Onan on and on: the long, slow, agonising death of the electric guitar #3(ii)

Part two of three, starring Eric Clapton, Duane Allman, Jimmy Page, Andy Goggins, David Gilmour, Earl Slick, June Millington, Mick Ronson, Robert Fripp and Lynyrd Skynyrd

Derek & the Dominos: Jim Gordon, Carl Radle, Bobby Whitlock, Eric Clapton

WHAT ARE ELECTRIC GUITARS for, if you don’t mind me asking?

As we have seen in the first part of this three-part essay (Distortimento), electric guitars are partly for dressing up: a Danelectro Longhorn Baritone, for instance, adds a tusky Nordic flourish to a carefully assembled Baltic look, for street or evening wear, with runes. Guitars in general make for slightly cumbersome jewellery, especially the denser Gibsons, but visually they get you where you want to go, and some.

We have also heard that electric guitars are to the individual unconscious mind as a dark pool is to the all-seeing eye: they can be a way in, for player and listener alike.

And of course there remains the instrument’s abiding covert identity, the one everyone smart bought into back then when it was first articulated properly by the Feminist intelligentsia as a critique of patriarchal masculinity in the mid-1970s: the six-string wonderwand as projection from the murky cloister of the guitarist’s unconscious: a rock-hard ‘phallus’, which the narcissistic instrumentalist is compelled to manipulate grossly in public spaces to enact “the sin of Onan”, in order to satisfy his need to demonstrate sexual puissance (and, by inference, conceal its lack). Well, we’ve all seen it going on, haven’t we?

As you’d expect, this hard-to-argue-with proposition was met with sneering disdain by the haughtier kind of phallocrat of the day, such as Jimmy Page, plus the rather less distinguished regiment of non-metropolitan heavy metal guitarists who protested that they were not familiar with the term ‘phallus’.

“Woss ’at when it’s at ’ome?” remarked Andy Goggins sceptically. He was one of the twin lead guitarists in the groundbreaking Ipswich HM five-piece, Tracktaters. “We don’t speak Latin. We speak only the language of metal.” This assumed ignorance was betrayed somewhat by two songs on The Rusting Coulter, their second album in 1981: the rousingly climactic “Grumio (in Culina Pavonem Coquit)” and the melancholy road-boogie “Sick Transit Van”. In addition it is worth noting the title of their spectacular debut Under the Influence of Ludwig W (1980).

Nonetheless, the sin of Onan is the cudgel with which rock guitarists have been clobbered in ‘sophisticated’ circles for more than half a century. One can imagine dear old Hank Marvin and his shiny red Strat and even shinier suit literally gulping at the news as it reached him from the distant first chapter of the Old Testament, and then bridling…

“Hang on, hang ON”, he gasps, smiting the formica tabletop in the 2i’s coffee bar in Soho with the flat of his palm. “Who are you calling a wanker, like? And who’s calling me it?” He takes his glasses off in readiness, as he has always done, for he is a Geordie.

It’s not so easy to conceive of other members of the lead-guitar confraternity taking it quite so equably, some of their number perhaps even reacting with the threat of retaliatory violence. But we know that won’t happen. Mick Ronson you can kind of imagine throwing up one hand and saying “Oh, don’t be so silly” and walking off. Were he around. Robert Fripp? I rather think the unfortunate messenger would be the beneficiary of one of his stoniest stares and a very few words spoken firmly but quietly: “We do not have masturbation in Wimborne, nor have we ever. We do not believe in the need of it. Not in Wimborne.”

But most of the rest of them, nothing like as collected. It’s all too easy to picture petulance, isn’t it?

But I have good news for the surviving seed-spilling Onanists in every department of the long-serving rock instrumental front line. Deep research has discovered to me that the standard Anglican interpretation of the sin of Onan is fundamentally misconceived and was probably done so deliberately to serve the interests of Empire and evangelical Christianity, which have always experienced difficulty with the human body and its needs.

The standard Christian interpretation of the story of Onan is as follows.

Onan, in the first Book of the Old Testament, Genesis 38.9, was the second son of Judah and his Canaanite wife, Shuah. Onan had an older brother, Er, and a younger one, Shelah. And it happened that Yahweh slew Er and so Onan was commanded by Judah to fulfil his duties as a brother-in-law in levirate marriage and, er (you might want to pretend that you haven’t read the next bit), to slip one to Er’s widow. And then several more after that. Yes, reader, that is levirate marriage and we must respect its traditions. So there you have it. Er’s relict, Tamar, was required under the law to give it up to Onan, his kid brother, in order that she might deliver herself of offspring — which is as classical indication as any that exists that the Old Testament inclines to the view that a woman’s body is not her own.

I like to think that Onan was an adumbration of we modern men in one respect at least: that he was quite prepared to “spill his seed upon the ground” rather than enter in to Tamar, whether out of respect for Tamar or indeed his dead brother, Er. Whatever the truth of it, it was the act of spilling that made Onan famous and endeared him to 1970s feminism. Casting aside ethics, empathy and curiosity as was his wont, Yahweh, as usual, saw it only one way and promptly slew Onan on account of Onan’s spillage, which had displeased him in the sight of himself.

Well, here is the rub. Anglican scholars have always tended to interpret the story as if Onan’s sin were his masturbation, so that he was physically rendered incapable of entering in to poor Tamar. That’s because the British Empire was dead set against its young men lying around all day playing with themselves, because how then in the face of such torpor would you build an Empire? Modern Bible scholarship takes a different view: non-British scholars of the Old Testament tell us that masturbation is not the issue. In fact, the sin of Onan was not related to masturbation at all but, rather, Onan’s determination to enter into his sister-in-law and then withdraw judiciously and with apt timing, so as then to spill his seed upon the ground … and annoy Yahweh to the point where Yahweh slew Onan, which had an awful ring of inevitability to it. Which also means ipso facto that modern lead guitarists are emphatically not an inadequate bunch of roué exhibitionist tossers — and never have been.

So I am glad that we have cleared that up, and with proper academic rigour.

ALSO SUBJECT TO DISCUSSION earlier in this meticulously researched paper was the suggestion, perhaps expressed a little obliquely, that the electric guitar had two gifts to offer to the suffering postwar world. One was the gift of ‘guitarchitecture’ and the myriad ways an electrified, harmonically complex instrument of immense tonal flexibility was better equipped than any other form of musical tool to enable new ways of building songs. The second gift was of course ‘the guitar solo’, which previous generations of guitars and guitarists had been unable to explore even as an idea, such were the limitations placed on the instrument by its diabolical quietness. There was no established vocabulary for the guitar to solo with either. Not one that would be heard anyway.

So it was entirely good news that the mass-market electric guitar quickly evolved an extraordinary technical and musical adaptability that might be applied at any time in any situation, and would result in a rapidly evolving new solo vocabulary to go with the instrument’s established virtues as a chordal rhythm-maker. The vocabularly duly raced from Elvis’s Scotty Moore to Jimi Hendrix in just twelve years — twelve! — and pretty soon after that it endured an extensive plateau in creative-development terms, (Hendrix to Eddie Van Halen took about twelve years too: compare and contrast etc) which somehow allowed Western Culture to both revere and despise the instrument simultaneously to no great end. Besides, a mere ten years on from the Hendrix sun-burst, the guitar solo’s degradation was sealed and banishment to the abyss of heavy metal assured, by punk.

And then as the more Stalinist of punk strictures began to soften, daft conversations between young men in pubs were overheard. I retain the memory of becoming awfully enamoured of The Only Ones’ John Perry’s brief solo in a song on their first album called “No Peace For the Wicked” — a beautifully turned velvet chain of simple phrases that tilts itself as the solo rolls to impart fresh momentum every time you think impetus has been lost to the strangely metered 4/4 (I have tried counting it, because it sounds like 5/4 or even 7/4, but fours are the only numbers that seem to work) and then seals itself off with an absolutely gorgeous short truncated bend-and-flip played somewhere close to the nut for tension. I cannot express how much I loved this little solo at the time and I duly tried to express as much to a chum while down the pub one night, and ye gods, it was as if I’d asked to eat his firstborn — that fifteen-minute harangue may have been the seminal moment for this very piece, in 1979.

Once upon a time guitar solos had been everywhere and they were valued highly as a musical figuration bringing delicacy and power, shape, structure and tonal weight to music of every kind. In the extraordinary case of Steely Dan, indeed, the freelance guitarists who provided that most recessed of non-groups with high levels of sophisticated energy and even lyric intensity, created something akin to a critical nostalgia for the well-played and properly felt six-string umherstreifend.

Really good guitar solos can make and even uplift an entire album’s worth of so-so songwriting. I hope I don’t denigrate Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon excessively when I suggest that the two ardent Stratocaster solos played by David Gilmour, on “Money” and “Time”, elevate the entire album as a whole to a different altitude altogether, as a tonal, narrative and emotional experience. Similarly, but also very differently, the slightly detached but murderous tonal warping of Earl Slick, heavily overdriven atop the ramparts of David Bowie’s mighty rock-funk “Stay”, on Station to Station, is effectively the broken glass cemented to the tops of the song’s outer walls, as if to defend whatever form of alienation it is that cowers naked and vulnerable within its enclosures.

But it is also useful to understand soloing guitars in more conventional psycho-musical terms as well, as gestures of musicianly self-expression — as small steps taken in the direction of jazz-style improvisation, yet without sounding like jazz. It is instinctual with some players.

I have never held much of a brief for the playing (or the personality) of that early standard-setter of British blues-wailing, Eric Clapton. If ever a man was all guitar solo and not much else, it was Clapton. He has made some sensationally dull music over the decades. Nevertheless, one of my absolute stone-cold knock-out formative experiences as a young and goggling music neo-fan was entirely the work of the White Carshalton Blues Man — and, guess what: he was also playing a Fender Stratocaster at the time, which he called Brownie.

I heard it first a year or two after its release in November 1970. I can remember where I was too. Harpenden. The song was “Have You Ever Loved a Woman?”, a straight extended twelve-bar blues tune popularised by one of Clapton’s heroes, Freddie King, and rather compellingly hammered out on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (Polydor) by Derek & the Dominos, Clapton’s mask band as the decade turned following the collapse of his previous so-called supergroup, Blind Faith. “Have You Ever Loved a Woman?” is a seething slow-to-mid-paced blues, clipped and perfunctory at first yet quickly gathering to itself a hint of pitch and yaw. The drummer Jim Gordon’s hi-hat flutters the vessel along like a breeze on the starboard quarter, while the rhythm section behaves altogether in an oddly boat-like fashion, floating and tugging and feeling the tide, as boats do. There is suction too in the way the groove works its passage, a resistant pull on a different compass-setting to the one you want.

But that could just be you resisting the pull of Clapton’s ferocious introductory solo — because, yoiks, someone really did get out of bed on the wrong side that morning. The music scowls, although Clapton’s guitar tone is electric honey, the illusion being that you can hear the string vibrate through the guitar’s tone. That instrument has got to be plugged into something small and Tweedy, and the Tweedy thing’s original valves have still to be in place and are now really ready to sing. And, tally-ho etc, Clapton’s singing… For a man who was then not thought to have any kind of singing voice at all, he sings this song exceptionally well, as if he’s really inhabiting it, been there, got the expensive suits hanging in the wardrobe with all their crotches cut out — and now we’re going to hear all about that too. So go with the vibe. It’s pretty good. Meant, if you know what I mean.

The solos arrive, just as your gut tells you they will, after two verses, the two guitarists each taking a couple of long choruses to stretch right out, the first of them to go being the flaxen, furry giant of Southern Rock, Duane Allman, with a bottleneck of some sort turning his left hand into a slide, his body into a highly sensitive sounding board. He’s as elegant as he always is, as stately, as soulful, as in control. But heard again quite some time ago as an adult, it did actually cross my mind that he might be acting. Thinking about it now for the first time since then, I still wonder: did Clapton ask Allman to, as it were, enact a role, using his instrument to ‘play’ a woman’s voice?

Women in general? Or a specific one? Allman’s slide guitar does sometimes sound a little female in its movement and phrasing, becoming increasingly high-pitched with indignation and anger and hurt as she is shut down by her interlocutor — then really giving him what-for… And does Clapton stay out of Allman’s face? Well, no, he doesn’t — he can’t stay out of the picture at all, at any point. At the conclusion of the second sung verse, just as Allman begins his first chorus, you hear Carshalton White Man pull away from the microphone and then hammer straight back into the space he had just vacated with ferocious rhythmic crunches on his bottom strings, like drums, smacking them out as a giddy-up to Allman who is doing his best, bless him, not to yell. Eric Clapton as Keith Richards. Whatever next?

We discover soon enough what happens next. Having acted as Keith to Duane’s Mick Taylor for almost the entire length of Allman’s solo, Clapton then switches back from rhythm to a sort of contrapuntal back-lead, or so it always sounded to me in the album’s rather murky mix played on my cruddy stereo of yore, and he does it before Allman has even reached the exit ramp for his solo, the Englishman pretty much barging the American out of his own lane, with high, needling stuff around the dominant-seventh chord before the cadence has even arrived. To his credit, Allman doesn’t budge, but you sense his surprise and, having sized up his options, he stays calm and clears the path in his own terms. It’s all you can do, really, when your host (who also happens to be your boss) sidles up to you at his house party, while you’re having a really rather nice chat to a very attractive person, and hisses, “Get the fuck out of my lane, motherfucker!”

Or, alternatively, when your lover starts yelling at you, because he cannot organise the chaos undoing his own attempts to soothe his inner world.

The first four bars of legitimate solo space taken by Clapton are hair-raising the first time you hear them, and that effect is not diminished by time, even beyond that point in life where there is no hair left to raise. It is a passage, albeit a brief one, which can have few rivals for entry-impact anywhere in the history of the soloing blues guitar. Or for cogency. It says, Sit up and listen, you Godawful people!

And you do.

“I have fucking had it with this, Pattie. This is what I have to say, okay? You ready for it? Are you ready?” is what I imagine this aggressively imperious sequence of phrases is actually barking into her blenching visage. A little context might not hurt, then — context that I didn’t benefit from myself when I was twelve.

Clapton was at the time secretly, now famously, infatuated with the woman who was married to his Grate Frend, George Harrison, Pattie Boyd. Boyd is Layla and “Have You Ever Loved a Woman?” is a raw exposure of the disorganised and deeply agonised feelings that crawled inside Clapton like lizards: rage mixed with lust, despair, jealousy, romantic delusion, resentment, self-hatred and utter frustration at the impossibility of meaningful connection given the vastness of the psychological (and moral) mountain range that gave them footing, but which also divided all three of them. The music we’re listening to when we listen to this song is not gracious or richly deep, nor does it feel as if it is presenting an audacious technical challenge somehow made to look easy. It is borderline psychotic, I’d say, in places. Highly aggressive. Right on the forward edge of control. A man making the voices in his head become real in the room.

The essence of what we’re hearing here is a description of unsane feeling expressed through the wiring of a Fender Stratocaster, pushed by close-to-violent string-striking against the radiance of the instrument’s natural tone as it emerges from a minuscule vintage valve amp (I did some research: it was a tiny Fender Champ), fingered, I should imagine, right up high on the neck on a middle-ish (the G?) string, so that string-length is equal, from pick-stroke to anchor-point, on either side of the functioning pickup, engendering a tone that is very pure indeed, yet is savagely — and I mean savagely — attacked by the distortion imparted by the storm in Clapton’s fingering. It is one note that he rides in on. Just the one, yet I have always registered it as two somehow; two, gradually closing on each other chromatically across a bar’s length, one note bearing in on the other yet held in absolute tension, one bending in to the other to produce a delicious, livid discord, which is then resolved by Clapton’s execution of a rapid and perfectly formed tippy-tap on a single repeated note followed by a whipped and looping fret-slide down half the length of the neck and back up again to occupy the duration of a grammatical beat, then half-opening the Fender’s throat again to offer up a bar of gulping, desperately chromatic sea-lion barks on two strings and finally, with immaculate resolution, clarity and command of himself, the execution of a beautiful curlicue-and-out figure to finesse the phrase, like a gymnast dismounting from high bars. He lands it perfectly. We mop our brows. But it is the last time in that long, long, hating solo that he feels fully in command of himself. And it was not two notes at the start. It was just the one. Just the one.

It starts at 4mins 14secs and is pretty much over the important part of it by 4m 30s — sixteen seconds give or take, four bars of music — four! — in which a man actually gets to express what he is incapable of consciously knowing of himself.

Since I was a kid I’ve felt that this surely is the most idiomatic, exquisitely turned and perfectly achieved piece of electric guitar soloing that has ever snaked out of a sink of thwarted adolescent woe (although obviously I was not using that kind of language then). It is exquisitely turned because in the flash of the moment its author had the musical instinct and guitar-playing gumption to find its form in himself, ready-made in all its simplicity; it is perfectly nailed because he nails it perfectly in time, fractionally ahead of the beat, yet also, counterintuitively, perfectly relaxed within the playing of it — the timing of it really is beyond exquisite: listen to that very first phrase of the solo, the one where he tippy-taps around the tonic note (or is it the mediant? My ears can’t do that anymore), and I promise you that everything that is musical in you will scream with pleasure and possibly pump tears to your eyes when you hear it; and finally it is the most idiomatic parcel of electric guitar soloing ever played (well, that I’d ever heard when I made this judgment hundreds of years ago), in that it perfectly expresses what it has to express in a language that belongs to the electric guitar and no other instrument, all of it pirouetting around one note with impossibly sweet timing. And it could not be thus expressed by any other musical instrument, nor algorithm. It is the electric guitar in apotheosis. And I wonder if it is mere coincidence that it is also an electric guitar expressing perfectly the feelings — or something like the feelings — of a man who has no real access to real emotion, about women principally, but also about identity; a child who was brought up negligently and deprived of a sense of real love and connection and who, four years on from this startlingly angry moment in the recording studio — for so it is, intensely angry — would drunkenly utter to a hall full of real people some of the most foully racist effluent ever disgorged onto a British stage. If you ever feel inclined to search out the recording of that event, prepare yourself. It is hideous. It was in truth the lowest Clapton ever got — far lower than the deep trench of the blues he sank into as a recorded expression of his misbegotten desire for Pattie Boyd. Or the booze. Or even the heroin. This was the level of the dogshit on the welts of his shoes. No higher than that.

IT SEEMS TO ME that the electric guitar has somehow come to have — broadly speaking, culturally speaking — a masculine voice. As if by some strange default. It is pretty easy to see why that might be.

The instrument has been dying something of a cultural death over the past forty-odd years, something Peter Bevington and I intuited out of sheer ingenuous enthusiasm in 1977, and very likely read in the NME too. Of course people still play electric guitars, of course they do. People swoon over them, and some folk even collect them, and assemble vast collections and do so without the ability to play a decent phrase or chord progression on any of them, let alone on one of their untouchable “crown jewels”, as they like to call the most valuable items, stored below stairs in the specially built sub-vault under the house, breathlessly fumbling with shaking hands the catch that will reveal to his friends his most darkly held secret possession: the 1959 Sunburst Gibson Les Paul once owned by Garry Holepunch of the Amazing Rhythm Stationery Cupboards.

But the electric guitar is finished as an agent of social change, as a weapon and as the most modern-looking and cool-sounding thing you will ever see and hear. Of course it is, if people who can’t play them collect them. Collecting is neurotic. It is a compensation for some deficiency.

What kind of people collect things?

Men do.

And when they collect things like guitars they are doing so partly because the fetish in their possession connects them in a very real way, or so they imagine, with the music that was once played on the instrument and is now contained so silently and safely in his vault, and by simple, syllogistic extension of that connection, he can claim attachment to the musician who made music with it. These are nails from the True Cross. Given half a chance the collector would probably have Jimmy Page down there in the vault as well, restrained by velvet-lined titanium ankle gyves, so that every day Jimmy is available to play the solo from “Since I’ve Been Loving You” on demand, like a human jukebox with only one punch-button, installed in the shallow cleft in Page’s chin. This would not be kidnap and enslavement in the collector’s mind. It would be validation, at last.

Guitar solos are so peculiar, aren’t they? So freighted with uncomfortable, half-felt anxiety and fully felt feelings of domination and control. Yet sometimes — no, often — a guitar solo feels like the reflex processing not of any particular content but is just a guitar solo because it’s time for a guitar solo and someone’s got to play the guitar solo and since I’m the one with a guitar in my hand — then I suppose it might as well be me. The object of the guitar solo, in this model, is to be a Guitar Solo, with all that entails in the way of making yourself feel BIG. And so once again we sense that weird feeling of reinflation as you start pumping yourself up under the pressure of your own high-gain excitement, the passion, the indiscretion, the presumptuousness, the shining brilliance, plentiful guts and, to put it mildly, your ballooning sense of your own majesty (for which you may also read the words “narcissistic masculinity”). And with every guitar solo of that nature you also get, as a bonus, a very high-pitched whistling sound. For even that kind of guitar solo is not entirely empty.

Can you hear the whistle, boys?

I imagine that if you have been around long enough you’ll remember ”Free Bird”, the epic mid-1970s chorale by the occasionally very fine Southern Rock group, Lynyrd Skynyrd, which clocked in at nine minutes in the studio but would stretch, live, to anything up to a quarter of an hour in length, depending on the number of guitarists involved.

Lynyrd Skynyrd: 73 guitarists in search of a socket

“Free Bird” was an insubstantial dirge-like hymn to personal freedom which became, in performance, a monument hewn in Time, no less, to a collective Romanticism of the Southern Selfhood, a mutant confederacy in which a long-haired, tie-dyed ol’ country boy of that early-1970s era declares over and over and over again his absolute existential resistance to all those things that are felt to restrict, tie down, impose upon, shackle and keep that good ’ol boy from movin’ on to the many places he’s gotta see. And he’s not messin’. He is not, you know. A man and his boon companion, his soul, may not be detained against his will. And so it’s toodle-oo to the girl he’s in the process of ditchin’ with this very song. The song then accelerates hard from its funereal exposition and reaches climax after climax over the length of an enormous coda, as each of the (usually three) guitarists do their twiddly bits along the front edge of the stage apron, legs spread, heads tossed back, mouths open in ecstasies of self-affirmation, not “cutting” each other as in the jazz improv tradition, but rolling out minuscule variations on the solos that each of them always plays, has always played and will always do in “Free Bird”, nigh unto death. It is music as dead as road kill. Which is perhaps why the effect is less hypnotic than plain hysterical, perhaps a little like a peal of bells which don’t toll but squeal like piglets.

Actually, transpose each and every one of those ready-made guitar phrases into a sound source less concretised than Skynyrd’s endless man-flourishes and there’s only one thing you’ll hear. A dog-whistle.

I saw Lynyrd Skynyrd play once, in 1976 at Knebworth, in a monstrous crowd composed mostly of hippies standing around on their last legs, and it was then that the penny dropped. It was vogue-ish of me, I know — and possibly a little disingenuous in the way that I chiselled out the articulation of the thought for repetition afterwards — but the thought bloomed in my sixteen-year-old head, like the lilies of the field:

“Gosh, I don’t really like guitar solos, do I. Blimey!”

And it’s true, I don’t.

Although that would not include individual guitar solos by Jerry Garcia, Bill Frisell, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Taylor, Mick Ronson, James Williamson, Earl Slick, Charlie Christian, Billy Gibbons, Larry Carlton, Hubert Sumlin, Johnny Winter, Jeff Beck, David Gilmour, John Perry, Jimmy Page, Bonnie Raitt, Kenny Burrell, Richard Thompson, Steve Cropper, Johnny Guitar Watson, Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter, Grant Green, Elliott Randall, Marc Ribot, Steve Howe, David Lindley and, on one occasion, Eric Clapton. Otherwise — mostly, I reckon — guitar solos are pretty free of content and therefore of no value at all to me. It might as well be the existential void, humming.

June Millington of Fanny

ELECTRIC GUITARS ALWAYS had it coming.

The cultural fetor that settled around and about the guitar as punk gave way to the age of the synth in the early 1980s was not excessively foul and was perfectly warranted by the slippage of rock, the traditional training pool of the electric guitarist, into the ocean of dross that rinsed the 1980s of its grit. The new non-pop, non-stop dance music was both hard and often extremely edgy and it did almost entirely without guitars (if it had a guitar on it, then it was probably R&B, anyway). Yes, the electric guitar enjoyed a late and in part retrogressive blooming in the softer compost of the Smiths and their spoor of pale indie rockers, who at least troubled themselves with the important question, “If you don’t have guitar solos, what do you have for the guitarist(s) to do?” The answer: “Do fancy guitar arrangements, weaponize the curt guitar hook as a vital new arrow in your quiver or, if you’re in the Jesus and Mary Chain line of business, just turn the amps up as far they’ll go and sit around moping while the harmonic distortion and feedback does cold sarabandes around the room — maybe one day they’ll say you were early movers on rock’s last stand in the following decade and were quicker/slower off the mark than Pixies and My Bloody Valentine to recognise in the purification of the cooked guitar amp the melting down of rock’s grossest vanities.

If you were a hulking great stadium band, like U2, you simply issued your guitarist with a Homebase multipack of textural effects, tacks and a hammer on a “rack” and got him to lay some carpet, wall to wall. Really the 1980s felt as if it was the decade in which the electric guitar was laid to rest with a nice underfelt.

But it wasn’t. That was the Nineties’ job. Grunge supercharged the guitar into a killing machine stomping out the death fantasies of the children of the post-Reagan era and when, back in the rapidly shrinking UK, the Gallagher brothers brought new boorishness to rock and Union Jack-bejewelled Gibson semi-acoustics to the High Street, rock guitar seemed profoundly shameful, while rock guitarists, possibly for the first time ever, looked like they were trying way, way, way too hard. Then, if you wanted to look cool following the dissolution of Brit Pop, in the latter stages of that decade, and throughout the protracted celebratory hoo-hah of the Millennium and into the new century, you either wore a Telecaster Custom / De Luxe or a pair of Technics turntables, or nothing at all. British rock and pop music went around pretty much unclothed for the first time since the 1950s. The “lead guitarist” had gone to the pop-cultural knacker’s yard and was now only to be found looking gloomy, overweight and somewhat bilious at the bar of certain pubs in Camden, along with his barely recognisable older brother, “Geoff, the rhythm guitarist”, who’d been propping up the same bar since the end of the 1960s (all specialist rhythm guitarists disappeared overnight on 31 December 1969, a phenomenon that has never been properly explained by the authorities).

Behold. It is an indissoluble truth that it was we old people who were the ones excited by the look and the sound of electric guitars, and made assumptions about them and had dreams, quite a lot of them erotic, and wished we could play one and bring them thick-end first down, crack!, upon the heads of our sneering enemies — although we’d be obliged to spare, I suppose, the smirking children, who don’t even know what kind of cultural reference “Smoke on the Water” actually is, who look up from the sociology essay they’re writing on Lacanian Transference in the Erotic Beyond Pleasure and say…

“Ah, the electric guitar! I’m right in thinking, aren’t I, Dad, that when you were a young person, the electric guitar was, like … your generation’s mobile phone… yeh?”

Don’t even think it.

And now, the nub.

What distinguished the lead guitarist in every group, band or ensemble of pretty much every era was of course his appetite for playing solos loudly and theatrically and at any length he might get away with, accompanied by a supporting array of his own visual vocabulary of gurns and postures that was really the province of the commedia dell ’arte. You know the cliché. You’ve seen This is Spinal Tap. And yes, it was nearly always a “him”, with surprisingly few exceptions, even back then. If you were, as I was, a neophyte rock fan in 1972/3, then there was June Millington in the reasonably excellent Fanny, and that was it. Hard to believe now, I know.

Well, it is for someone of my age. The electric guitar was, for us, an Alpha Object identifying and symbolising the times we lived in and our own youth in relation to those times, and our distance from our elders, an object on a par with the Lunar Module and … and, actually, precious little else. And in fact better than a Lunar Module because, no matter how tightly you strapped yourself into one, you couldn’t do rebellion in a space craft designed by NASA. There is nothing I can think of that does rebellion as classily or authentically, and that’s just because the electric guitar, like the Lunar Module, is classless. (Are you listening, Noel? Guitars don’t do class war by nature. You might just as well weaponize a Goblin Teasmade or, I don’t know… a Lunar Module, and set their aftermarket-installed phasers to ‘kill’ in the unending war against southern wankery — and see how well that works as ‘real rock an’ roll’).

I now realise that my schoolfriend Adrian’s Gran was right too, in a sense, when she registered shock and dismay at the sound of her grandson blundering his way around the guitar figure that commences “Smoke on the Water”. “I thought the whole point of electric guitars,” she Lady Bracknelled from her accustomed seat, “was that you plugged them in and they played themselves!” I would qualify that observation by suggesting that electric guitars perhaps did their most important work when they weren’t actually being played and were just being held, slung, touted, brandished by some heartful youth and his gang of mates for a photographic session in the rubble on the edge of town. And… an electric guitar, is it? Really? Or is it a wand, or a sword, or a baton, or a penis?

On a good day it can be all five. But most importantly, always, always, always… it is an electric guitar.

For John M, who was the first fast-fingered Freddie to widdle on my patch, fifty years ago, and Tom C, who was certainly the last.

NEXT TIME, IN #3(iii): Four women, two guitar solos — and what happened next

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press in 2027