Next Friday, when his band Rage Against the Machine plays at the New World Music Theatre, Tom Morello will be playing a guitar that doesn`t look all that much different from the one Chuck Berry hoisted in the 1950s.
“He can play a guitar just like ringin` a bell,” Berry once sang, and his trusty Gibson rang out the sound of a musical revolution: country twang plus blues rhythm equals rock `n` rollor at least it used to.
When Rage takes the stage, Morello will make his guitar sound like it comes from a different planet than Berry`s. Listeners won`t hear a hint of twang or even a touch of the blues. Instead, they will think they`re hearing the turntable scratching of a hip-hop deejay, the grind of a trash compactor or the scream of an air raid siren.
Where have you gone, Johnny B. Goode?
Not that Morello couldn`t do a mean rendition of the Berry songbook. “I started out in high school with a really militant attitude, which led to some really horrible guitar playing,” Morello says. “But then I went through phases where I studied people like (Black Sabbath icon) Randy Rhodes and (progressive-rock virtuoso) Alan Holdsworth and practiced my harmonic minor scales eight hours a day. But for the last six or seven years I decided to concentrate on the eccentricities in my playing.
“I figured I had two choices, stick with the tried and true–and some might say tired–established vocabulary of the instrument, or take off the blinders and get on an open plain where I’m coming up with these weird video noises. My foundation is in traditional guitar rock like Aerosmith and Black Sabbath, but the building I’ve built looks a lot different.”
Indeed, it could be argued that guitarists such as Morello, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, the Rollins Band’s Chris Haskett, U2’s Dave “The Edge” Evans and Shellac’s Steve Albini don’t even sound like they’re playing guitars. Instead they use the instrument as a six-string sound-effects device. And no wonder–rock is increasingly becoming an electronic playground, with samplers, keyboards and computers becoming the “instruments” of choice among a new generation of aspiring rockers.
Although there is still plenty of classic-rock guitar to be found in the late ’90s, it’s a sound that is becoming increasingly passe. “Is rock guitar music rebellious anymore?” asks Duane Denison, who plays in the Chicago rock band The Jesus Lizard and the instrumental combo DK3. “You drive down the street and blast rock music with the windows down, people don’t react anymore. But you put on a hip-hop record with a heavy low end, angry voices, and people turn heads, they cower almost, because this loud-sounding thing is coming at them. Rock used to threaten people like that. Not anymore.”
All of which is not to suggest that the electric guitar will become obsolete any time soon. But the instrument is at the very least undergoing a redefinition that may have a profound effect on how rock bands will sound in the 21st Century.
The traditional rock band–bass and drums supporting one and usually two guitarists, who divide lead and rhythm roles–is in no danger of going the way of the jazz-swing big bands, but it’s now just one of many formats in which to play rock instead of the primary one. Increasingly, popular hard-edged rock bands are emerging–Prodigy, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Crystal Method–that don’t feature guitar as the lead instrument or use it only sparingly, if at all.
The shift is significant because the electric guitar is to the music of the second half of the 20th Century what the Stradivarius violin was to 17th Century classical. It has been to rock what the saxophone is to jazz, the human voice to opera, the talking drum to African music.
Its sound as the prime rock ‘n’ roll instrument was defined in the 1950s by Chuck Berry, Scotty Moore, Link Wray and others, and then turned into the Excalibur of the youth movement by such ’60s innovators as Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. By the ’70s, the rock audience’s passion for the instrument had made guitar solos–the longer the better–a crucial element in the concert ritual.
“What song is it you want to hear?” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant would ask. “Freeeee Bird!” came the reply, and audiences wanted all 11 minutes of it, the better to bask in an orgy of fret-shredding by three guitarists.
Punk changes the rules
But punk’s arrival in the late ’70s changed the rules. Long guitar solos were out, brevity was in. The Ramones’ 1976 debut album set the tone: A 30-minute blast of pithy, high-volume pop songs without a single solo by Johnny Ramone, whose right hand was a blur as he slashed it across the guitar strings with Vegomatic precision and speed.
By the ’90s, the Ramones’ standard had infiltrated most mainstream guitar rock. Dave Grohl, a guitarist in Foo Fighters, exemplifies the prevailing attitude: “I think guitar leads are unnecessary. I think a lot of people put guitar leads in songs to show off or to bridge a gap because the songwriting isn’t up to par.”
Adds Art Alexakis of the million-selling Portland punk-pop trio Everclear, “The guitar is what I write on, and anything I do is going to be guitar rock, but to me the song is God. You use whatever textures and whatever confidence you have as a musician to make the song realize itself. Guitar solos for the most part are pretty gratuitous and masturbatory.”
Certainly not for everybody. The jaw-dropping dexterity of Eddie Van Halen, Adrian Belew, Robert Fripp and other virtuosos has kept the guitar solo alive, if not flourishing, in the ’90s. John Squire, the gifted lead guitarist in the British bands Stone Roses and the Seahorses, says even though he was inspired to pick up the instrument after seeing the Sex Pistols perform “God Save the Queen,” he hates the idea of boundaries being imposed on the instrument.
“I learned Hendrix and Page from my blues-rock instruction books, and I felt resentment from people I’d idolized in the punk intelligentsia whenever I played any solo over eight bars,” he says. “As I learned more, I became offended at how many Led Zeppelin riffs the Sex Pistols had ripped off without crediting them. That’s when I threw away my punk manifesto.”
Increasingly the absence of rules about how a guitar should sound has opened up the instrument’s vocabulary in exciting ways. As part of the New York “no wave” scene of the early ’80s, Sonic Youth began experimenting with alternative tunings and driving screwdrivers and drum sticks into the bridges of their guitars to create new sounds.
The quartet remains at the forefront of the guitar revolution with the first in a series of self-released instrumental EPs, “SYR 1.” The inspiration for the group’s recent music is not other guitar bands, guitarist Lee Ranaldo says, but the cyclical electronic textures of ’70s German experimental groups such as Can.
“We’ve always listened to music outside of rock and music that doesn’t even necessarily have guitars in it,” Ranaldo says. “It’s the texture of the sound that interests us, not what’s making the sound.”
Not dead yet
That sense of freedom inspired some of the most lasting and influential music of the rock underground in the ’80s. After forming the pioneering Chicago noise-rock band Big Black while attending Northwestern University, Albini and Santiago Durango developed a guitar vocabulary adopted by many ’90s rock bands.
“For the duration of a song, Santiago would constantly be making dramatic changes in the sound by flinging knobs up and down, turning things on, plugging things in, in a ridiculous sequence,” Albini recalls. “A lot of guitar players are very precious about their sound–it’s their voice–but Santiago had absolutely no ego about that. If by one of his experiments he found his guitar sounded like a stapler, that would catch his fancy and he’d be quite content to play stapler for a while.”
It’s an attitude that coincides with the nonlinear, anything-goes approach of the new electronic bands. Underlying the shift away from guitar playing is that cash-strapped urban school systems can’t afford to expose youngsters to instruments first-hand.
“I can walk out in the back yard with my guitar and there will instantly be a flock of kids around me,” says The Jesus Lizard’s Denison, who lives in Humboldt Park. “And then I realize that most of them have never seen someone play an instrument before.”
It explains in part why turntables and samplers have increasingly become the tools of urban musicmaking, why deejays and not guitarists are supplying pop music with many of its freshest ideas.
Yet even advocates of electronic music, such as Matt Adell, who runs the progressive dance label Organico in Chicago, say the guitar isn’t about to become extinct. “The guitar is simply too versatile an instrument and there are sounds it can make that no technology can duplicate,” Adell says.
Brad Tolinski, editor of Guitar World magazine, says the instrument’s appeal is enduring: “It’s portable and it’s relatively easy to learn; a person can get relatively good on it quickly. So it’s an ideal folk instrument. The sound of a pick against a string going through an amplifier has an impact like nothing else. And it just looks good. It’s going to be around for a while.”
As bassist Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth says, “The great thing about the guitar is that it can be anything you want.” A new generation of guitarists certainly understands that, just as Chuck Berry did 40 years ago.
STRIKING NEW CHORDS
Key moments in the evolution of rock guitar.
1954. Scotty Moore invents rock guitar on Elvis Presley`s “That`s All Right”
1958. Chuck Berry`s 17-second intro to “Johnny B. Goode” is a song in itself
1965. Keith Richards, the master of the riff, creates first classic on Rolling Stones` “Satisfaction”
1967. Jimi Hendrix`s “Are You Experienced” revolution-izes approach to guitar feedback, distortion
1968. The Velvet Underground`s “Sister Ray” becomes the template for noise guitar
1970. Eric Clapton and Duane Allman duet on “Layla”
1971. Jimmy Page captures classic-rock drama on “Stairway to Heaven”
1973. Ernie Isley`s vibrato lead hits a new funk pin-nacle on the Isley Brothers` “Who`s That Lady”
1978. Keith Levene of Public Image Ltd. introduces minimal, droning sound that would influence U2`s The Edge, among others
1980. Glenn Branca creates guitar-rock orchestra, featuring future members of Sonic Youth and Helmet, in New York
1981. Summit of innovators Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew convene on King Crimson`s “Discipline”
1985. Big Black`s Steve Albini and Santiago Durango bring the noise guitar on “Atomizer”
1987. Prince`s “Sign O` the Times” creates a virtuoso guitar explosion
1991. The Edge rewires his guitar to sound like anything but a guitar on U2`s “Achtung Baby!”
1996. Rage Against the Machine`s Tom Morello makes guitar sound like the scratching of a hip-hop deejay on “Bulls on Parade”
