Frank Zappa died 24 years ago today. It was a big loss for the music world, but Zappa has lived on through an unusually large body of work. From his debut "Freak Out" in 1966 until his final release, "The Yellow Shark," in 1993, Zappa put out around 50 albums that covered a staggering amount of territory—satirical and novelty songs, dinosaur riff rock, soundtrack music, jazz fusion, off-blues and reggae, doo-wop, guitar solo-driven instrumentals, avant-garde classical, and plenty of idiosyncraticmusic that is unclassifiable.
As a fan of almost four decades, and a lead guitarist of three, not seeing Zappa live is one of my biggest musical regrets. Fortunately for me and other Zappatistas, Frank's concerts are amply represented on YouTube. Among the many gems to be found is the live recording of "Zoot Allures" embedded below, which offers a prime exhibit of Zappa's undersung guitar prowess. Ever experimental, Zappa had a Floyd Rose tremolo system which kept his guitar in tune through frequent and extreme whammy bar manipulations and variable resonant frequency wiring which allowed him to marshal (and control) as much feedback as the venue could handle, making for a big, bold tone. The three-minute solo that begins at 2:31 is angular and unpredictable, coming in stops and starts and quick bursts of notes. The phrasing is well outside the Pentatonic box of most rock and blues guitarists, often moving horizontally along the neck, full of hammer-on pull-offs and isolated bends, moving in free-form cycles rather than building to a formula crescendo. Like much of Zappa's music, it may not sound pretty on the first listen, but repeated viewings reveal a sublime beauty. As Zappa famously said, "Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible."
According to Caught in the Crossfire, by Joe Patoski and Bill Crawford, Stevie Ray Vaughan was up to a daily intake of seven grams of cocaine and a fifth of Crown Royal by the time he bottomed out, in 1986.
After a breakdown and a visit to the ER, Vaughan got clean for the first time in over 15 years. Sobriety, in concert with a deep spiritual focus and regular AA meetings, did wonders for Vaughan mentally and physically, but he worried about his guitar playing, which had been fueled by drink and drugs for so long. Would he be able to light up the guitar without his chemical crutches?
The fireworks on Vaughan's next album (In Step) and the shows in support of that release proved that his concerns were misplaced. In October of 1989, a few months after In Step came out, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble played their home town of Austin, where Vaughan had been a struggling musician for over a decade, couch surfing and gigging for peanuts, before David Bowie plucked him from obscurity for the multi-platinumLet's Dance album.
My favorite performance from the Austin City Limits show is the rendition of "Leave My Girl Alone," a tune written by Vaughan's good friend, blues titan Buddy Guy. The song is simple and heartfelt, the guitar and voice up front as the rest of the band hang back. The singing is passionate; when Vaughan says "you better leave my little girl alone," you believe him. The guitar fills are a model in economy and bite. And the solo, from 2:11-3:40, is epic: Vaughan rips into his guitar with raw blues power, for the most part bypassing the big, juicy bends and wide vibratos that were his specialty in favor of ferocious runs that stop and start on a dime.
This Saturday, on what would have been Stevie's 61st birthday, blues fans and six-string aficionados alike will mourn the early passing and celebrate the lasting legacy of the last true guitar hero.
Freddie King is the least known of the three major blues guitarists with the King surname, but while B.B. and Albert King gained more notoriety, Freddie was potent in his own rite. Like many a great blues player, King hailed from Texas, where he learned an old school acoustic fingerpicking style which he later adapted to the electric guitar. Though he sang, King made his mark with instrumentals, particularly "Hide Away," a #5 Billboard R & B hit later interpreted by many a bluesman, including Stevie Ray Vaughan and a young and hungry Eric Clapton. One of King's other biggest releases was "San-Ho-Zay," presented below in a 1966 performance on "The Beat." There's much to like visually in the period details of this video (the go-go dancers, the raised platforms, the pastel colors of the studio, the crisply-dressed uptown band) and King's oh-so-pretty tomato red Gibson. Musically, King typified a less-is-more lead guitar style which was the norm before Jimi Hendrix and the Yardbirds alums sexed things up with volume, effects pedals, and advanced technique. King doesn't waste a note in this compact piece. There's no showing off or reckless abandon, just spicy nuts-and-bolts playing: tasteful bends, tight vibratos, barbed stops and starts. And he does it with no gimmicks, nothing but a clean Gibson tone. Much as I love the dynamism of King's descendants, sometimes there's no substitute for pure blues feeling.
Throughout most of their vintage period I listened to the
Beatles, Stevie Wonder, top 40 radio. I saw the classic “Fair Warning” concert
videos in the early ’80s on MTV, but the music didn’t stick; hard rock wasn’t yet part of my musical palette.
The gateway drug was “Jump,” Van Halen’s only number one
record. Released as a single and a video at the tail end of 1983, the song
opened my ears to the band.
By spring, “1984” was the high-adrenaline soundtrack that got my blood pumping before I walked out on the court as a freshman on the varsity tennis team. My doubles partner, a drummer on the side, had the bug too: he expertly mimicked Alex Van Halen in a pair of air band contests. The growing success of the
Eddie Van Halen flying high in 1984 with his first number one single
album paralleled the excitement of a season in which we won the conference title.
By May, Van Halen was my favorite band. A
cassette of “1984” or one of its five predecessors was in regular rotation on my $20 boom box. Filled with the zeal of the newly converted, I scrawled the boss Van Halen logoon notebooks, the inside of bathroom stalls, the
back of desks, anywhere I had the time and space to spread the Gospel.
It wasn't long before VH invaded my household. When we got our first family
dog, I started calling the unnamed beagle Eddie. My parents initially agreed to
the name as a placeholder only, but it ended up sticking.
That summer, my younger brother (at left) got in the act. With black hair, natural
six pack abs, and boyish good looks, he was a fitting stand-in for Eddie Van Halen as he launched off our ottoman with a cardboard guitar. (Years later, he still
had the bug, using “Panama” in a video shoot with his friends in Africa.)
In July of 1984, the circus came to town. The Velcros
opened the concert; they’re still bragging about opening for Van Halen thirty years later. Amid
a spectacle of lights and stage mounts and stimuli, David Lee Roth told us we were
the best audience he’d seen in the last 99 shows. Out on the floor, I had my
first kiss with a girl who invited me back to her hotel after the show, the
same hotel name-checked on the back jacket of Van Halen II.
Nine months later, Roth left the band. The party
was over.
***
Decades passed. Other than a brief revival of Van Halen
infatuation in the early ’90s (during a period of intense devotion to the
electric guitar) the band mostly fell off my radar as my
Business time.
tastes veered toward
’50s and ’60s jazz, Frank Zappa, Funkadelic, Laura Nyro, soul, baroque classical, instrumental
world music, an ongoing dose of ’60s/’70s rock. As
my listening habits changed, my six-string sensibility gravitated away from the
technical playing that dominated the ’80s to the electric blues (Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan in particular). Even so, I slowly
acquired the first six Van Halen CD’s—just in case.
The separation ended in 2013, during an especially challenging time in my life. As if dipping my toes in the water, I
put just a handful of tunes from each Roth album on my iPod.
Soon I was hooked all over again. For months the band
provided aural therapy as I crossed San Franciscosidewalks, the
music mainlined into my ears loud and clear. With 25 years of electric guitar under my belt, I appreciated
Eddie’s innovative sound(s)in a way I hadn’t before.
I’ve been a born again fan ever since. It feels like we never parted, as if we've been joined
in a continuous line running from the moment I cracked the plastic on my "1984"
cassette up to the present. Looking back from the vantage
point of 2015, the final album with David Lee Roth represents a crossroads for
this listener. Working from his home studio
and freed of the shackles of
hit-centric producer Ted Templeman, Eddie created an entire album’s worth of
original material, a major achievement in itself and a big step up after the covers-heavy “Diver Down.”
And yet, the synthesizer-based tunes on "1984" not only sound dated (in the way that ’80s production values sound dated),
but they remind me of the sappy, formula pop songs the
band did with Sammy Hagar which made me lose interest in Van Halen.
I love “Panama” and “Hot for Teacher.” They’re kinetic, well-crafted
songs that have stood the test of time. But like "Stairway to Heaven" or "Layla," I’ve heard them too many times to
count.
What remains freshest in my ears are The Big Four: four
guitar-oriented album tracks which connect me with the life force that put the mighty
in The Mighty Van Halen.
Closing side 1 of “1984” in grand fashion are “Top Jimmy” and “Drop Dead Legs.” Before I knew who the real Top Jimmy was, I thought the song might be a veiled ode to the virtuosic Eddie, who makes his mark from the opening with ethereal harmonics counterpointed by a slashing riff, as a volume swell trills in the background. The verses have a swing that could only exist in the Roth era. The solo opens with a patented Eddie whale shriek and ends with a quivering tremolo dive that sounds like it’s falling down a mine shaft.
Recently accused of helping cause Ebola, “Drop Dead Legs” has
a lumbering beast of a main riff (modeled on “Back in Black”) that is pure Van
Halen strut. The MXR Phase 90 tone Eddie opens with is pristine, the drumming
simple and powerful. The last minute-and-a half—tacked on after the rest of the
song was already recorded—is a singular outro inspired by Allan Holdsworth. After vamping for a
spell, Eddie breaks away from his typically disciplined pop-length solos with
a smorgasbord of shapes and colors and sounds, a rare display of Van Halen's free-form side.
The other two tunes on my active playlist are
the closers on side 2, “Girl Gone Bad” and “House of Pain.” The former, which Eddie wrote in a hotel closet while
Valerie Bertinelli was sleeping in the room, is an advanced composition that clocks in at 4:30. The wealth of ideas begins with Eddie tapping harmonics high on the neck while holding chords (with the same notes) at the low end as Alex taps insistently on the hi-hat, then the ride. The verses are short and to the point and transition—with Roth’s Tarzan
yowls—into a fresh interlude at 2:16. The rest is gravy: following a soft landing from the
solo into Eddie’s arpeggiated lines, the opening theme re-appears en route to another pass through the chorus. Alex brings down the curtain with a sweeping flourish that drops into a Rototom-and-kick drum stomp.
My favorite tune on “1984” is “House of Pain,” a song with distinctly Rothian tongue-in-cheek lyrics. The crushing main riff alone is worth the
price of admission. Transitioning from the opening riff into the first verse, Eddie maintains the hard edge with a propulsive
rhythm guitar line. The solo proper is merely a prelude to the outro solo at 1:42,
introduced with a screeching pick slide capped by a taut snare hit. What follows is a heady demonstration
of the musical telepathy a drummer and guitarist working in tandem for 15 years can generate. Over Alex’s driving beat Eddie conjures a wicked
assortment of squeals, howls, dive bomber sounds, and serrated blues licks. He comes out of
the squall into a boogie blues riff doubled by a vocal line, a final dance with
Diamond Dave before Eddie, Alex, and Michael Anthony march one of posterity's most kick-ass rock ‘n’ roll bands over and out for the last time.
A lot of the music I listened to in the ’80s seems like a
guilty pleasure now, but Roth-era Van Halen still feels vibrant. And no one
since has re-calibrated the sonic possibilities of rock guitar the way
Eddie Van Halen did. As a player, I haven’t found a way to incorporate his
space age techniques into my straight ahead blues style, but as a listener, I
remain in awe.
I first saw "Woodstock" in the mid-'80s, when most rock and pop was weightless and overproduced, with all the shelf life of a stale fart. As a teen bohemian-in-training trapped in what was in many ways a plastic, reactionary era, I found the movie fascinating. For over three hours I was transported to a time when personal growth and exploration didn't take a backseat to getting ahead, when brotherhood was more prevalent—and infinitely more hip—than greed, when the young men didn't look like frat boys and the women had long, straight, natural hair instead of those godawful '80s perms. Musically, Woodstock remains a rock festival without peer, a distinction which is likely to stick due to the scale of the event and the quality of the bands. The list of soulful, high-caliber acts that performed on those four days 45 years ago is staggering: Jimi Hendrix; The Who; Santana; Sly & the Family Stone; The Band; Ravi Shankar; Janis Joplin; Johnny Winter; Creedence Clearwater Revival; Ten Years After; Crosby, Stills, & Nash; Jefferson Airplane; Blood, Sweat, & Tears; Joe Cocker; Joan Baez; Arlo Guthrie. Woodstock's high points could fill multiple posts, but I will focus on just five key moments. Richie Havens, one of the lesser-known acts at Woodstock, opened the festival. The first performance that appears in the documentary is Havens' closer, "Freedom." Never before have I seen a musician move an audience of 200,000 with just an acoustic guitar, his voice, and a lone conga player.
This turbo-charged rendition of Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues" features the Who early in their career, firing on all cylinders (see: Pete Townshend's windmills, Keith Moon's kinetic drumming, Roger Daltrey's microphone lassoing). Added bonuses include Townshend's sonic performance art at the conclusion of this video and the heady split-screen footage spliced together from seven cameras positioned around the stage.
The backdrop to Woodstock was the United States' futile and bloody involvement in Vietnam. Country Joe, the relatively obscure leader of Country Joe & the Fish, captured the zeitgeist with an anti-war protest song, the "I Feel I'm Fixin' to Die Rag." Interesting historical footnote: a young Martin Scorsese, serving as an editor of the documentary, came up with the bouncing ball-on-white lyrics effect that comes in at 1:42.
Ten Years After was one of my most potent Woodstock discoveries. Other than hearing "I'd Love to Change the World" every once in a while on classic rock radio, I had no familiarity with the band. After I saw this rousing clip, Ten Years After—and virtuoso lead guitarist Alvin Lee—became a permanent part of my musical landscape.
Alvin Lee was not the only bonafide guitar hero at Woodstock. Carlos Santana, then just 22 years old, led his band through an epic version of "Soul Sacrifice." From the sheer size of the crowd to the percussion orgy break (2:11) to the most bad-ass rock drum solo this side of "Moby Dick" (3:07) to the molten guitar solo that followed and the random shots of audience members caught in musical ecstasy, it doesn't get any better than this.
Many years ago my first guitar teacher loaned me a VHS recording of a concert tribute to Les Paul called "Les Paul & Friends." Among the highlights were Les Paul's demonstration of his "little black box," a sweet, subtle rendition of "Georgia" with Paul on lead and jazz guitar phenom Stanley Jordan on rhythm, and a blues cutting contest between David Gilmour of Pink Floyd and Jan Hammer of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. The high-energy peak of the show for me was the video below, featuring Eddie Van Halen—who was then the gold standard of rock guitar—with two highly esteemed musical collaborators.
After giving the audience a taste of his vast sonic palette with the instrumental "Cathedral," Van Halen was joined by an all-star line-up for this instrumental version of "Hot for Teacher." On keys was Jan Hammer, a longstanding member of jazz fusion royalty. Tony Levin, a member of King Crimson with an astonishing catalog of side work, ably handled bass. The performance was novel on many levels. It was a rare opportunity to see Eddie Van Halen at the peak of his powers with world-class musicians whose chops were several notches above the average rock 'n' roller's. In his namesake band, Van Halen did the solos and emitted all of the fireworks, but here the virtuosic Jan Hammer held his own (and produced musical ecstasy faces to match). The Hammer-Van Halen point-counterpoint solos and climactic low-to-high, guitar-and-keys unison run before the closing main theme all point up the singular potency of jazz finesse married to the raw power of amplified rock.
Buckethead turns 45 today. Though perhaps best known to the general public for his mask and unique headgear, Bucket is an exceptionally versatile musician with sizzling guitar chops. In two decades on the music scene, he has collaborated with Mike Patton (Faith No More), Iggy Pop, and Bootsy Collins, and ably manned the lead guitar post in a Guns 'n' Roses re-boot. He has created a sprawling catalog of experimental solo releases which incorporate multiple genres, from metal to funk to hip-hop to electronica to moody instrumental ballads to jam rock and even hints of new age music. And when the moment is right, Bucket can transform himself into a robotic dancer. The video below from Bonnaroo features Buckethead in big company: the fearsome Primus rhythm section (Les Claypool on bass, Brain on drums) and Bernie Worrell, the emeritus keyboardist from Parliament-Funkadelic. Buckethead is capable of dizzyingly fast shred guitar, but here he lays down a molten, blues-based jam over a deep pocket, an example of the heady blend of technique and feeling Buckethead can draw on. In whatever context(s) he chooses to pursue, Buckethead will continue to generate original music and wicked fretboard work for many years to come.
***
Other Truth and Beauty guitar hero essays:
Click here for "Eddie Van Halen's 'Fair Warning': an Appreciation"
here for "The Second Coming: Stevie Ray Vaughan," a first-hand account of Vaughan's final concert
here for"It was 70 years ago today: an appreciation of Jimi Hendrix"
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