The lost chord, found! The interminable death of the electric guitar … now rewritten!

Let Mick Ronson, Billy Gibbons, Larry Carlton, Joni Mitchell and, above all, Mick Taylor be your guides in the underworld of #3 (part iii), where all is not quite as it used to seem, thank goodness

A confession: I published this in a rush, too soon, on Monday. It has since been clinic’d, it has attended a course in how to be written in the style of Magic Non-Fiction, poked, prodded and generally been made better across the piece, but especially at the end. All my fault. Sorry.

I MUST INSIST, with all the doggedness that my rather un-doggy nature can muster, that the electric guitar shall not die, for all the reasons mooted in earlier instalments of this story. The electric guitar is not capable of death.

Well, I say that. Much depends of course on how promiscuous we are prepared to be with words, doesn’t it? ‘Death’ might well enjoy a productive side-hustle as a metaphor but the ‘electric guitar’ is never, in any context, an organism. It cannot be said to live life, even if it has been anthropomorphised nigh unto death by its fond keeper, with pet names and special attributes and cosy flight cases lined with clerical plush. As objects, guitars exist for a period and then they exist no longer, either because they have broken or been dismantled or become lost somehow — whatever else is going on for the guitar at any given moment, the organismic event of dying does not come into it. Guitars have no consciousness. The guitar is only its functionality, and when the possibility of good use is gone, then so, meaningfully, is the instrument. It isn’t dead. It’s useless. Only a very few immortal Gibsons and Fenders get to exist forever and that is because they are preserved in the refrigerated basements of collectors, unfingered, merely worshipped.

That is not living, though, is it?

But there is another kind of death to which all inanimate things of prize value are more properly subject, to some degree at least, which goes beyond the mean chisellings of time and neglect, as well as the dull reality of the object’s essential inanimacy. It is cultural death: the crushing outcome of going out of fashion. Yes, electric guitars still exist and shall continue to be manufactured for yet more generations of new guitarists, who doubtless will continue to make fantastic music with them. Of course they will. Furthermore, the instrument’s historical status cannot be questioned now. You might be one of those people who, for whatever reason, can stand neither sight nor sound of an electric guitar, and bridles at everything to do with the ghastly things, especially its having to be so loud. Well, lodge this between the tangents of your clavichord and hit it with a hammer: there has been no newly invented musical instrument to match the amplified guitar for societal impact since, I would suggest, the pianoforte in the 18th century — an instrument that does a very different kind of job with the fundamentals of tonality but cannot match the guitar for tonal range and plasticity; nor even subtle — and I mean subtle — variations of pitch and attack. Music has its idioms for a reason. You can of course play the blues on a piano, but they are x / y-axis blues by comparison to those uttered in three dimensions by any instrument that depends on the pliability of strings or a moistened reed to give voice. A piano cannot sing the blues, not like a guitar can.

The saxophone, another real contender, was a magnificent product of the 19^th century. Truly magnificent, too — loud, strident even, if you want it to be. Human in so many ways and capable of supporting a limitless range of consistent tonal idiotypes: a real, fully inhabited ‘voice’, if you possessed the strength of will and the inhering genius to make the thing speak as you (note: speak as, not for, you).

So, who can tell John Coltrane from Dexter Gordon from Sonny Rollins after hearing three notes from each?

Me! Me! Me!

Not because I’m clever but because I’ve listened to those three tenor Titans attentively for 45-odd years and developed a personal relationship with each of them. Well, two of them. I know their respective tones like I know my own family’s noses. As to what each man’s tone and articulation and choices might embody, I would suggest that individually they might be said to stand separately for 1) warm masculinity, 2) cold masculinity and 3) transcendence of everything, including gender specificity. I leave you to decide which is which.

So how do you go out of fashion, especially if you are a guitar?

Over-familiarity breeding profound indifference, I should imagine. And indifference is always only too ready to ease itself down into a warm bath of idle contempt, as we know from other eventualities in our lives. It is as well then, I think, not to offer yourself up as a hostage to context.

In the case of the electric guitar, during the first third of the decade of my adolescence, the early 1970s, the world was strewn with riffs and solos and licks, guitars elaborating and simplifying and competing and thrusting and crushing, as well as swarming and soaring and widdling and weeing, drawing attention in the way that only electric guitars and their owner-wranglers can: by being louder than the rest and more obviously virtuosic; by admiring themselves conspicuously and by doing it all over you, rapt listener, in a strange parody of the narcissism that permeates masculine power. It is not difficult to see how indifference and then contempt might have found compost in an environment that was essentially a Golden Age for the worst and most laughable excesses of rock’s blokey theatricalism.

It wasn’t a parody, though, was it? Not really. It was no more a parody of masculine narcissism than the 18^th-century dandy was mocking elite style with his exaggerated cuffs and collars, or mods were making hard-hitting satire about posh men in suits. The electric guitarist in the era of his pomp was in truth a reconceptualisation of masculine narcissism in order that a new kind of power might be loosed upon the world. Soft power trying to persuade itself that, actually, it is quite hard, you know, in places.

How can I present this in terms that will be grasped and then understood straightforwardly by the citizens of the second quarter of the 21st century, who find it easy to be indifferent to the electric guitar and its vast, lagging train of often ludicrous baggage; indeed, why bother? After all, they are not obliged to give a fig about how the power relations between men and women were continuously ruptured and repaired by pop culture in the 1970s, and why should they? How can I make it plausible to a reader who was nowhere near there at the time that the electric guitar really was felt, in the era of my bouncing adolescence, to be an instrument of challenge, possibly even of overthrow. After all, not one electric guitarist worth his snifter went to the gym back then. Or drank protein shakes, or ate spinach. If you were to use the words “work out” to such an individual, he’d assume you were after discussing Hank Mobley’s best album. Wellness was not a thing. Aerobic exercise? Yoga routine? Pilates? Do what? The 1950s model of the wholesome manly man — now visited on us again with new tonality (and toned body) — was despised in the eternal rehearsal studio of rock, both as concept and as a chromosomal reality. Handshakes were resolute only in their resemblance to resolutely dead fish.

Serious electric guitar players set themselves apart from humanity’s main stream. They were not as other men. They inclined to be unusual, by and large, capable of going long and deep when creative circumstances required it, yet hellaciously avoidant and recessive when fronted up. Rather moody then, not to say hormonal. They affected strength within themselves, and mystery, yet only appeared to have some kind of inner world with switched-on lights when either they were playing their instruments or actively avoiding contact with other humans. It is often forgotten that the decidedly “effeminate” sartorial tone adopted by your average 1960s / 1970s musician, whether of colour or not, stood in direct, diametric opposition to dads and bank managers, athletes and warriors, and the broken, lost men who came back from the war and were considered better, and to know more of the world, than those who merely played the guitar after the fighting ended. Your average six-string suburban dandy man found himself on the front line of a different war, one at which his very identity as a male of the species was subject to question, and it hurt more than could be spoken of. You can of course read the greater story of masculinity’s peculiar postwar adventures, researched and told properly at immense length elsewhere — but I do believe that that story can be shrivelled down to something like this. Or boiled down, if that feels more comfortable to you.

THIS WRITER’S PREFERRED David Bowie album has always been Aladdin Sane, and not only because it came out the week of his thirteenth birthday. I rather imagine, if you’ve had the patience to read thus far, that you know what Aladdin Sane sounds like. It sounds brilliant and it is brilliant. It is very loud too. At the core of its purpose is a splendid set of Bowie songs that he never bettered, at least not as a set of tools for winkling the adolescent soul out of its shell so that it might gaze upon itself without horror — and then permit itself to go, “Hmm, not that bad!”

Another great thing about Aladdin: the destabilising presence of Mike Garson, the young American pianist, who launched himself in great parabolic arcs over the tumbled moonscapes of Bowie’s R&B as if he had never been issued with the manual containing the rules and regulations of how pianos rock (not in great dodecaphonic arcs, they don’t, not as a rule).

But come on, you do really know what makes Aladdin Sane seethe in you, still, after fifty-three years; seethe like snakes and mercury. You do. It’s that Mick Ronson, from Kingston upon Hull, isn’t it, remembered keenly as the possessor of bony ’ob-’nob features hatted with a thin peroxide thatch and the half-reluctant air of a man not really connecting with the dubious shenanigans he’s somehow got himself tangled up in … while connecting to almighty fuck with it through the engroined engine of his paint-stripped Gibson Les Paul Custom, plus all the grunt that a 200-watt Marshall pig can generate in a confined space, modulated by a “cocked Cry Baby Wah”, which pedal-operated gadget remained static for the duration on the floor, set half-open, half-closed, just at that critical torsion point in its sound-twisting curve at which the folding signal begins to tear. You might say that this effect is only an effect, but you cannot deny that it lends Ronson’s guitar unusual charisma, heft and presence. It is also the shape-squeal in the music’s Gestalt and its driving force, as well as its ballast and its huge grandeur. Ronson’s Gibson, lovingly recorded by Tony Visconti so that you feel you can walk all the way round the back of it (as if it were real architecture), is by some margin the most powerful element of the entire Aladdin Sane enterprise. Bowie was himself strong enough to let Ronson have his head while he, Bowie, exerted basilisk control over everything else. The Spiders were by no means the Stooges and he knew that it was not in his interests to let it go that way, so he held on to the reins even as they chafed his fleshless palms into pitiable husks.

Back in 1973 I listened to this uproar in a high old state of eroticised anxiety. It was quite a nice feeling, actually, but not very safe.

Hurrah!

Rather more recently, but still a while back (and nothing like as long ago as Aladdin Sane), my old friend the writer Nick Hornby wrote touchingly in his book 31 Songs about the need he felt at twelve or thereabouts for music that spoke almost entirely through the amped-up voice of the electric guitar. Of course, he’d have generously conceded, you need someone singing the words and the melody of the song, if there was one, and it was more than permissible that yet another person might thrash away at a drum kit, but the important thing was that one or more electric guitars should be audibly dominant in the general sound the record makes, almost to the exclusion of all other considerations. I felt this too.

“Like a pretentious but dim adult,” he wrote, “who won’t watch a film unless it has subtitles, I wouldn’t listen to anything that wasn’t smothered in loud, distorted electric guitars. How was I to know whether the music was any good otherwise?”

I rather take this to mean that, for Nick, his affinity with electric guitars had a special secondary purpose: the validation of his powers of discernment, the surge of distortion perhaps both a sensory reward and an impregnable defence reinforcing his inborn confidence that he did stand resolute, a lone figure of defiantly sure insight into the world as it met with him, crimsoned but unslayable on the crest of the Hill of Judgment. Conversely, any time electric guitars were not found to be present in music then Mere Dullness must skulk there instead, like a drooling idiot with nothing to say for itself. Are you listening, Blue-period Joni Mitchell? This is why you only sold twenty-three copies of that obviously deficient record to teenage boys under the age of sixteen. Blue was a terrible misjudgement. A sin of omission at best. Just think how much greater its appeal might have been had you thought to engage, say, Ron Wood to smear a few of his skiddy, Faces-style distorto-licks around the frankly over-tidy surfaces of “A Case of You”. You might have had a classic on your hands then. Think of the lift Ron would have brought to the music — and if you liked the direction he was taking you in, you could perhaps then hire in the rest of the Faces to rollick up the rest of the album and get shot of that pervading atmos of angst and lonely regret, which has always made that record into something of a downer.

But let’s not get too hung up on how good Blue might have been with wiser counsel at the helm — regret is such a dull emotion. Let us return, instead, to the consideration of the male guitarist and his fascinating instrument, who combined in mine and Nick’s youth to contrive a brilliant yet enigmatic figure in the society of the young and feverish of mind: a figure with access to and command over, the leccy. What thrilled the unconscious mind of the post-pubescent male, more than anything other than the slavering chimera of actual sex, was the sensory excitation engendered by electric guitars played fast and loud. Or slow and loud. Man, it was like plugging yourself into the mains without actually having to. You’d receive a charge invisibly, by proxy, with an unfamiliar surge of … SUDDEN POWER! Straight in it’d go. Power contained within the body, stored, yet also agitating hard for discharge into the world. Mutant power. Power here, right now, in this room, where no one can see you luminate and fizz all over with it, like a Van der Graaf Dog on its ‘spray’ setting. Raw power, limitless, flowing, diffusing… And finally, the dry power of hawser fingers braced against the resistance of a hardened world, fretting it and bending it to your will with every chord that erupts with Vulcan force from your smoking amp.

So what must it be like to actually play one then, an electric guitar, in a room where people can see you, with your huge amplifier cabled into a colossal speaker backline with a rack of effects and some control pedals, and the knowledge that if you wanted to you could really … ker-RANG!!!

And then hear them scream.

FEMINISM AND PUNK drew attention to the masculine narcissism that shaped (and fuelled) the deportment of the career rock star following the late-1960s breakout into ‘rock culture’ and its ghastly trappings, its conventions, hierarchies and conformities. Feminism and punk also increased by a factor of squillions, potentially, the number of women who brandished guitars, or just held them in the way you’re supposed to, so that they might play them really well. By the time post-punk’s Tail-End Charlies were being shot up in the provinces of the early 1980s by the Blow Wave of Fancy New Hair Metal — or whatever the official collective term was for Whitesnake and Iron Maiden, Aerosmith and Motley Crue and their glossy gang of camp followers (BWFNH&M was an acronym used aggressively to signify the considerable distance in space, time and dimension that separated their hair from Haircut 100’s) … By then, the cheap and, crucially, easy-to-play polyphonic keyboard-synth was on every suburban teen wannabe’s birthday list. Darkening days indeed for the Arbiter Les Paul Jr or Mexican Strat knock-off.

And that appeared to be that. Over bowled. Time, gentlemen, please…

But not so fast, umpire! The guitar dragged its sorry disintegrating body, plus trailing wires, on for a few more years, decades even, of puddle-shallow ‘iconic’ pop and rock — you can read an account of those decadent efforts written cursorily and unkindly, if you really want to, in the previous instalment of this toilsome narrative: The Death of the Electric Guitar (#3 pt ii): The Sin of Onan. But I for one was essentially done with it, cussed old fucker that I had become at thirty-three. Indeed, the events of 1993-’99 in this country that masqueraded as a recapitulation of 1964-’68 to juice the appetite of a pop media increasingly famished by the facelessness of dance culture, hardened my antipathy. They even gave themselves a name, that lot, to mark their place in history for all time, and I am not going to repeat it here.

And now we’re going to consider women.

But first I am going to talk about someone I sometimes wish I liked more.

I NEVER YEARNED to be a rock star. This is actually true. I was in bands when I was young, though not terribly good ones — some certainly better than others — and it was always me that did the singing and prancing about, not because I was gifted in any way with a great or even interesting voice but because I was the one who didn’t mind doing it. I certainly was not the owner of a God-given ass, but I was unaccountably confident about being looked at. Didn’t mind the prospect of derision. Not that I would have used such vocabulary in 1976, but I quite enjoyed the thought of projecting my selfhood into the sewer of filthy air that swirled above the assembled heads of any viable quorum of sceptical teenagers in a large-ish room of some description in my home town — some of whom were inclined already to regard me as a wanker. Perverse, I know. But I wasn’t cocky, I was just confident. I quite liked attention if I felt I might be able to control the terms and the context in which it was delivered.

I now know what this was really all about (I am certainly not going to bore you with a dreary account of my teenage deficits and needs) and so, I suspect, did my wise imp of an A-level English teacher, who appeared to quite like me — unlike most teachers, who generally regarded me with suspicion. He seemed to like nothing better than to peer over his spectacles and announce, “Nicholas Coleman, you are a roué exhibitionist.” I always enjoyed this most cheerful of insults. It meant I was getting away with being maybe just a little bit worldly. Or Stonesy, if you want to be literal-minded and reductive about it.

And the Rolling Stones were always my favourite band, right from the very start, back in the Sixties when I had no idea what I was looking at or hearing, but recognised a thrill when one crackled inside and outside my head — against which every other rockin’ enterprise was judged cruelly; even later on during the dog days of punk, when I foreswore every other kind of rock music going and then, after punk, never really went back. And I loved the Stones even then (up to 1981), because they were worldly and because they were capable of swinging like the clappers and because they had no illusions or pretensions about themselves or what they thought they were doing. They were not in the business of saving the world from itself or even of telling it where to get off. They were sly observers of the world, when they were good, not its redeemers. One of them liked money and was a social climber; another was like a kid in thrall to a pirate fantasy, who just couldn’t snap out of it, even in his thirties — and that was okay because he had a genius for architecting guitar arrangements that sounded simple but actually were no such thing; and they made you want to dance, unlike ninety-nine percent of rock music. The Stones weren’t bothered about seeming to be particularly likeable as people, either, and especially not virtuous — although Charlie obviously had manners and a sort of brittle, worldly decency. I loved worldly and I didn’t like guitar solos, on the whole, so it worked for us both.

And I never once had a serious yearning to be a rock star myself. Not even on Tuesdays, when I would sometimes spy a Jaggerish ‘thoughtful insolence’ leering at me over my toothbrush in the bathroom mirror. Yes, there was a terrible, squeaky moment when it dawned that I couldn’t be one, even if I’d wanted to, when I was fifteen — but that moment only lasted as long as it took for the penny to re-drop that I didn’t want to be one anyway — and probably, if truth were told, I knew that I didn’t have remotely what it takes. I am too sarcastic by half. And idle. Perhaps not scared enough either. What I really wanted to do was listen to electric guitars without the interference of fools and hope that the experience was not ruined by some insufferable child-man with a microphone interposing himself front and centre on the grounds that he believed he was channelling Dionysus, or embodying Saturnalia, or animating shamanistic vibrations in a ritual environment or some other such bollocks concocted by American academics to warrant their droning on about the grisly life and leather trousers of Jim Morrison. Sorry. I know it sounds mean, but I really felt that it was a shit aspiration to have at the end of the 1970s. And I was prepared to take it one teensy step further, because I am an utter bastard: I thought rock stars should have stopped by now, including Mick Jagger. They were over. And rock music too, probably. They’d had their moment. They’d done something no one else had done before — and that had been quite entertaining and sometimes even moving to behold, as they blundered around, getting it wrong — and sometimes gloriously right in the 1960s and early 1970s. But what was there further to be said by becoming another one of these people in an overpopulated world? Was being a rock star just a career option now? Something perhaps you might do a training course in, maybe financed with a government grant? Or did rock stars still only descend on pre-stressed rigging through a hole in the ceiling, lowered by roadies, to show you the right way to go, Deus ex bleedin’ machina? Was there now a career path to rock stardom and you had to really really really really really really want it, if you wanted to be it…?

I really really really thought that David Bowie ought to be the last of these people.

I also thought that if the kind of girl I liked saw me trying to be a rock star, she’d think I was an utter twat.

AND IT IS TRUE to say that not one woman or girl has ever seized me by the upper arms and told me that I should listen to a guitar solo, a tribe of solos or solos in general. Not one. I am certain of this, because I would have fainted dead away had it happened and probably banged my head memorably. Although now I think hard about it, I must recognise that I do have a fairly distant friend who is undoubtedly a woman and writes excellent biographies of distinguished women of talent — and is interested by this guitar stuff, genuinely. We have brief but enjoyable communications every few years and we never forget to exchange our latest thoughts on the lyric genius of her favourite guitarist, Mick Taylor, once an important member of the Rolling Stones (and very shabbily treated by them too), on the subject of whom she always has something interesting to say. She loves Mick Taylor, even though his hair was fluffy. I love that she loves him.

She’s the only one though. And it seemed quite absurd that, given the decent range of other friends I have who also happen to be women, I had never once had even a light and superficial chat tinkling with irony on the subject of electric guitars, not with any of them (obviously I am excepting the musicians I know — and there really aren’t many of them). Not once. Did I perhaps detect in them a detection of the needy schoolboy in me? Or did they really just not give a shit?

So I determined that the voices that should have the penultimate word in this epic of voyage discovery and rebirth really ought to be women’s voices, even though the central subject in hand is clearly not any closer to their hearts as a rule than the galoshes worn by North Sea fishermen. Or so I imagined. So I have been scientific about it. I have carefully selected a cross-section of women I really like whom I know like music a lot too and may or may not enjoy talking about it, but are bloody well going to have to do it a bit now, for once — and the creek don’t rise (he said, looking nervously over both shoulders, one after the other).

Being myself not a huge fan of the guitar solo, I devised a number of searching questions for my lady quartet that would enable each of them, individually, to explore the meaning as well as the sound of two guitar solos, which had been carefully selected by me from the list of thirty-seven guitar solos that I think are any good. I asked them to consider gender in their answers but not to make gender a burden to their thoughts. I also asked them to put emotion before thought in their responses to the music, as and where they felt that was possible. What I want to know above all, I semi-pleaded in my most wheedling voice, was what these exhibitions of instrumental virtuosity appeared to be actually saying to them, however old-fashioned the musical form that the communication came in.

The four women selected to take part in this survey have had their names anagrammed to protect their identities from their children. They are, in no particular order, Vicky Challenger (writer and active figure in the charity sector), Ginger Gore-Blymie (professional musician), Evangelulia Gummidge (social worker) and Suzanna Tapeworm (company executive).

The two guitar solos they were invited to contemplate at the highest comfortable volume with headphones on were actually four guitar solos played by two men over the length of two songs, a first solo in the middle of each song and the second in each at the end. Plenty of room for creativity, there then, yes?

The identities of the musicians were not concealed from the participants. I explained to each that the object was not to be facetious or make fun, not unless you really need to. Also that I had chosen these performances as examples of the art of the guitar solo, as I saw it, at its absolute peak. There will be no trick questions. I really do love them (even though I don’t like guitar solos as a rule). You are of course entirely permitted to disagree with anything and everything I say.

‘I Need You Tonight’

The first song appeared in 1983 and is by the three kings of the Texan dust-displacin’ blues, ZZ Top, during their globally successful cyber-boogie phase. It’s called “I Need You Tonight”. The Rev. Billy J Gibbons is the guitar man in the frame, alone and overwhelmed by carnality and seeking small-hours redemption (or possibly, as a reasoned alternative, imagined late-nite sex), equipped only with a modified Fender Stratocaster (cranked) and his deep personal spirituality serving as a pathway to real feeling. Three times in the approach to the final chorus he calls out “Have mercy!” “Have Mercy!” “Have Me-e-ercy!” in his choked-up pinched-harmonic guitar voice and three times a certain element of his listenership struggles to stay moored. This is guitar-playing from the gut and the soul (yeah yeah, and the other place too), pentatonic to the blue max and formed into shapes and phrases that tell a savage story of the way it goes down, late night in hot places and there’s no one around to share but you.

From the diametrically opposite lobe of the electric guitar brain floats Larry Carlton, sliding in on a murmuration of tiny chord substitutions and silky tone; a guitarist of altogether different temper and really very different things to say. His first solo, located in the stomach of Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne” (1976), is a dazzle of harmonic sophistication and an argument in favour of technique as the only gateway to proper articulacy. It is off-the-scale brilliant in its deep reading of what harmony is, which is a good job because the solo starts just as the song modulates into what sounds like a middle-eight passage in a different key. Panic stations? Not Larry.

He’s checked. There’s gas in the car.

Carlton’s second solo, at the end of the song, as we all begin to think about taking our leave, is an invitation to participate in the joy of life, as we go. It isn’t erudite, nor is it clever and it is not especially holding out for your admiration either. It is only hoping that you too will find joy in this leaping rarified moment and will keep leaping for as long as you can keep that feeling alive in your heart. It is an exquisitely beautiful passage.

“That first one, the ZZ Top one,” announced Evangelulia Gummidge to me over the phone, promisingly, “…well, I liked the rhythm a lot. And I didn’t really notice any guitar solos because I was so overwhelmed by that glorious thumping groove. Foof, goodness me! Really… you know. I mean, well, really!”

But Lulia…

“As for the other one, it triggered me completely,” continued Lulia. “I had to listen to that song over and over again when I was going through a terrible break-up, decades ago, and… well, I had to turn it off last night after about three bars because it was just too upsetting. I’m sorry; I hope I haven’t let you down.”

“Look, it’s no good,” said Suzanna Tapeworm [pron. T’peh-vüüürm], menacingly. She had just emerged from a board meeting and was in a savage mood. “I know I agreed to do this, but I have changed my mind. There is no way in the world I am going to let myself be caught saying things for public scrutiny about guitar solos in a survey conducted ‘scientifically’ by you. Frankly, I’d rather pull my pants down on the front seat of a seventy-three bus.”

Chastened, I turned to our pro musician, Ginger Gore-Blymie. I had a funny feeling she at least might take to this. I was not wrong.

“First of all,” wrote Ginger. “ZZ… I did and I didn’t enjoy it. I did because the groove the solo sits on is elementally fabulous and would always make me rock and shiver my timbers, and the guitar sound is out-of-this-world exciting — that overdriven beast that the guitar becomes with the amp turned up to eleven and the guitar’s close by the amp… Proper skill and proper exciting.

“But then I didn’t enjoy it because the song says to me something quite macho. And halfway through the second solo it went rather widdly-wee with the guitarist running out of melodic ideas, perhaps, so resorted to showing off. That’s when I got bored.

“The Steely Dan solo … Well, these are the words I jotted down as I listened: thrilling, musical, inventive, genius, the brilliance makes my hair stand on end. Intelligent, a quieter guitar sound than ZZ, and subtle. I’m in love with the guitarist.

“There is no doubt that ZZ is good music, and I was in that bar in Thelma and Louise with that great band and everyone having an exemplary Saturday night piss-up. However, I found it hard to listen to without being visited by the image of ZZ Top and their attitude towards women — hence my conclusion that my enjoyment of the music (and the solo) is attached to my feelings for the player. As a listener I am transported by their performances and talent, and the excitement they bring to the ear, and I am in awe. They are both creating highs and lows in their intensity and structure, taking us with them. But for me, ZZ Top lose the plot, whereas Steely Dan are meticulous in their examination of the human condition and where to take us mortals next.

“One thing I can say is that I think all lead guitarists want to be noticed and the ZZ solo was certainly saying ‘I’m available for sex after the show.’ The Steely Dan solo was just as surely saying, ‘I’m a sensitive dude and, although one of the reasons I became an accomplished lead guitarist is to get girls, I’m probably a bit too shy to do anything about it — and I have a wife and kids at home, anyway.’

“There can be no question that ZZ is a LOUD expression of male energy. It pushes hard. Steely Dan guy is much more melodious and subtle. I would suggest that the Dan solo possibly expresses the feminine side of the player, although I would still say this was definitely a man playing. That may well be because there are so few contemporary women who play electric guitar like this. I can in fact only think of St Vincent. The women I can think of who play electric in bands, play in a different way.

“I could go on about this …”

Vicky Challenger was keen first and foremost to say something about the instrument itself: the electric guitar as an all-purpose friend to us all and jack of many, many trades.

“Almost daily,” she wrote, “I am so grateful for its invention. Whether it is introducing songs or tracks (‘Icarus’, by O and the Mo; ‘Jelly’ by Moon Soul), fading out songs or tracks (‘Honey’, by Common Saints), inserting new colour and shape between phases of a song or track (‘Family Affair’, Sly and the Family Stone)… whatever it is doing, I am loving what it brings.

“As a child I grew up in an environment in which — even if not spoken about — ‘classical’ music was considered to be the real music, the only music offering profound experience and highbrow aesthetic appreciation. In contrast, pop was just primitive and lightweight, infantile even. In that environment, the only musical instruments regarded as offering anything of quality or legitimacy were those to be found in a symphony orchestra and its add-ons: keyboards such as piano and harpsichord (the latter for those favouring Baroque) and organ (ecclesiastical roots and church environment permitting a degree of machine augmentation to the pure interaction of human and instrument). Tympani and side-drum were permissible, and a range of percussion instruments, but certainly not the full-regalia drum kit of pop bands. The classical guitar was just about tolerable, very occasionally. But the electric guitar? Decadent probably, new-fangled most certainly, and disquietingly challenging to the safe old order. But thank goodness for it — in all its forms. The music I love is mostly that which involves the incorporation of machine into music.

“One of Nick’s questions is: ‘is this music with a story to tell as well as emotions to explore?’

Well, my answer to that is this: whatever the composers’ and performers’ stories may be, for me the only story and emotion that can be authentically experienced (rather than guessed at) is that of the listener.

“And no, masculinity was not the dominant vibe. The dominant vibe — if there is one — is just the affirmation of being alive in all its sonority. Was there room for me in it? Yes, of course: the room is the music, pure and simple. It’s not for anyone. The music is the totality of the whole ensemble’s musicianship — rhythm and bass and tune and chord sequences; the solo set against the backing, the layers of sound that prevail notwithstanding that it’s a ‘solo’.

“Do they have to be talking to anyone specific, or are they just putting it out there? I think the latter. They’re doing their thing and I don’t think it’s gendered. And I am not sure if one solo is more describable than the other: you’ll have to judge that in terms of my descriptions.

Steely Dan: ‘Kid Charlemagne’ — I can’t separate the solo from the whole. I can appreciate the virtuoso performance — expressive, inventive, unpredictable, technical prowess etc — but it reaches me as a whole experience of chord sequences and layers and layers of content, with the guitar singing away on top. The second of the solos is joyful. I’m not sure if I feel the joy or whether I sense the joy in how it is performed, but joy is the word. Again, it’s like a song — the guitar is singing for all its worth.

ZZ Top: ‘I Need you Tonight’ — Both solos visceral, unavoidable appreciation to be experienced — how could one not relate to this as a human being? Not virtuosic, but precisely what’s required. Escape, letting it all hang out — I imagine the guitarist (and the listener) dancing, shaking their heads, moving their bodies. Not gendered. The second solo is cleverer and fancier but I’m not sure that is relevant. It’s the pace and rhythm of the whole that is key to what’s going on. Maybe the long, drawn-out, ending is slightly indulgent but I like the range.

I THINK IT IS A GOOD that death can be both itself and ‘death’, a metaphor, whereas an electric guitar cannot. Not yet. Lunar Modules have yet to enter the language as metaphor too, as far as I’m aware, and the Lunar Module is also an object which symbolises postwar optimism and progress, as cogently as the electric guitar does. I think of them as equals, pretty much — except that the guitar outstrips the module easily in terms of measurable economic and cultural benefit to humankind. The Lunar Module has only ever had one place in the cosmos where it can be used properly. Electric guitars have unquantifiable numbers of options in your county alone, assuming there’s a viable electricity supply ready for immediate use — and that perhaps is the one virtue possessed by the Lunar Module that shades our friend the Gibson Les Paul Custom, even on the Dark Side. It is battery-powered. There is no leccy on the lune and an electric guitar is about as much use on its surface as a jetpack made of brie.

And so I think it is right to celebrate it even as we commence a period of anticipative mourning that will only cease when the last contoured ash body has dried out, cracked and fallen apart in someone’s garage in some lost suburb of the future somewhere. I feel authentic sorrow that the instruments that gave us “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” and “Mannish Boy” and “The Jean Genie” and “Kid Charlemagne” and “Cortez the Killer” and “Green Onions” and “Dark Star” and “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” and “Get It On” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Complete Control” and “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” and “I Feel Fine” and “She Does it Right” and “Ain’t That a Bitch” and “Johnny B. Goode” is… well, that it is already deep into a period of declining usage that may end one day with extinction.

Speaking as a broken semi-musical instrument that was roughly co-eval (give or take nine or ten years) with the first industrialisation of the electric guitar, it does feel like a valuable achievement to have spent the duration of almost my entire life coiled with them, giving grave attention to them, showing dutiful respect and loving them as anyone who has ever lived would want to be loved. But please be on notice that nothing I may have expressed in the preceding paragraph may be taken to constitute the use of the guitar as a metaphor. Nor may the reader appropriate any material written by me, the attested author, nor adduce those words in legal proceeding, contending that the electric guitar may be used fairly as a metaphor for any other object that might be said to exist. The electric guitar has never been, and equally can never be, in any formulation of useable language, a tool for chopping wood — or a penis.

I just want to be clear about that before we end.

I may have mentioned briefly, earlier in this essay that I am not fond of electric guitar solos, as a general rule. It is true. I am not. But this is not to say that great guitar solos have not been played and I can’t spot a good one. They can and I certainly can. But soloing has never really struck me as the optimal usage of this fascinating instrument. And I feel that we should conclude this long and reflective walk through the thinning woods of ash, alder and mahogany, which abide on this planet without any intention that I know of to furnish us with wood for guitars, with a cadence that is in keeping with the opposing spirits so often extracted from an electric guitar. I’m afraid it involves once more looking at and listening to, and for the last time (it really is), a Rolling Stone.

MICK TAYLOR WAS A child of the English exurban Home Counties towns of Welwyn Garden City and Hatfield, Hertfordshire; a post-war kid to boot, born into austerity and not much else in 1949. His dad was a fitter at De Havilland, his mum a co-worker in the office at the same aircraft factory. Young Mick was taken to see Bill Haley and the Comets as a nine year-old. It meant that Taylor got in the lift on the ground floor.

He emerged from the elevator six floors later, a musically confident yet socially introverted fifteen year-old, and walked slap-bang into the fevered London blues scene of the mid Sixties. He very quickly became Peter Green’s teenage successor in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, and then, at twenty, the filler of Brian Jones’s somewhat pinchy boots in the Rolling Stones. After founding the group, the original Stone had become a non-productive passenger attempting to conceal the effects of his drug intake by becoming a jack of all trades and master of, well, none, really (the myth of Jones’s musical mega-talent supposedly suppressed by Mick ‘n’ Keef to finesse their coup is not supported by any recorded evidence that I’ve ever heard — it remains a myth in my view).

Taylor made his first appearance in front of a quarter of a million people in Hyde Park a few days after Jones’s death in 1969. He looked about twelve on the Stones’ rickety stage, recessed and nervous and frozen, as if wishing the entire apparatus would collapse and disappear into a hole, butterflies, scaffolding, Jagger’s Shelleyan dress, Mick and all. The Stones were understandably not very good that day and what could be heard of the fluffy-haired Will Scarlet hiding in plain sight among thickets of roadies and girlfriends with a Gibson SG strapped too high on his sternum did not inspire confidence. But he got through the anticipated baptisms of fire and became a fully integrated, contributing member of the Stones for the next five years. It is thought however, a thought that is certainly corroborated by Taylor’s own account, that an uneasy Richards was not a warming mentor to Taylor but a chilly taskmaster, and it is notable that for the few Stones recordings that are known for Taylor’s serious authorial involvement (“Moonlight Mile” and “Sway” on Sticky Fingers, “Winter” on Goats Head Soup, all gorgeous), Richards is nowhere to be seen. Jagger is the only senior creative in the room. And it is impossible to avoid thinking that in more generous circumstances, the songwriting credits might have read Jagger / Taylor rather than the usual formulation of spoils divvy: Jagger / Richards.

Taylor was not really the ideal fit for the newly soi-disant ‘Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band in the World’, which might have accounted a little for such unattractive behaviour on Richards’ part. Taylor was a very fine technician with a remarkable talent for long, sinuous lines of single-note soloing or descant, making tasteful use of structured repetition executed with classical Gibson sustain in a tone with which you might sterilise milk. His approach has sometimes been compared to that of Carlos Santana, in which case it would be needful to check up on the proper spelling of the word ‘invidious’. Richards was the master of rhythm guitar as subject, theme and drive-train, a true descendant of Chuck Berry. He was not in Taylor’s league as a ‘lead’ player and to be fair to the older man, Taylor’s extreme lack of conversation and his apparent blank determination to remain within his comfort zone as a stylist might well have been irritating to a senior guitarist who would have wanted above all things to forget the wretchedness with Jones and work agreeably, collegiately with a fellow master instrumentalist whose only desire was to meet Keith’s vision in Keith’s band. He had built the musical platforms and buildings and outworks into which young Michael might be expected to assimilate under his direction, fitting in, dovetailing, meshing, providing the right sort of wattle and daub. Instead, you rather suspect, Keith got ‘Mick Taylor: lead guitarist’. It is speculation on my part, of course, but it is not difficult to see why, in the circumstances, Richards might have occasionally bridled Gothically.

It is worth recapitulating at this point that there are in essence three kinds of rock ‘n’ roll guitar player. There’s the hotly virtuosic lead guitarist who plays to express himself in whatever space he can extract from the ensemble clutter. Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton are exemplars of this kind of player — a soloist who lives for the possible annexation of depopulated tundra. Then there is the ‘guitarchitectural’ mason of harmony, riff and rhythm (Richards and, to a different extent, Jimmy Page), often an autocrat, who lives to construct edifices and then colour, decorate and buttress them or knock lumps out of them where he sees fit. A man whose principle role is as a masterbuilder of song. And of course there is the all-rounder, who is just as interested in chord structure and groove as he is in tearaway single-note play-and-display, typified by Jimi Hendrix and not many others.

Taylor fell into the first category, linear in focus, often exquisitely pearlescent, fluid, elegantly strung across whole choruses of others’ spadework like festoons of tasteful outdoor lighting (though it is also true to say that he had a weakness of musical ear which allowed those lines to hesitate and fail in the denser harmonic thickets, where, with the Stones, he often shapes his way gloriously into one of Keith’s chordal thickets and then can’t get out again without stumbling, appearing to modulate strangely … and then lucking his way back into the right key almost as if he’d fallen through a trap door and landed in the correct tonal centre like a fat man into a vat of cement (see any live “Love in Vain” apart from the one on Get Yer Ya-Yas Out — I have sometimes thought Keith laid traps for him with extra chords insinuated into that slow boiler of a blues by Robert Johnson).

Still, this is Mick Taylor we’re discussing here, not some kid, and from everything that’s been muttered by everyone involved since 1974, when Taylor upped and left the Stones without so much as a by your leave, it was a thing he had to do if he wanted to save his own life. He ran for the hills and, rather sadly, took his drugs with him. But he did leave behind him one of the great structured guitar solos in rock history (I don’t believe for a moment it was all completely off the cuff) by sidling into the Latinesque coda of Richards’ big groover on Sticky Fingers, “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”, and pealing out a cathedral’s-worth of chiming phrases and shimmering overtones the subtle repetitions of which occasionally bring to mind the mazy numerological world of campanology. Guitar solos in rock music seldom demand the use of the adjective ‘beautiful’, but this one does.

But it is not the beautiful Mick Taylor I want to introduce you to today. It’s the one on “Starfucker”.

“Starfucker”, the title of which was changed somewhat primly by Atlantic Records’ Armet Ertegun to “Star Star” for the song’s cover listing on Goats Head Soup (“Star * ” — do you see what Ahmet did there?)… “Starfucker” is in my opinion one of the high achievements of just-peaked Core Stonesiness, a vulgar, sexist, leering Chuck Berry knock-off about… well, about sex with film stars, that is both top-shelf-bleurky and genuinely funny-smart-crass in the way, say, that Bardolph, Pistol, Poins and Hal are funny-smart-stupid in their revolting jive with Quickly and Doll Tearsheet. The lyrics were obviously composed by Jagger and then bellowed at the very top of his throwaway bawdy form (this is a brilliant example of Jagger’s singing-as-acting proposition), set to an engulfing boogie bounced furiously into a state of airworthiness by Charlie Watts — it goes down the runway and it really does take off, this one. I have danced to this piece of flying masonry on my own, frequently.

But you can tell that as much as it is an authored folly by Jagger, it is also a House of Berry Boogie Production by Richards at his most nobly tributary. It has all the hallmarks: a late-arriving lumpy bass line, three guitar parts plus a brief, formal stab of a solo by the guvnor, which comes out wetter than it went in and concludes with a nice twist out and sudden drop. He’s no soloist Keith Richards, but sometimes when the touch is right…

The solo is licked and snicked at as it goes past by two other ‘lead’ solo parts, which quote from the catalogue of Chuck Berry readymade lickstabs on one, two, sometimes three strings, prattling away, not unlike, I sometimes think, a laugh track in a TV sitcom. Ah-haha-ha… ah-haha-haa! Both very obviously played by Richards. Meanwhile, way down low in the mix, sometimes inaudible, never louder than a chortle just out of the range of your general hearing, but lockable into once you’ve got it, like a pulse on your wrist, there’s an old-fashioned rhythm part, that is exquisitely accurate, massively disciplined and so immaculately formed that when the refrain comes and all those starfucker-starfucker-starfuckers are joined together as one before the throne, the rhythm guitarist defaults to a dragging, syncopated open block-chord sequence before relaunching into his little catherine wheels of augmentation as precisely as an adding machine, once the starfuckers have all fucked off again. Oh man…

It is absolutely delicious guitar-playing. Accurate as a rifled bullet and almost as inaudible as a silenced one. And it isn’t Keith Richards, as I thought for years and decades. It just popped into my head one day, when I could still hear such things, that it just didn’t sound like Richards. So I went and did some research in appropriate archives and there it always was, wherever I looked. Mick Taylor — rhythm guitar.

Mick Taylor — rhythm guitar.

We guitarchitectural weirdos are terribly moved by this sort of thing and I can’t really say why. But the playing on “Starfucker” as a collected whole is one of the greatest joys I know, and I cleave to it like a tearful father to a newborn son or daughter every single time, even if I can’t actually hear it very well now. And I never stop listening till I am quite sure the fade has swallowed them all up. Some things, however small and apparently insignificant and full of nothing but their own juice, will never die — because they are what they are and nothing else, and that’s all you can ever really hope for.

Mick Taylor — rhythm guitar. It has a ring to it, don’t you think?

With my eternal and devoted thanks to Vicky, Ginger, Evangelulia and Suzanna [pronounced. Zoo-oozen-NAH)

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 Books

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