Guitar Hero Sandwich

We had a light-hearted look at heavy metal guitarists the other day. It got me to wondering. Where did the guitar hero idea come from? I decided to answer my own question. Who else can I trust?

For purposes of this exercise, I should warn you that I’m not going to do any research. It sounds too much like work. Like a true guitar hero, I’ll be blasting away with little concern for anyone else’s input or what the audience wants to hear. Shooting from the hip, as it were.

I guess we should define “guitar hero” before we start. I’ll take a stab at it. A guitar hero plays the guitar to impress people with his guitar playing. That sounds like a bit of a tautology, but it’s really not. Many guitarists are more interested in being musical than being impressive. Jimmy Vaughn is a more musical guitar player than his little brother, who’s in the running for exhibit A in the guitar hero pantheon. Guitar heroism is usually the musical equivalent of weightlifting, not ballet.

So, how did we arrive at this state of affairs? Tell us, oh Sippican! Lay some more of your ill-considered opinions on us!

OK, I’ll bite. I think it started with Django Reinhardt.

Django made his guitar heroism all the more intriguing by the fact he only had two functional fingers on his left hand. It got burned, and his ring finger and pinky were formed into a kind of claw. But man, he could fly. In the video you can see the kind of guitar army he often fronted. Those old Selmer acoustic guitars were made for cabaret music, and they didn’t have the punch needed to get over in a loud world. When he started out, amplification was kind of non-existent, but small orchestras make plenty of noise acoustically. Django used a heavy plectrum to get maximum sound out of the box, and to elbow his way to the front of the pack. Let’s see what the Wikiup says about Django:

It wasn’t until 1938, and the Quintet’s first tour of England, that guitarists [in the U.K.] were able to witness Django’s amazing abilities. His hugely innovative technique included, on a grand scale, such unheard of devices as melodies played in octaves, tremolo chords with shifting notes that sounded like whole horn sections, a complete array of natural and artificial harmonics, highly charged dissonances, super-fast chromatic runs from the open bass strings to the highest notes on the 1st string, an unbelievably flexible and driving right-hand, two and three octave arpeggios, advanced and unconventional chords and a use of the flattened fifth that predated be-bop by a decade. Add to all this Django’s staggering harmonic and melodic concept, huge sound, pulsating swing, sense of humour and sheer speed of execution, and it is little wonder that guitar players were knocked sideways upon their first encounter with this full-blown genius.

Bang! There it is. It’s little wonder that other guitar players were knocked sideways. That’s a music critic talking. He kind of elides the fact that Django was endlessly musical, despite blowing all the other guitarists’ doors off. He gets right down to the meat of the matter, at least for guys like him. Django was impressive.

By the way, when your kids want to undertake something hard to prove their chops, Django beats Knopfler any day:

So where do we go from here? We’re drunk on cheap wine in pre-war Paris, and the greasy cigarette smoke is making us nauseated. What’s next?

The USof A, and Charlie Christian, of course.

That ladies and germs, it the electric guitar, blazing away, a true soloing instrument at last. He played in Benny Goodman’s band, and they featured him right out front. If you’ve never had the treat of standing in front of a Swing band before, you… you… you probably still have some of your hearing. Those bands were loud. I played in the back row of a few of them, and I still have a slight headache.

Pop a transducer in the sound hole of a guitar, plug it into a suitcase with a speaker and some tubes, and all of a sudden even the drummer can’t keep up. Charlie’s playing jazz, of course, but the whole idea of electric guitar soloing over background chord changes popped out of Charlie Christian’s very short stint on the stage. Died young and tubercular. So young there isn’t any video of him anywhere. Jazz musicians, and all sorts of other musicians, talk about Christian in hushed tones. Miles Davis said he wanted to play the trumpet like Christian played the guitar. Even rock musicians mention him, sometimes. They might have no taste, but they recognize a volume knob when they see it.

Now, the next step if fraught with peril. The 1950s has rolled around, and guitarists are thick on the ground at this point. Less well-informed observers might jump in here with any number of really good players who inspired lots of kids to take up the instrument, like Scotty Moore, or Eldon Shamblin, or  T-Bone Walker, or even Chuck Berry, but wowing people with blazing licks wasn’t their top priority. Besides, in a way, we’re assigning blame for how guitar hero ethos turned out, not credit. If we’re going to find the pedigree of  it goes to eleven malefactors, we’re going to have to go through Les Paul:

If the solid body electric guitar has a true father, he’s it. There may be twenty-zillion brands and models of guitars, but honestly, there are really only two kinds that matter for the purposes of our discussion. Les Pauls and Fender Stratocasters. Gibson made Les Pauls, but he invented them, and lots of other stuff to do with amplification and recording, including multi-track recording, so guitar showoffs could solo over themselves to increase the solipsism. Lots of guitarists went to an intermediate way-station on the road to shredding, using a semi-hollowbody guitar like the Gibson ES 330 or 335, but Les changed the whole scene for everything

Fender Strats are like boat oars compared to a Les Paul. They’re born from a country tradition, like the Telecasters that predated them. Blues heroes love’m. But a Les Paul guitar is a Lambo compared to the Fender musical delivery van. The neck is really thin, but the fretboard is a little flatter than a Strat. It’s got multiple pickups and volume and tone knobs. It’s made for showing off, and at flight-deck volume if you get a big enough amplifier.

So now it’s beginning to really look like the arms race we’re trying to define. Everyone was going to need bigger amplifiers and more necks on their guitars and maybe even some music lessons to keep up with the times. We’re going to get the musical cuisinart humming and dump in blues and country and swing and Broadway and torch songs and whatever else is hanging around.

Oh boy. Now we’ve run smack dab into the side of the 1960s. You’re going to demand I mention Hendrix or something. But we have to stick to the topic. We’re not just identifying showoffs. We’re talking about enablers and prototypes here. Lots of Millenials and Zoomers don’t understand Boomer affection for bands like the Beatles. They hear things like George Harrison’s lugubrious guitar solos and compare them to Eddie Van Halen or somebody. They’ve been taught that Rock Music is a thing, so the Beatles and Van Halen and Sade and Roxy Music and Weird Al Yankovic should all be compared to each other, and on the same merits.

Like I said, it’s the ’60s. The Stones and the Beatles and the Beach Boys et. al. gotta make a mint with pop music and some pedestrian guitar solos. Until we get to here:

It sounds woolly because they’re standing in front of walls of very crappy amplifiers to make all that noise. Real sound reinforcement got invented to replace the ad hoc arrangement you see here, and to keep up with the size of the venues and amount of decibels they demanded. The average wedding band in 2000 had a bigger PA system than the Beatles had to play Shea Stadium. This is why.

If you want to hear clearly what’s going in in that last video, let’s drop in on Tim Pierce and hear it done with all the equipment you could possibly want. It helps if you can play like crazy, too. Tim invited our son over to his house once, so he’s aces with us:

That Cream video was from 1968.  It led directly to the end of our search, the go to Guitar Center, go directly to Guitar Center, do not pass out of the garage, do not collect a $200 advance from the record company, the true adumbration of the guitar hero ethos:

Everyone heard Crossroads, and thought to themselves, if I could play like that, maybe I could make time with George Harrison’s wife, too.

Sorry kids, like Marty DiBergi said in Spinal Tap, “Let’s talk about your music today…uh…one thing that puzzles me …um…is the make up of your audience seems to be …uh… predominately young boys.