band, but even though they might wish that they were, and even though they might chafe against them, they aren’t built like lead singers. Lead singers want the world to love them so badly that they stand onstage every night and ask complete strangers to adore them.

Guitarists?

Guitarists are blokes in sheds being very serious about kit. You see it in cycling, in rowing, in cooking, in engineering, in sports - the obsession with the thing that makes the sound, does the job rather than the sound / job itself. The kit might lead to adoration and ‘cool’ status being conferred, but at heart, every Keef, every Jimi, every Eddie … remains a trainspotter, happiest surrounded by kit. Spods, in other words. Hell, Joe Bonamassa nailed it in a way that no-one seems to have picked up on, calling his guitar museum Nerdville and his podcast Welcome to Nerdville - or in other words, welcome to a safe space to talk about capacitors and bumblebee caps.

I get it.

I can geek out on kit as much as the next guitarist.

But the reason that solo hits hard is because it happens in a song, at the right moment, in the right way.

That Tim-like focus on the kit and the licks is, I think, now the central strand of guitar culture rather than the actual music and one of the reasons, I think, the guitar isn’t as dominant as it once was in current or contemporary music.

I can go on YouTube and learn anything I ever wanted. The solo to this, the riff to that, the chorus to the other. If I want to learn how Joe Bonamassa does Eric Johnson’s cascading pentatonics, there’s a lesson for it.

But that’s kind of the point. Joe is doing something now that Eric did in the 1980’s.

The world is full of guitarists who can play. They can play everything … front to back, back to front upside down and inside out. Go on Youtube and type in amazing guitar licks. There are people playing technically amazing things …

But they don’t have any emotional or cultural impact because they’re just a blur of notes on a video clip happening before the next blur of notes.

There’s no context.

They aren’t happening in a song, they aren’t responding to or adding to that song’s story, that song isn’t part of an album, that album isn’t part of a band’s career and that band aren’t part of the representative culture.

It’s like seeing someone capable of winning the Olympic Gold medal in the 100 metres using that ability only to run for a bus.

One of the reasons, I believe, that guitar culture has got stuck is because I think that guitarists do still want to be heard.

The old jokes outline the complex:

How do you make a guitarist stop playing?

Give him sheet music.

How does a lead guitarist change a light bulb?

He hangs on and the world revolves around him.

And so on.

The problem is twofold and coterminous:

Guitarists still exist and want to be heard. We all pick up the instrument because we hear something that inspires us to do so, but too many of us don’t learn the implicit lesson in that: we are responding to someone’s unique voice. Rather than copy it, we should be developing our own unique voice too.

Guitarists still exist and want to be heard, but the guitar is no longer the dominant driver of popular music. How does a guitarist make a living in that landscape, then?

By becoming a Youtuber and showing other guitarists how to play the licks and songs from the instrument’s glory days (rather than make new music) while also talking up the gear that was used in the glory days.

Can you see how this might become a Worm Oruborus - a snake eating its own tail, a road only back to the beginning, a discourse that relies on its own secondary discourse for validation?

Playing the guitar is hard.

Finding your own voice on it is harder.

It’s far simpler to recycle what’s already been done, and if you want the recognition and validation of an audience, it’s also far easier to start a Youtube channel and start posting than it is to find a group of like-minded musicians and start the difficult process of writing songs together, playing gigs together, developing an audience and so on, let alone navigate a way through the music business, let alone risk putting your heart and soul out there for people to see, or worse, completely ignore.

(Even though the whole point is that starting from the position that the only person you need to give a shit about what you do is you is the only way and reason to start doing anything in life, let alone art, let alone music … ).

It’s human nature to look for and suggest that there’s a shortcut. That’s why there are a million How to play … videos out there. Without sounding like a Luddite (and there was nothing wrong with their position, by the way), learning it off the record yourself rather than being shown it teaches you far more about the instrument and goes further towards developing your own touch on the instrument than someone just showing it to you. But this is where we now live: in an age that suggests that there are, in fact, shortcuts to the top of the mountain. And so there are a million suggestions that there are shortcuts. Leslie West / Dickie Betts / Mick Taylor / Eddie Van Halen / Etc Knew This Trick … do you? or The Secret Behind This Classic Song …

But there are no high roads to the Muses.

The musicians who thrilled us and inspired us to pick up and play in the first place knew that. You have to find your own way to the top of the mountain.

And it’s entirely possible that these people have found the way to the top of their own particular mountain. After all, popular channels generate the sort of numbers that most musicians would have killed for back in the days of record sales, even if those numbers do not generate a tenth of a tenth of what record sales did. Furthermore, none of anything that I’ve written in this so far is a diss against any of the people who do this. The people who do this are obviously passionate about the guitar and passionate about its history. They can play, and then some. They can play me under a table. Go on Instagram and watch. It’s entirely possible that a younger generation, tech-savvy and used to surfing the seas of content, are already creating the next guitar movement.

But along with everything else about the culture and the instrument at the moment, if you’re producing content to keep your head above water as a Youtuber, you aren’t writing and producing your debut album, your second album, your masterpiece. I’ve written about it here.

And if this ends up being posted on Original Stories, people might disagree - and they might disagree vehemently. They might also listen to my music and say Well, you’re hardly one to talk about original voices and Yeah, you’re right. Everyone else can play you under a table. That’s fine. If you stick your head above the parapet on any topic, if you speak contrarily to the prevailing wisdom in any context it gets a reaction. This is just my perspective - although I happen to think that my perspective is right; my analysis is both evaluative and sound (or to put it another way, it’s not a flat-earther conspiracy theory) and my exploration of it is driven by a desire to look at the music that I’m making and ask what I’m trying to do with it.

It’s for me, if no-one else, for me to say:

I don’t want to present rehearsed or learned licks.

I want to add to guitar culture, not parody it.

The guitar works best in context.

The guitar works best as part of telling a story.

It sounds incredibly arrogant to say that I want to add something to music; and that I want to add something to guitar culture; and to tell an individual story - as if there’s a hunger for external recognition. It would be nice if someone said ‘one of the best players / songwriters of his generation’, of course, but that’s such a shibboleth. Noel Gallagher came out of the gate saying he wanted to be regarded as the best songwriter of his generation - and in terms of middle-aged people singing along to the early Oasis stuff at festivals as the sun goes down, you could argue that he is.

But you could also argue that that’s a consequence of commercial success. Having been sold as the voice of their generation, by the time everyone realised that Oasis had nothing to say, which was around the time of Be Here Now, they’d already banked two albums that had become the soundtrack to people’s lives whereby people had got drunk to their songs, sang along in the pub to their tunes, woke up with hangovers to them, dated, mated and broken up to them …

… and that’s certainly a valid way to be the voice of generation. If it is, then people like ABBA and Tom Jones are too. Helen Shapiro gets in there, as does Millie Small and everyone you’ve ever sung along with on the drive to work and headed to the dancefloor at a wedding to shake your tailfeather at. What’s actually meant by the voice of a generation thing are the songs and artists that critics like. The Bobs and the Fabs and the Punks and the Indies and the people with really good PR teams - which is also another metric, but as David Lee Roth once pointed out ‘Critics like Elvis Costello because he looks like them.’ We’re all drawn to a tribe that looks like us, after all.

But when I look at Northumbria, yes, the critical reaction was great. But had it not happened, I was very happy with the work that I had done and the piece that I had produced. The critical reaction did not change that I already felt it was great work. It made me feel good, but it didn’t change my opinion of what I’d done.

And that’s kind of the point when I look at how to do what’s in front of me. If guitar music is stuck in a loop of repeating the same phrases and recyclying the same paragraphs of meaning, then a way to look at this is that I have learned the language. Rather than telling other people’s stories, which the recycling of licks and runs and genres has become, it’s now time to speak my own stories. They might fall on deaf ears. They might be laughed at. They might never be heard.

But they’ll be mine.

©℗ 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.

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