Guitar Abusers
I found this copied text on Internet. A funny
and informative article written by Geoff Nicholson, which has appeared in Wire
Magazine in 1993. I hope I dont annoy them with breaking the by publishing
this without asking. Buy Wire Magazine, they are doing great work, as you will
notice while reading this article.
Guitar Abusers
Geoff
Nicholson looks at non-canonic ways to spank the plank
In the 20th century, musicians have lost all respect for the guitar, and begun subjecting it to all kinds of creative abuse. Geoff Nicholson surveys the destruction wreaked by Thurston Moore, Derek Bailey, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix and more
Love, devotion, disaster
There is a story that in his early, drug-crazed
days, John McLaughlin once fell off the stage while playing and landed on top
of his guitar. A strange and wonderful chord rang out. Fortunately Jack Bruce
was in the band and he wrote down the notes in the chord for use in a future
composition, but something tells me that when he came to play that chord it
lacked something that the original had. Falling off the stage may sound like a
rather extreme form of extended technique and McLaughlin almost certainly
didn't intend it, but the sound he created probably couldn't have been created
any other way. This is not an orthodox way of wringing music from a guitar, but
the electric guitar is an instrument that thrives on misuse, and indeed abuse,
and you could argue that it's as good a way as any.
A plectrum is what a plectrum does
Look up "guitar" in any well-meaning
dictionary of music and you'll read some flannel about it being "a musical
instrument related to the lute but having a flat back and usually six strings
that are plucked or strummed."
Even as a definition of classical or folk guitar
technique this seems a little creaky. What about the use of bottleneck? What
about hammering on and pulling off with the fretting hand? But perhaps it would
just about do as a working definition for acoustic players. When it comes to
the electric guitar however, plucking and strumming isn't the half of it.
If you're going to misuse a guitar then the
first thing you might do 'wrong' is not pluck or strum it at all, or at the
very least use a wacky sort of plectrum.
Now ultimately, a plectrum is what a plectrum
does; you can use a filed down coin or a piece of old plastic and it may sound
fairly orthodox, but if, for example, you use the leg of a toy doll - as Frank
Zappa has been known to - it quite simply makes a different sort of noise. But
dolls' legs are tame stuff compared with some of the things that get used.
Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth have
employed drumsticks, pieces of rag and screwdrivers with which they break the
strings. Paul Gilbert of Mr Big assaults his guitar with an electric drill,
while Reeves Gabrels prefers to use a vibrator. Davey Williams used to play
what he calls "object guitar", attacking the strings with an egg
beater, a toy mouse or a wind-up dinosaur. There is also a photograph of him
using what appears to be a six foot long metal girder.
(Incidentally Davey Williams also used to play
two guitars at once, one on his lap played conventionally, the other
open-tuned, placed on the floor and played with his bare foot: a form of abuse
later taken on board, not necessarily unwittingly, by Nigel Tufnel of Spinal
Tap).
Some players like to rub their guitar against
the microphone stand or the corner of the amplifier, in which case the stand or
the amp does, in some highly specialised sense become, I suppose, a plectrum of
a sort. But this is a difficult business and at some point it probably merges
into the area of the 'prepared guitar'.
Be prepared
Derek Bailey was asked in interview whether he
ever used prepared guitar. He replied, "I used to have an old flat-top
Epiphone 12 string on which I did that. I had loose strings and squeakers and
all the usual stuff. See, at one time in the 60s, there weren't any free
players who didn't prepare their guitars. I can remember a piece I played with
four other guitar players where you got a bag of paper clips, things that would
stick on the strings, and you stuck 'em on the strings and then you got
something else out - four guys doing this for as long as you can stand
it."
About 45 seconds might be enough for some, but
even someone as mainstream as Johnny Marr has used this kind of thing to create
texture on The Smith's albums. And Marc Ribot is to be heard on Elvis
Costello's "Pads, Paws And Claws" playing a guitar that is customised
with alligator clips. He says he got the idea from Fred Frith, but of course
they are both only borrowing and transferring John Cage's technique of prepared
piano which dates back to at least 1938 (and a piece called
"Bacchanale"). Since Cage was using a grand piano he was able to
balance a pie plate on the strings. Guitar players are forced to use smaller,
handier objects.
The twang bar kids
The Tremolo arm, aka the whammy bar, aka the
twang bar, must indeed have seemed an abusive device when it was first
invented. It wrecked your strings and destroyed your tuning, and still does,
largely, but today it seems a natural, even a highly conventional part of any
guitarist's technique.
Its use was popularised by the likes of The
Ventures, Duane Eddy and (especially) Hank Marvin. For these players it became
a recognisable 'sound', a stylistic trademark. Undeniably they sounded hip and
exciting at the time, but today their tremolo sound seems largely a way of
achieving added twanginess. They were making pop instrumentals, not pieces of
experimental music.
In case you think there's anything new-fangled
about the tremolo arm, it's worth knowing that the Rickenbacker Vibrola,
designed by Doc Kaufmann and looking pretty much like a modern tremolo arm, was
patented in 1929.
When used by a certain kind of metal player its
capacity to create dive-bombing sounds and its ability to get between the
notes, can be highly exciting. I always thought Richie Blackmore's use of
tremolo was the most, make that the only interesting thing about his playing.
Tremolo is also achieved by bending the strings
below the bridge or above the nut, and in the case of Adrian Belew, he of Twang
Bar King, it is frequently achieved by yanking the guitar neck and wiggling it
in the opposite direction to the guitar body. This is definitely not one to be
tried at home unless you have a ready supply of spare Stratocasters to hand and
don't mind breaking one or two in practice.
Feedback my baby to me
Feedback, of course, is the "howl or squeal
when a microphone or pickup is too near its speaker, thus picking up its own
output and reamplifying it." (From Making Music, edited by George Martin).
It's intimately associated with the electric
guitar, although, as any acoustic guitar player will tell you, amplified
acoustic guitars feedback like the devil. The difference is largely that
acoustic players want to avoid it, while electric players love it.
There was a time when Dave Davies, Jeff Beck and
Peter Townshend used to argue about which of them first used feedback
creatively. It seems a futile argument. There's definitely a touch of feedback
on the opening of The Beatles' "I Feel Fine", released in November
1964, before either The Who or The Yardbirds had a hit record.
Electric blues players like BB and Albert King
often used highly controlled feedback as a form of sustain, but admittedly they
didn't use it the way Beck or Townshend or The Grateful Dead or Quicksilver
Messenger Service used it.
And in an important sense those American bands
used it quite differently from the way the British bands did. Beck has said
that when he was playing the club and ballroom scene the sound systems were so
lousy and his amps were so overloaded that his guitar was howling and feeding
back almost the whole time. Whereas The Dead used feedback as a token of avant
gardism, Beck was fighting with his equipment and making a virtue out of necessity.
Not least of feedback's attractions for the rock
musician is that a simple change in the physical position of the guitar, or a
change in the way the player is standing, will change the sound of the feedback
produced. This enables posing to become a form of technique.
Feedback may indeed be a rockist mannerism, but
in 1969, say on "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy", even a comparatively
restrained jazz player like Lenny Bruce was discovering the creative
possibilities of feedback.
The use and abuse of technology
Given that we have whole albums that are
'machine made', it may be a little late in the day to ponder the status of the
guitar 'effect'. Nevertheless, you may still find yourself asking questions
such as, is a Big Muff distortion box a musical instrument? Is a wah-wah pedal?
Well the answer is obviously not, and yet when you hear Clapton on "White
Room", you hear a great bit of wah-wah pedal as much as you hear a great
bit of guitar playing. There are times when Bill Frisell's real instrument seems
to be an Electro-Harmonix 16 second delay as much as the guitar, so essential
is it to his sound. Where would Vini Reilly be without a fuzz box? Certainly
I've seen Buckethead play a solo on a jackplug, and Reeves Gabrels has been
known to hand his jackplug to the audience so they can play 'solos' on it while
he fiddles with his effects boxes.
It seems to be the rule that the best guitarists
embrace rather than eschew new technology. It takes a bonehead like Noel
Redding to ask, as he did once in interview, "If Hendrix was such a good
guitarist why did he need so many boxes?"
Control freaks
Of course Hendrix occupies a central position in
our ideas of what might be the right and wrong way to play a guitar, and of
what skilfully 'abused' guitar might sound like. His use of distortion and
feedback hardly need recounting here, likewise his use of elbows, teeth and
crutch in guitar playing, but his trashing and burning is worth some
consideration.
It might be nice to think that his burning of
the Strat at the 1968 Monterey festival, and elsewhere, was some ultimate
flowering of extended technique, some kind of testing to destruction of the
guitar's powers of expression. But I don't really buy this. And the reason I
don't buy it is because he used such a cheesy old guitar for the burning. The
crackle and hum you can hear from the pickups isn't musique concrte, it's the
sound of a knackered guitar. If you wanted to really make a sacrifice why not
do it with your shiny new Gibson Flying V? The burning of the midnight Strat
seems at best a highly effective bit of rock theatre. At its worst it becomes
vaudeville, as when done years later by Yngwie Malmsteen.
However, smashing up the guitar is in many ways
a more interesting area. For both Hendrix and Townshend, destructive tendencies
seem not merely showmanship but an integral part of their art. Even at the peak
of their popularity The Who were losing money because they were destroying so
much equipment. It may have been rock excess and conspicuous consumption at its
worst, but it did have an undeniable integrity. Not that its aesthetics were
ever entirely clear.
Pete Townshend has complained, "Someone
would come up and say, 'Well, why did you do it?' And the thing about
autodestruction is that it has no purpose, no reason at all. Some fool in the
Bee Gees said, 'You wouldn't break a Stradivarius, would you?' The answer is,
'Of course I wouldn't break a Stradivarius.' But a Gibson guitar that came off
a production line? Fuck it." Keith Moon had an even subtler theory however.
He said, "When Pete smashed his guitar it was because he was pissed
off."
Smashing a guitar to pieces is certainly
'expressive'. It can say as much to an audience as any amount of riffing or
trading of licks. But it does signal the loss of control. Eric Barrett,
Hendrix's road manager, used to say that if he ever picked up Hendrix's guitar
it was so distorted, so overcranked and alive, that he couldn't get any noise
out of it except painful, demented feedback. Not least of Hendrix's skills was
his ability to coax an articulate guitar sound out of all this fearsome noise.
But one may be fairly sure that not even hendrix knew at all times precisely
what sound his guitar was going to make.
The joy of the electric guitar is that beyond a certain level of amplification and distortion the instrument takes on a life of its own, and makes sound that surprise even the best player. Sometimes the guitarist can just stand there and let the guitar speak for itself, or like Neil Young, the player's intervention may be no more than gently blowing on the strings. The greatest joy of all is not so much that a guitar can take a lot of abuse and survive, but rather that at some point it starts to fight back.
This article first appeared in issue 116, October
1993 (issue currently unavailable to buy).
1998 The Wire.
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