My first couple of years in high school, it was very fashionable for boys to congregate in the student parking lot and contemplate the engines of each others’ cars. One was expected to have very strong feelings about the relative merits of Ford and Chevy. The Beach Boys actually composed and recorded hit songs about their own cars (which, at that point, they may have owned only in their imaginations). “I guess I should've kept my mouth shut when I started to brag about my car”, indeed! Auto Shop hotshots who’d already been promised jobs as mechanics in their uncles’ garages ranked just below jocks. The power and speed of one’s car were perceived as analogues for his manliness.
I derived not the slightest pleasure from looking under anyone’s hood. I didn’t even trouble myself to learn any of the jargon. Everything automotive bored me senseless.
I’m reminded of those dark times when I hear modern guitarists talking to each other about their instruments. What gauge A-string do you prefer? What thickness of plectrum? And what of your pickups and tuning pegs? Did you know that on such-and-such a track on his 1977 such-and-such album, Stevie Ray Vaughn used such-and-such strings, rather than his usual ones? One might just as well be talking to Star Wars nerds.
A former friend of mine, with whom I was in a couple of bands, decades apart, exemplified the breed. There was no musical equipment minutaie too minute for him to have memorised. He could talk for hours (or maybe it just seemed that way) about the relative merits of different pickups, about the varying electronics of a particular manufacturer’s line of amplifiers. For him, the annual NAMM (National Association of Music Merchandisers) in Anaheim was Christmas, Easter, New Year’s Eve, V-E Day, V-J Day, and his birthday all rolled into one. I always thought that if he’d spent half the time practicing that he spent poring over catalogues, he might have been a terrific musician.
Over the decades, I’ve probably seen 100 live shows at which a guitarist made a big show of swapping his Ibanez Interrogator for a Fender Prevaricator with pre-CBS Ernie Banks pickups, let’s say, though neither instrument actually exists. I will admit to never having detected much of a difference. As a young man, I saw opening for The Pretenders a Welsh U2 imitation called The Alarm, who made a big deal of playing acoustic guitars on stage. As said instruments were fed into big Marshall amplifiers (I so wish I could specify the model numbers, not), our heroes sounded exactly like everyone else, but I suppose it was the thought that counted.
When I saw Cream live at the Fillmore Auditorium, I found Mr. Clapton’s extended solos fully as engrossing as my high school classmates’ Ford vs. Chevy debates. If this guy is God, I thought, call me an atheist. I can count the number of guitar solos I’ve really loved over the years without removing either of my socks, my favourite probably being Robin Trower’s on Procol Harum’s "Repent Walpurgis". No solo I’ve ever heard matches it in raw emotiveness. I fervently dislike what I’ll call the Neal Schon school of lead guitar playing, which seems to be 100 percent about technique, and 0 percent about expression. Virtuosity for its own sake made punk, and later guitar-less synth-pop, inevitable. Not, of course, that the cease-fire lasted long, not with Yngwie Malmsteen waiting in the wings.
For me, the greatest instrumental break in rock is Raphael Ravenscroft’s exultant alto solo in Gerry Rafferty’s "Baker Street", which he was asked to play only because Rafferty’s lead guitarist didn’t turn up at the studio. It’s like glorious sunshine suddenly bursting through storm clouds, that solo, for which Ravenscroft was paid £27, but not really. The cheque bounced.
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