(the piece I most enjoyed writing this year, apart from this one maybe)
Flash of the Axe: Guitar Solos
from Excess All Areas issue on musical maximalism, The Wire, September 2019.
by Simon Reynolds
I can distinctly remember the first
time I let myself enjoy a guitar solo. 1983,
I’m at a party, “Purple Haze” comes on - I just went with Jimi, surrendered to
the voluptuous excess. There was a sense
of crossing a boundary within myself, like sexual experimentation, or trying a
food that normally disgusts you.
You see, growing up in the postpunk era,
we were all indoctrinated with less-is-more. Exhibitions of virtuosity were frowned
upon. Folklore told us of a time before punk, a wasteland of 12-minute drum
solos and other feats of “technoflash” applauded by arenas full of peons
grateful to be in the presence of their idols.
Minimalism wasn’t just an aesthetic preference but a moral and
ideological stance: an egalitarian levelling of rock’s playing field, letting
in amateurs with something urgent to say but barely any chops. Gang of Four
went so far as to have anti-solos, gaps where the lead break would have been. Postpunk
was an era of amazingly inventive guitarwork, but even the most striking
players, like Keith Levene, were not guitar-heroes in the “Clapton Is God”
sense. The guitar was conceived as primarily a rhythmic or textural
instrument. An example of how the taboo
worked for punk-reared ears: David Byrne’s unhinged guitar on “Drugs” sounded
fabulous, but Adrian Belew’s extended screech on “The Great Curve” made me
flinch.
There was a sexual politics aspect to
postpunk’s solo aversion: the guitar, handled incautiously, could be a phallic
symbol. Willy-waving nonsense was
resurging with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Bands like Iron Maiden were
competing for the hearts and minds of youth. So if you supported the DIY
feminist-rock revolution represented by the likes of Delta 5 (tough-girls and non-thrusting
males united), you made a stand against masturbatory displays of mastery. Solos
were, if not outright fascist, then certainly reactionary throwbacks to
guitar-as-weapon machismo.
In those days, on the rare occasions I
liked anything Old Wave - Blue Oyster
Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” say – the solo would be something to grimly wait
through until the good stuff resumed (the Byrdsy verses). Then came Jimi, triggering
a rethink. Another key moment in punk
deconditioning came ironically courtesy of one of the class of 1977:
Television, who I also heard for the first time in 1983. Where Hendrix’s “Purple
Haze” solo lasts just 20 seconds, Tom Verlaine’s in “Marquee Moon” is a
four-minute-long countdown to ecstasy. Its arc is unmistakably a spiritualized
version of arousal and ejaculation, building and building, climbing and
climbing until the shattering climax: an
extraordinary passage of silvery tingles and flutters, the space of orgasm
itself painted in sound.
The mid-Eighties was coincidentally
when the idea of the guitar-hero began to be tentatively rehabilitated within
post-postpunk culture, from the Edge’s self-effacing majesty to underground
figures like Meat Puppets’s Curt Kirkwood, who channeled the spectacular vistas
and blinding light of the desert into his playing. Then came Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis and his
phalanx of foot-pedals, churning up – on songs like “Don’t”– not just an
awesome racket, but solos that were sustained emotional and melodic explorations. In interviews, Mascis namedropped
long-forgotten axe icons like James Gurley of Big Brother and the Holding
Company. Paul Leary and his band Buttholes Surfers signposted their influences
more blatantly: even if Hairway to Steven’s opener hadn’t been titled
“Jimi”, its blazing blimps of guitar-noise would’ve reminded you of “Third
Stone From the Sun”.
This kind of winking, irony-clad
return to pre-punk grandiosity was the rage in underground rock as the Eighties
turned to Nineties. But where Pussy Galore covered (with noise-graffiti) the
entirety of Exile on Main Street, that band’s Neil Hagerty, in new venture Royal Trux, stepped beyond parody
towards something more reverent and revenant. The pantheon of guitar gods –
Neil Young, Keith Richards, Hendrix – inhabited ghost-towns-of-sound like “Turn
of the Century” and “The United States Vs. One 1974 Cadillac El Dorado Sedan”. But the effect was more like time travel than
channeling – the abolition of a rock present that Trux found unheroic.
As a young critic during this period,
I tried to stage my own abolition, a transvaluation that erased the now stale
and hampering postpunk values I’d grown up with and ushered in a new vocabulary
of praise: a maximalist lexicon of
overload and obesity. Revisionist expeditions through the past were part of
this campaign. When Lynyrd Skynyrd’s
“Freebird” had been inexplicably reissued as a single in 1982 and became a UK
hit, I could not have imagined anything more abject. But reviewing a Lynyrd box
in 1993, I thrilled to the swashbuckling derring-do of that song’s endless
solo, a Dixie “Marquee Moon” whose slow-fade chased glory to the horizon.
This was the final stage of depunking:
the enjoyment of lead guitar as pure flash. At a certain point in rock history,
solos ceased to have an expressive function and became a self-sustaining
fixture, existing only because expected.
Soon I found myself taking pleasure in such excrescences of empty
swagger as John Turnbull’s solo in Ian Dury’s “Reasons To Be Cheerful.” I even
started looking forward to Buck Dharma’s spotlight turn in “(Don’t Fear) The
Reaper”.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Apart from a few academic studies of
heavy metal, a surprising dearth of serious critical attention has been paid to
the guitar solo. The exception that springs to my mind is the novelist’s Geoff
Nicholson’s Big Noises, a collection of pithy appreciations of thirty-six
notable guitarists, ranging from obvious eminences like Jimmy Page to cult
figures like Allan Holdsworth and Henry Kaiser. But although Nicholson is
insightful and evocative when it comes to a particular player’s style or sound,
and generally revels in loudness and in-yer-face guitar-heroics, he rarely dissects
specific solos. Perhaps it is simply
very hard to do without recourse to technical terms. At the same time, the mechanics
of “how” do not actually convey the crucial
“what”—the exhilarating sensations stirred in the unschooled listener.
Why does the discrete spectacular display of instrumental prowess get such short shrift from rock critics? Partly it’s because of the profession’s bias towards the idea of communication—seeing music as primarily about the transmission of an emotion, a narrative, a message or statement. Prolonged detours into consideration of sheer musicality is seen as a digression, or even as decadent. I think another factor behind this disinterest in or distrust of the guitar solo is a lingering current of anti-theatricality – the belief that rock is not a form of showbiz, that it has higher purposes than razzle-dazzle or acrobatics. A guitar solo is like a soliloquy, but one that is all sound and fury, signifying nothing (or nothing articulable, anyway). It’s also similar to an aria, that single-voice showcase in opera, the most theatrical of music forms. Adding to the distaste is the way that guitar soloing is typically accompanied by ritualized forms of acting-out: stage moves, axe-thrusting stances, “guitar-face.” This makes the whole business seem histrionic and hammy, an insincere pantomime of intensity that’s rehearsed down to every last grimacing inflection rather than spontaneously felt; an exteriorized code rather than an innermost eruption.
How would you start to formulate a critical lexicon to defend, or at least, understand, this neglected aspect of rock? In the past, I’ve ransacked Bataille’s concept of “expenditure-without-return”, seeing a potlatch spirit of extravagance at work in the sheer gratuitousness of sound-in-itself. That in turn might connect the soloist’s showing-off to an abjection at the heart of performance itself – the strangeness of exposing one’s emotions and sexuality in front of strangers. Another resource might be queer theory and camp studies, especially where they converge with music itself, as in Wayne Koestenbaum’s book about opera, The Queen’s Throat. The guitar hero could be seen, subversively, as a diva, a maestro of melodramatics.
The ultimate convergence of these ideas would be Queen - the royal marriage of Freddie Mercury’s prima donna preening and Brian May’s pageant of layered and lacquered guitars. Queen’s baroque ‘n’ roll made my flesh crawl as a good post-punker, but as a no-longer solo-phobe, I’ve succumbed to their vulgar exquisiteness. From the phased filigree of “Killer Queen” to the kitsch military strut of “We Will Rock You”, May’s playing is splendour for splendour’s sake – a peasant’s, or dictator’s, idea of beauty. Anti-punk to the core, and perhaps the true and final relapse of rebel rock into show business.
