michael schenker

Long ago, several lifetimes in the past, my mom would take me with her to a grocery store in Pawling, New York, where my family owned a weekend getaway home.  Going to the store with her was one of the few times when I got to see what life was like on the other side of the tracks. I remember mothers smacking their children’s faces when the kids talked back, and I recall asking my mother what Food Stamps were and why we were the only ones in the store not paying for our stuff with them. This was a million miles away from my life on Park Avenue, where domestic servants seemed to be hiding in every closet and bathroom, the kind of lifestyle where you have a maid, but you also have a woman who comes in a few times a week to do a deeper cleaning. Whenever I think about this stuff now, it reminds me how downwardly mobile I've been. If, as Engels wrote, the purpose of the family is to reproduce class relations, then our family was a miserable failure.  But I don’t really wanna talk about Engels and class reproduction.  That, too, is a remnant from a life I once lived.  I’d rather talk about UFO… One thing I remember clearly about this Dickensian grocery store I would go to with my mom on the weekends is that they sold LPs.  Weird, right?  Government cheese, Ajax, and Led Zeppelin III, all for sale under one roof...

The LPs were kept in a bin near the cash registers, and I would look at them while my mom shopped. One record the store always had in stock was UFO’s Lights Out.  Not to dwell on the topic, but in retrospect I can say that their having this particular album was another marker of their main demographic. UFO makes music that’s nothing if not blue collar.  But this class character is not the same kind of working class vibe you get with Springsteen or even Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, where there’s a certain amount of poetry and aesthetic refinement introduced into the music, which often is indicative of a gap between the singer and the world he describes in his songs.  UFO is the real fucking deal, scar-faced lads from Birmingham, and (in their heyday) one equally trashy guitar playing ubermensch from Germany.  I may be making this up in my head, but UFO’s music sounds like it could only be made by guys who know what it’s like to live amidst burned-out steel mills, who know what it’s like to stand in long dole queues…

Along with records like Foghat Live, Deep Purple’s Made In Japan, and Angel’s On Earth As it is In Heaven, Lights Out was a record I always looked at and wanted when I was at that grocery store, though I never dared ask my mom to buy it for me.  But a little while later, I bought Lights Out at a store on Third Avenue called Music Maze. Like many small record shops in those days, Music Maze also sold bongs, pornos (on actual film reels), incense, and Alice Cooper belt buckles.  I got Lights Out on the strength of its cover art alone. As it turns out, it’s ok every now and again to judge a book by its cover because I loved what I heard right away. The music was so hard rocking, and nasty, and of a forbidden world, the world of  teenagers on pot, which at 10 or 11 is what I aspired to be when I grew up. And the nice thing is that a lot of UFO’s music (not all of it, but quite a bit) still stands up.  It’s unabashedly music made for arenas, or soccer stadiums filled with rabid hooligans who wanna hear some heavy duty rock and then go flip over cars and set buildings on fire.  When you’re a young lad, and you exist in a narrowly defined and somewhat staid environment, you hear a band like UFO and the hard hitting aggressiveness is exactly what you want and need.  It's like a lightning bolt across the night sky...

There’s a lot of things I really like about UFO, but I think the biggest is Michael Schenker’s shreditude.  Shreddiness, in and of itself, is no longer something I value much in guitarists.  Shredding for its own sake bores me, which is why I’m only into metal in controlled doses.  Perhaps I have only one ball or something, but playing lightning-fast sweeps without bringing any other aesthetic considerations to the table usually makes a guy sound (a) overly clinical (i.e. lifeless), and/or (b) like he works in the stock room at Guitar Center.  But sometimes shredding adds an element of frenetic excitement, particularly if it’s approached in a way that’s highly musical.  The thing about so much of the metallic shredding you hear is that it’s not really very musical sounding at all.  It’s just a guy with decent manual dexterity, and a two-inch cock, who can play really fast. BFD. I’ll take the lumbering creakiness of Neil Young over Randy Rhodes or Kirk Hammett any day of the week.  And yet, there are a few guys who shred tastefully – aesthetically pleasing shredders, let’s call them – the best example being Michael Schenker.  I can’t really put my finger exactly on what makes Schenker different other than to say that some remarkably melodic and even intricate ideas lurk beneath the high-octane intensity of his particular brand of shred.  Intricacy is, of course, not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of UFO and Scorpions.  But what makes both bands so good is that, even as the songs drip with testosterone and bravado, the underlying tunes are surprisingly catchy. I give Schenker a lot of credit for this, especially in the case of UFO.  His feel for tight song structures comes across not only in his soloing but even more so in his super-crunchy accompaniment.  He also gets amazing tone from his Flying V, a kind of tuneful distortion that would work in any high-energy musical context…

So my advice to the uninitiated is to go out and get your hands on some UFO.  If you like your music hard, tough and loud, and if you wanna hear some shredding that actually sounds like music, these guys are just the thing.

richard thompson

There’s a cult of Richard Thompson among folks in my nebishy demographic. And as a knee-jerk contrarian – meaning, essentially, that I just wanna be different from the geeky herd – I’m uneasy with the cult. But I think I have good reasons for my demurral in this instance. Richard Thompson is not breathtakingly brilliant, which is fine. He’s very good, and he’s managed to remain remarkably consistent over 45 years or so of making music. But, whether it’s his time in Fairport Convention, or the albums he recorded with his (now ex-) wife, Linda, or the scores of records he’s made since then, none of it is stuff I have to have in my collection.  I like it a lot, but it’s not essential listening. (I don’t limit myself to essential listening, btw). Thompson’s music doesn’t stay with me for days afterwards. In fact, much of Thompson’s charm comes from his being so unflashy and understated. His guitar playing is first-rate. He gets a syrupy Stratocaster tone that will never fail to soothe the savage beast.  But the playing is not at all ostentatious. Tasteful (but not tasty) is how I would describe it. And over the arc of his career, he’s also developed into a very good vocalist…

None of these aspects of Thompson’s music are worthy of a cult.  And I’m pretty sure that the guy doesn’t even want a cult following. He’s always struck me as being reserved/dour/a tad misanthropic, and the subtlety of his music doesn’t suggest a guy who’d be comfortable with nerdy dudes worshipping him. I hesitate to say that he’s middlebrow, but I think it’s an apt description, even if it often has a negative connotation. I for one have a considerable amount of space in my life for things middlebrow. I liked Spielberg’s Lincoln. I voted for Obama.  I tend to spend about $12 on a bottle of wine.  I think Business Class upgrades are worth the money. I’m Mac as opposed to PC because PCs are for people who have bad taste and don't have college degrees.  I still fondly think of baseball as a pastoral game, even though the stadiums these days boom with awful noise designed to beat every last shred of attention span out of the public. I read authors like Jonathan Franzen, and I skim the New Yorker (but not the New York Review of Books) in the waiting room at my shrink’s office. I listen to NPR (though it's sheer milquetoastness makes me wanna do stuff like this). I dig John Stewart. I only have one Republican friend, and he gets a pass because he’s 70+ years old.  I use terms like “African American” and “LGBT”.  And I enjoy listening to Richard Thompson.  Until just now, I never realized the extent to which I’m the embodiment of parody…

angelo bruschini

Angelo Bruschini is an under-the-radar guitarist I was hipped to, by accident, about 20 years ago. I was browsing through the Richard Thompson CDs at Aaron’s Records on Highland. The place has long since gone the way of most record shops, but back then it was the best music store in the city. So I’m there one day, and a dude with a big blonde Harpo Marx-style afro, and wearing a Mudhoney T-shirt (another sign of just how long ago this was), comes up to me, unsolicited, and says something like, “If you like Richard Thompson, you’ll love Blue Aeroplanes.”  I hate when strangers impinge on my personal space. It’s one of the biggest reasons I’ve chosen to live in LA instead of New York.  You’re constantly in the cocoon of your car out here, shielded from people who want to talk to you, shielded from guys with Harpo Marx afros, who don’t get that you don’t want to talk to them, who don’t get that what you want, above all else, is for them to stay the hell away from you. For some reason, I give off an unspoken vibe that’s precisely the opposite of the way I feel.  Weirdos love me. I’m a magnet for psychotic drunks on the street, demented elderly folks at the grocery store, religious proselytizers in parking lots… I wish I could be like Susan Richards in the Fantastic Four, with her ability to put a force field around herself. My time in the car is my Susan Richards time.  Nobody can get to me in there. I just find the Blue Aeroplanes on my iPod and the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

“I’m serious,” Harpo says.  “You’ll love Blue Aeroplanes.”  I do everything I can, body language-wise, to let the guy know I just want him to get outta my face.  “Ok,” I say, refusing to look at him (because once you make eye contact with guys like this, they have you), “I’ll check ‘em out.”  He finally scurries off, and I think I’m rid of him, but I’m wrong, of course. He comes back with a Blue Aeroplanes CD called Beatsongs. “This is the one you want,” he says, “this is the one you need.”  Part of my problem is that I don’t like conflict and I don’t know how to say ‘no’ to people. Sales girls in places like Banana Republic and J. Crew can feast on me because when they make their inevitable hard-sell pitches for all kinds of extra stuff I don’t need - 'this really expensive shirt would go great with those jeans you're buying, and here's a little peak at my cleavage, and we take Visa or Mastercard, suckah - I don’t know how to politely decline. Christ, I can’t even say no to some freaky mental patient at a record shop! ...So Harpo more or less walks with me to the cash register to make sure I buy the album, Beatsongs.  I’m thinking to myself, ‘it’s only $8 (used), a small price to pay to finally have this motherfucker out of my life forever and ever.  …I take the record home, along with a few others I’ve selected, and when I finally get around to playing it, Blue Aeroplanes really don’t sound anything like Richard Thompson, except for Angelo Bruschini, who turns out to be one of the best guitarists I’ve ever heard.  He’s sort of in the same vein as Johnny Marr, but with more Thompson-esque flourishes.  He’s obviously studied his Richard Thomspon very closely and taken great notes.

But I don’t wanna make it sound like Bruschini is a mere copycat.  He’s got his own distinct, style and a great intuitive feel for the texture of a song. He understands that sometimes the most brilliant thing a guitarist can do is to just be a great accompanist. …Bruschini eventually left Blue Aeroplanes and joined Massive Attack, whose dancey trip hop vibe resonated with me in the era of the dot com bubble, but eventually I lost interest.

…I wonder where Harpo is today.  Maybe I shouldn’t be so down on people like that.  Some folks just crave human connection and have no way of knowing that I crave detachment and solitude. I wonder where a guy like Harpo goes after his main hangout closes? What’s his new spot?  Is he one of those Hollyweird guys who traverse the seedy alleyways just off the boulevard, hoping to find somebody to talk to, somebody who’ll listen and be interested in what he has to say? If I knew where he was, I might drive there, locate him, roll down the window of my car, and thank him for turning me on to Blue Aeroplanes. And then I’d roll the window back up, drive away, and get lost in the loveliness of Angelo Buschini's guitar playing...

rick derringer

Rick Derringer’s an interesting cat and a helluva guitar player.  He got his start as a teenager with the McCoys, who had a Number One hit with the great Hang on Sloopy in 1965. But he didn’t really become known for his axe wielding prowess until his stint with the Johnny Winter Band. I owned Johnny Winter Live when I was a kid, and even then I could tell there was something special about Winter’s chemistry with Derringer… But forget all this stuff, and let’s face it:  Derringer will be always be remembered most for Rock and Roll Hoochie Coo, a perfect slab of debauched cock rock boogie. It’s the musical equivalent of a pair of Russ Meyer-style Double Ds bouncing up and down. And who among us hasn’t pondered the question, what exactly is this "hoochie coo" of which he sings?  After much reflection over the years, I’ve concluded that the term refers not so much to sex appeal in a general sense, but more specifically to the intoxicating power of pussy.  Lordy mama, light my fuse. The song is, in short, most certainly rendered from the vantage point of a generically straight teenage boy.  And that’s ok. There’s a tendency nowadays to heap contempt on this target audience, but having been one myself, I pity the poor 16-yr-old dude with a perpetual hardon... When Rock and Roll Hoochie Coo comes on the car radio or pops up on my iPod these days, I think of huge muscle cars queued up in long gas lines. I think of eight-track tapes, and girls wearing halter tops and homemade cutoff short shorts. I think of Hall and Oates and that horribly sad line about the toothbrush hanging in the stand. I think of Squeaky Fromme, and Gerald Ford, and being a pin pal on Bowling for Dollars. I remember when a new playground opened at 85^th street and 5^th Avenue, replete with a basketball hoop that had a net made out of steel.  Did that thing have razor blades on it?  I recall how badly I wanted a denim leisure suit so I could look like I was in the Osmonds. My mom refused to let me have one, which is probably for the best.  None of my memories from that period of my life gel into anything like a coherent narrative. They’re just fragments, small shards of broken glass from what feels like another lifetime. I will say that I feel lucky to have gotten at least a little taste of the 70s, even if I was too young to really appreciate them. Often adults don’t even appreciate the moment at hand until it’s no longer at hand…  Back to Rick Derringer.  There are a number of things I love about the clip I’ve posted here, but three stand out: (1) Derringer is pretty darn short. I’m a little person myself and I feel a special kinship with others of my kind. It’d be fun to stand in a police lineup with Rick Derringer, Ronnie James Dio, and Neil Schon… (2)  Check out the way Derringer switches to the neck pickup on his guitar at about 2:12.  The neck pickup is what you go to when you want things to sound tasty. (3) He’s having such a good time.  And why not?  It’s 1973, after all, and anything goes…

johnny marr

Along with Peter Buck, Johnny Marr did the most to inject jingle jangle back into guitar based music in the 80s. I have a lot of ambivalence when it comes to 80s music. By the second half of the decade, the ultra-processed and murky-to-the-point-of-being-unlistenable vibe was de rigueur in the world of pop.  Even bands I really admire, like Husker Du, REM and Soul Asylum, were wrapping themselves in thick layers of tin foil. The Smiths were no exception to this, but the ringing 12-string goodness of Johnny Marr’s guitar breaks through the muffled production value and transports you back to the warmer glowing sound of 60s pop, calling to mind the best records from the Move, the Byrds, the Hollies, the Beatles… If jangly arpeggios are your thang the way they’re my thang, then Johnny Marr is your jam.  He’s my jam.  Of course, you still have to deal with Morrissey. His pose made sense to me when I was a 16-year-old chronic masturbator, but nowadays I just feel like I’m listening to some overwrought asexual sad sack (who, it should be added, loves being an overwrought asexual sad sack and wants you to love his being so, too).  But it doesn’t matter because the melodies are what I listen for when it comes to the Smiths, along with Marr’s guitar playing.  I don’t care who the damn singer is or what he’s singing about. I don’t even care that the Smiths basically made music for obese teenage girls. These kinds of ancillary considerations wither away when the sound Johnny Marr's intricate magic is chiming out from my speakers...

don wilson and nokie edwards

If I could go back to any time and place I wanted, I would place myself in Los Angeles, mid ’65, when Beatlemania was in full swing and the Byrds and Beach Boys chimed from the open windows of every Mustang zooming down the wide-open freeways. The British Invasion had by then left an indelible mark on American music, and yet there remained a fleeting blip of overlap time during which surf music still sounded hip and fresh.  What a great time to be alive, as long as you were young and white.  When I think of that exquisite moment, a Ventures 45 is what plays on my mind’s turntable. Dick Dale may be the King of Surf Guitar, but for my money the Ventures had the sweetest surf tones of all.  Where Dale’s playing was frenetically speedy, the Ventures  offered something richer and more soothingly melodic, the aural equivalent of a golden sunset after a long day atop 12-foot waves.  It’s easy to forget that the band originally hailed from Tacoma, Washington.  ...Part of the appeal for me when it comes to the Ventures is the visual vibe – the so-square-as-to-be-hip suits (sometimes aqua blue, sometimes pastel pink, sometimes bright red), and, of course, the cool looking Morsite guitars.  But what I dig most of all is the  distinctive popping and tremolo-heavy sound those guitars make in the service of tightly crafted instrumental pop tunes. It's music that transports me to a place where the future looked bright and the possibilities seemed limitless…

bob mould

There are many reasons to love Bob Mould, but the biggest one for me is that he brings the fuzz. Gimme some good fuzz box, just enough to rattle the fillings in my teeth a tiny bit, and I’m yours for life…  I feel lucky to have seen Husker Du live on several occasions. I even took my beloved sister, 14 at the time, to see the Huskers play their legendary gig at the Plaza, where they ran through Warehouse: Songs and Stories from start to finish. But it’s the first time I saw them play that stands out most in my memory as a life-changing event.  When I was 10th grade, a nerdy older kid named Michael gave me a scratchy cassette tape with nothing other than Husker Du’s cover of Eight Miles High recorded on it. I’ve made my feelings about cover tunes known on multiple occasions, but this one breaks the mo(u)ld. While the original version of the song is flawless, I think I might like the Huskers’ version even better. The tape won me over immediately and opened me up to a whole new world of great post-punk music. I went out and bought Zen Arcade right away, which turned out to be exactly the right thing for me at exactly the right time - aggressive, angry, angsty, and noisy, but also vulnerable, profoundly human, and deeply melodic underneath the multiple layers of noise.

Husker Du was not the first band to have made punk rock with candy-sweet hooks, but they were the best. They came through New York in support of New Day Rising in the spring of 1984. The gig took place at the Peppermint Lounge.  I doubt that place is still around. It’s probably been converted into a Modell’s Sporting Goods store or some other grim Giuliani-era type of thing…  There were two shows that night, nine and midnight.  The midnight show was restricted to over-21s, so I only got to see the early show. This was long before the availability of instantaneous information, so the only concept I had of Husker Du as actual people was from the fuzzy rendering of the three of them in the cover art for Zen Arcade.  As they got up on the stage to tune their instruments, I was taken aback.  Bassist Greg Norton had a Rollie Fingers-style moustache, and drummer/vocalist Grant Hart was a weird hippie looking guy with long hair that looked as if it hadn’t been washed in months.  But Bob Mould - chubby, unkempt, and just generally ill at ease – seemed the most out of place.  He struck me as being a middle-aged guy in a young man’s body... Never judge a book by its cover.  Mould, as I quickly discovered, is one of the all-time great pop life antiheroes. All it took was a couple of devastatingly loud swipes at his awesomely badass (and very un-punk rock) Flying V guitar, and I was won over forever. The music was so loud, so fast, so insanely hopped up.  They played for about a half hour and then just sort of collapsed from exhaustion.  I wish every gig could be so direct and efficient.  I’d seen Bruce Springsteen play for five straight hours a few years earlier, and as much as I loved the unrelenting cavalcade of great songs, I much prefer it when a band just gives you everything they have quickly and then takes leave of you before your mind has a chance to wander…

Husker Du became tamer with each successive album after New Day Rising, but this was not to their detriment.  It allowed Mould in particular to develop his chops as a great writer of catchy pop songs, always with just enough of a noisy edge to make things seem slightly on edge.  As a lyricist, he articulates things that resonate deeply with me and my kind.  If there’s a recurrent theme that runs through his body of work, from the Huskers, to his numerous solo albums, to the records he did with Sugar, it’s that love is a minefield.  You walk through at your own peril, with a very high probability of getting hurt, sometimes badly.  It’s a dispiriting message in a way, but it’s redeemed by a musical sensibility that’s a balm to all of us fellow pop lifers, that mixture of sweetness and sorrow I've talked about so often.  And, of course, the fuzz factor alone ensures that Bob Mould will always have a warm and welcome place in my heart…

lindsey buckingham

I have a certain amount of ambivalence when it come to Lindsey Buckingham. He’s an amazing guitarist and a very talented songwriter, but you have to take the bad with the good.  Let’s talk about the bad first, and then do the good, so as to end the post on a positive note...

The Bad:  There’s something annoyingly prim and prissy about Lindsey Buckingham, and it comes across in a number of his songs and in his playing.  One gets the sense of a guy who wants nothing so much as to be a refined artiste. Taking oneself seriously is not necessarily a sin. It’s often preferable to being overly frivolous. But there’s a threshold beyond which self-seriousness becomes grating pretentiousness. Buckingham can be both pretentious and precious. The elfin register of his singing voice probably doesn’t do him any favors in this regard.  Listen to the opening bars of Long Distance Winner and tell me you don’t picture a guy in ballet shoes, perhaps even standing en pointe. Even with songs I love, like Second Hand News, Landslide, Gypsy, and Trouble, there’s so much attention paid to songcraft that you become hyper-aware of the music actually being a crafted product, and this diminishes its emotional impact. There’s something vaguely clinical about Buckingham’s aesthetic. It's too fine in certain respects...

In the wake of the Platinum Record mega-success of Rumours, some critics wondered aloud whether Buckingham might be the heir to Brian Wilson. It’s not an unreasonable thing to consider. There are some interesting similarities between the two guys, though there are also some stark differences. I don’t wanna get into it other than to say that I think Buckingham really internalized the idea of himself as a genius.  Watch this video and ask yourself this question:  Does he really need 15 guitars, each one tuned in a different, hopelessly obscure tuning?  Would it be so bad to maybe just play a few songs in standard?

The Good:  With the arrival of Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac became Fleetwood Mac in name only. From that point forward, the band simply continued what Stevie and Lindsey started on the (commercially failed) Buckingham Nicks record. Fleetwood Mac, for all intents and purposes, became the Lindsey Buckingham Band. I may not be enamored of the Buckingham persona, but there’s no denying the excellence of the man’s melodic touch.  I think he could probably write hit records in his sleep if he wanted to (which is a big if).  And he’s an outstanding guitarist, one of the best I’ve ever heard. He finger picks everything, which is staggering to me as a struggling student of guitar. He can pour on the loudness and aggression as he does on Go Your Own Way and Gold Dust Woman, but he’s also capable of guitar playing that’s vulnerable sounding and tenderly expressive on songs like Sarah and Landslide...  

Rumours came out when I was 8.  I remember hearing it everywhere: Supermarkets, candy stores, taxi cabs, people’s homes.  It was on the radio constantly. The two albums I remember most from that period of my life are Steely Dan’s Aja and Rumours.  Fleetwood Mac became bigger than jesus.  By the time I was 12, they released the much less accessible (which is to say much more pretentious) Tusk.  The backlash was inevitable. At 15, I embraced punk and “New Music.”  By that time, I didn’t want to get anywhere near Fleetwood Mac or any music of that ilk.   Yet here I am now, 30 years later, and Fleetwood Mac are much more interesting to me than those guys who would get on stage and stare at the floor, maybe bored, maybe sad, and definitely unenthusiastic about what they were doing, perhaps unenthusiastic about life itself.  The sweet tones Lindsey Buckingham has always gotten from his (complexly tuned) guitar have left a lasting mark on my ear drums, and the music he’s been involved in continues to be compelling...

danny kirwan and bob welch

I guess you could say that the Bob Welch years were Fleetwood Mac’s lost period.  But they were more than this, too. You might remember Welch as the maker of several coke-fueled radio hits that garnered fairly heavy air play in the late 70s. One of those hits, Sentimental Lady, received earlier (and more understated) treatment during Welch’s time in Fleetwood Mac. But here’s the thing: Although the Mac failed to gain much of a commercial foothold over Welch’s tenure in the group, his influence was decisive in that he was a native Angeleno and his entry into the band shifted the center of gravity from England to California.  Never again afterward could you think of Fleetwood Mac as a British blues rock band. Their first record with Welch, Future Games, is a lovely dawn-of-the-70s affair, oozing with gentle, laid-back vibes, the kind of thing that can only come from folks who’ve spent a fair bit of time baking in the California sunshine.  But from what I can tell, Future Games is neither a much-discussed album, nor is it highly regarded to the extent that it’s been noticed at all. Robert Christgau gave it a middling grade of ‘B’ in his review. But while Future Games is by no means an outstanding achievement, it’s one of those pleasingly relaxed records you can play while you’re folding laundry or doing dishes. Welch and Danny Kirwan have a good feel for one another. Even as the makers of glorified background music, their guitars chime and jangle with a sparkly goodness that’ll make you feel like your toes are buried in the warm ‘n golden sands of time…  

peter green and danny kirwan

In the early days of Fleetwood Mac, Peter Green and Danny Kirwan made for quite a dynamic axe-wielding duo. Unfortunately, a lot of the band’s material in this period suffered from the same jungle fever that afflicted so many guitar-based English bands at the time. I don’t have a problem with pasty English guys borrowing from the black blues tradition as long as they take those blues motifs and make them their own. I need to hear something unique brought to the table. Otherwise it just sounds to me like pilfering and leads to music that’s warmed over and once removed from the real thing. Many of the best English groups of the mid 60s - the Stones, Pretty Things, the Yardbirds, etc. - started off as boring blues groups and only become something new and distinctly English when they melded their blues influences with catchy pop song structures. But Fleetwood Mac arrived on the scene after the demise of the three-minute pop song. The Mac were very much a product of Britain’s return to the heaviness of the blues, which itself was an expression of the 60s moving from lightness into dark. I’m not a big blues enthusiast, but the interplay between Green and Kirwan makes me sit up and take notice.  Then Play On, released in the fall of 1969, is a strange assortment of fragments and fully-realized gypsy blues rock.  While the whole album is worth having and hearing, it’s the seemingly impromptu moments, ones where someone just happened to have a tape recorder handy, that best capture the chemistry the two guitarists had together. The whole Fleetwood Mac concept in the early days seems to have been motivated by a fetish for black Americana, but my critical faculties go out the window when I hear all that electrifying vibrato and those slashing rhythm chords...

kim simmonds

In 1979, when I was 11, my step sister married a guy I liked a lot. He understood me. We had what I would now call an intuitive understanding of one another. We’d speak in code to each other and know what the encrypted messages meant without their having to be explicitly defined. It’s rare when you have that kind of connection with another person. Like me, he was sarcastic and cynical, back before being these things became a  commonplace and grating  schtick. He was 15 years older than me, and I looked up to him.  I wanted to be around him all the time, wanted to fully absorb the validation he gave me and that I didn’t get from my peers, my family, my school… He really grasped who I was and what made me tick. My father couldn’t stand him, and the feeling was mutual. I often felt torn between the two of them.  One of the things I realize now as an adult is that my step brother-in-law attempted to de-legitimize my dad. Recognizing this has removed a lot of his glow from my memories.  He’d say stuff about my dad, heap ridicule on him, and generally throw gasoline on the fiery anger I felt as it became increasingly apparent to me that my parents, in many ways, didn’t understand what was going on with me.  Of course, all teenagers feel this way.  But you just don’t trash a kid’s parents to gain the upper hand. It doesn’t matter how justified the kid’s disaffection might seem.  It’s not something mature adults should do to kids. At the same time, I’d also feel really uncomfortable when my dad would say bad things about him. I’m not sure why my dad disliked him so much. Maybe he felt put out because the two of us had grown so close. I know my dad didn’t like the way he was a workaholic, and the way he was so feverishly committed to making tons and tons of money. It was the dawn of the 80s. But, really, you could have much worse problems than your daughter marrying a guy with aspirations to be rich. And it seems kind of unfair because both my parents were very heavily invested in their own careers and farmed out a lot of the work involved in raising my sister and me.  As with everything in life, I’m sure the antipathy between the two of them had both proximate and deeper causes.  …One of the things my step brother-in-law and me bonded over is music.  He was a child of the 60s and knew all manner of arcane rock ‘n roll esoterica. He introduced me to music that nobody else in my hemisphere knew about, bands like Bloodwyn Pig, Coliseum and Blue Cheer. He played drums and worshipped Neil Peart and Ginger Baker. We saw Rush several times together.  I look at his taste now and it’s obvious that he was partial to heavy-duty Progressive-ish stuff. I outgrew this type of music a long time ago, but I can’t deny its formative impact on me.  One of the groups he made me aware of was Savoy Brown, featuring a couple guys who later formed Foghat, as well as the great Kim Simmonds on guitar.  In some ways Kim Simmonds was just your typical pasty British guy from the 60s who’d absorbed black American blues. And he never attained the stature of Clapton, Beck, Page, or even slightly lesser-known guys like Peter Green and Peter Frampton. But Simmonds had some pretty sharp blues chops.  I think the reason he never got wide recognition is that he’s just too wedded to blues purism. When it comes to blues-oriented rock, most people (I think) are like me, they want it to be mostly rock with some moderate blues accents.  When it’s the other way around, the music loses its accessibility to most listeners, who really just want pleasing song structures and catchy melodies. It’s for this reason that Foghat, Grand Funk Railroad, ZZ Top, and Humble Pie earned Gold Records while Savoy Brown labored in relative obscurity. But setting aside my reservations about blues purism, especially the blues purism of white guys from England, I remain a fan of Kim Simmonds’ guitar playing. It has a slashing knife-like quality that rings pleasantly in your ears, even if you know it would have been much better served with a few more hooks.  Hearing him play now is bittersweet.  It takes me back to a period of insatiable musical discovery, and I remember my step brother-in-law and how much I loved him.  He and my stepsister ended up getting divorced about ten years into their marriage. I saw him ten years after they split up.  It was good to see him, but by then I understood that he’d done some bad things in the influence he had on me.  But he did a lot of good things, too, one of which was making me aware of Kim Simmonds...

terry kath

With respect to the question of taste: One of the paradoxes – and/or tragedies – of getting older is that your ear becomes more refined with the advancing years but also much more restrictive. It's largely the result of absorbing received ideas.  When you’re 8 or 9 years old, you haven’t been around long enough to assimilate the critical consensus into your own thinking.  You’re probably not even aware of anything like a critical consensus. You just know what sounds good to you, and you play it, and you dig it, and there’s nothing to clutter your mind or qualify the pleasure you experience. There’s no such thing, yet, as a guilty pleasure.  It’s just pleasure, full stop.  I mention all this as a preamble to my trying to make at least a limited case for Chicago. Most folks my age or older, when they think of Chicago, they probably remember them as that horn-heavy MOR outfit that went from 70s soft rock hits - Saturday in the Park, Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is, etc. - to horrible purveyors of 80s yuppie soundtrack music, most of which I’ve blocked out of my memory because the thought of Peter Cetera and his blond mullet makes me wanna break shit.  But a lot of those 70s lite rock hits are actually quite good, though enjoyment of them will likely require that you step outside those received ideas I was talking about… Before their lite period, Chicago was actually kind of heavy. I don’t mean heavy here in the way that Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple were heavy, where heaviness is combined with hardness. Chicago were rarely if ever hard. But they were heavy in the sense of fusing rock with jazz in an effort to create ambitiously ‘conceptual’ music, the kind of thing that was endemic to the late 60s and early 70s, as in, ‘man, that’s some heavy shit.’  If you’re having trouble grasping my meaning here, try to visualize a white guy in a dashiki playing a ten-minute flute solo… When I was a kid and still blinkered to critical opinion, I really liked Chicago. My father owned their first three records, which doesn’t surprise me now that I think of it, and I played those albums all the time. They’re not really my thing anymore because I’ve since become a narrow-minded Anglophile with a deep antipathy towards horns. But let’s not forget that Chicago also had a great guitarist in Terry Kath.  His playing has always been the aspect of their music I liked the most.  There’s nothing particularly distinctive about his style, but with his ballsy solos and accompaniment on tunes like 25 or 6 to 4 and Hour in the Shower: A Hard Day Risin’ (heavy, man!), he was the guy most responsible for injecting the rock component into Chicago’s blend of rock and jazz. I loved hearing his guitar playing when I was a kid, and even now, after having absorbed so many critical judgments, all of which have formed a wall of superego around my musical taste, Kath’s guitar, and a few scattered Chicago songs more generally, sound pretty good now and again...

robert quine

Punk rock meant different things to different people in the 70s. For every band like the Ramones, Dead Boys and Stooges, where the music was like a nihilistic sledgehammer, pulverizing the last remnants of 60s idealism into oblivion, you also had Wire, Pere Ubu, and the Voidoids, among others, bands with artistic pretensions, attempting (however obliquely) to make significant cultural statements. I tend to be suspicious of artistic overreach and self-importance in rock ’n roll no matter whether the package it comes in is punk, or 60s protest music, or R&B, or whatever.  The nostalgic conservative in me wishes that pop music had never transcended fast cars, pretty girls, and burger stands glistening in the neon night. I know that American Graffiti is a deeply reactionary film, yet I love it and identify with it in spite of myself. It’s probably no surprise, then, that art punk is a particularly difficult pill for me to swallow.  But there are nevertheless a handful of arty punk records that I find irresistible, and one of them is Richard Hell and the Voidoids classic, Blank Generation, which has been a part of my life since I was 16 years old.  More than any other record out of mid-70s New York, including Television’s Marquee Moon, Blank Generation evokes the Great Society's demise as refracted through the lens of the piss-stained alleyways on the lower East Side.  In lesser hands, this would be a depressing backdrop to work with, but Hell has a way of turning cultural decay into an occasion for a perversely celebratory work of art.  Hell is, of course, the main focus of Blank Generation with his fragmentary observations, offered nasally with a vocal delivery that’s somehow both emotionally flat and supremely affected. But it’s really the late Robert Quine’s guitar playing, taut and angular, that gives the record its distinctive sound.  There are very few records that sound like Blank Generation primarily because there are very few guitarists who play like Quine. I can’t think of any off hand, actually. His style is dissonant, almost avant-garde, and not the kind of thing I normally buy into, but he’s so good and so fearless in his playing, and it’s impossible to ignore just how intimately he understands and actualizes the full potential of the guitar.  Quine played with lots of different people and almost always elevated the music he was a part of, but I will always think of him as the guitarist for the Voidoids. I’m still discovering new things in his playing after almost 30 years of listening to Blank Generation, and still completely turned on by the things I discovered long ago… 

    

eddie hazel

Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain is one of the strangest records you’ll ever hear, not in a way that’s necessarily alienating, but don’t look to this slab of wax for warmth and reassurance in the face of a cold and harsh world.  ...Amidst the first real wave of American deindustrialization in the late 60s, Detroit became an increasingly bleak city and a pressure cooker of racial dissatisfaction and anger after having been the epicenter of (white) working class upward mobility in the two decades after the end of World War II. Maggot Brain can be heard as the musical accompaniment to this transformation, told from the point of view of those forced to live in Detroit’s broken-down, boarded-up ghettos. The record is highly eclectic and will remind careful listeners that motor city was not only the point of origin for so many great R&B acts but also for bands like the Stooges and the MC5, each of which also provided their own disaffected perspective on the profound changes taking place in Detroit.  The title track on Maggot Brain is a ten-minute Eddie Hazel guitar freak out. It's a helluva way to open an album. With a nod to Jimi Hendrix, Hazel’s impassioned playing runs the gamut from hot rage, to desperate sadness, to the yearning for human recognition in a country that cares little for its poorest and most vulnerable citizens.  It’s very powerful stuff and shows that Eddie Hazel might just be the greatest guitarist you’ve never heard of…