I’ve been an avid David Mitchell reader ever since Ghostwritten. I loved the supernatural elements in his work as long as they were presented as mysteries that obviously contained a secret logic and backstory of their own, albeit one the reader was never privy to. That reticence on the part of the author added depth and power to his stories and the characters who appeared in them. And as Mitchell’s work matured through Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, each book more fully realised than its predecessor, I thought I had found another lifelong favourite contemporary novelist like Iain Banks, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan or Gene Wolfe.
The came the speed bumps. The Bone Clocks was a brilliant page-turner but its revelations caused that ghostly, essential backstory to lose its mystery and power, to the detriment not of the book itself but, alas, all of Mitchell’s previous writing instead. This was followed by the genuinely frightening Slade House, which in spite of its success within the limited parameters set by genre-fiction icons like Clive Barker and Stephen King, hammered the last coffin-nails into the backstory and, moreover, utterly failed to satisfy as a David Mitchell novel.
And then this. It’s been out for almost three years now, so I shan’t bother to tell you much about it. It’s set in the Sixties. London. Pop music business. The story follows a band that almost makes it, but fails to crack America. There are lots of fictitious cameos from famous real stars, but – as someone said on goodreads.com – they’re no more lifelike than their waxworks at Madame Tussauds. One exception is the infamous Don Arden, who appears here as some kind of brutal Mephistopheles, an agent of pure evil, with Steve Marriott in his thrall; good call there. Mitchell’s own invented characters are, to be fair, more rounded: but what a dull lot they are, and how tedious they are as a band. The lead guitarist provides the supernatural link with Mitchell’s earlier works, but frankly that’s all a bit tedious, too.
As a rock fan who grew up in the Seventies and who is himself a musician, Utopia Avenue should have been right up my street. And at first, I did quite like it; but that should have been a warning, since one of my favourite authors writing about my favourite subject should have been thoroughly enjoyable to read, not just likeable.
Still, it took some time for the scales to fall. The book is very easy going, written in a rather simplified and deformalized version of Mitchell’s characteristic style that seems to take aim at the young adult market. It moves along at quite a clip. It’s a pleasant enough read, almost too action-packed in places, but when it was all done with, I really had to ask myself why I’d bothered. It is only now, two years after I read it, that I have finally admitted to myself how bad a novel Utopia Avenue really is. Hence this belated review.
Here is the second part of a ramble about my favourite guitarists, inspired by a jazz-vs-rock argument with a friend. Part I is here; all the necessary preamble is in that post, so I’ll just dispense with formalities and dive right in.
Pete Townshend
This list isn’t in any real order. If it had been, Pete would have been a lot higher on it. He was the first guitar player who really inspired me, my first ‘favourite guitarist’. His music can be imaginative and exploratory, tender and confessional, yet never loses its open-handed, life-affirming impact. It slaps sense into you. As a guitarist, he was one of the electric innovators: he showed people how you could torture a guitar into making sounds it hadn’t been designed to, and thereby greatly expanded the sonic palette of rock guitar.
Jim Morrison used to talk a big game about the Dionysian spirit of rock, but The Who could show him a thing or two about that. For all that they comprised four very different and idiosyncratic personalities, the band on stage were always a collective manifestation of Pete Townshend: Roger brought the rock ’n’ roll posturing, Keith the vandal spirit, John the musical elegance; Pete himself supplied the artistry, and the brains. He wrote the songs, though John would contribute a couple now and then. Their records displayed their musical craft and his songwriting talent, but live was where The Who excelled. For all the crashing and falling about, the music never faltered. They were broke for years when they started because they had to keep replacing the instruments they smashed on stage. Fun fact: Pete had kicked Abbie Hoffman – a man who incorporated in his person all that is irritating about hippiedom – offstage minutes before they gave the performance captured below.
B.B. King
Muddy Waters was the electric blues pioneer. The other two Kings, Albert and Freddie, was each great in his own way. Buddy Guy, a bit younger than they, was a worthy contender. B.B., though, was the finished article. He was at his absolute best just before he was discovered by White listeners (check out Live at the Regal), but this 1972 clip, live at Cook County jail on his home turf of Chicago, beats any other filmed performance of his that I have ever seen and heard. Although he, too, is an improvising guitarist, his playing is the polar opposite of the Joe Pass/Howard Roberts school – it’s all in the tone, those rich and varied timbres, with every note given its own expression. There is a very real sense in which electric guitar never got any better than this. Certainly nothing B.B. himself recorded or filmed after this was much good. He’d made it by then, after a long hard career on the chitlin’ circuit, and he was milking it as he had every right to do. Fun fact: how blue can you get? Exactly this blue, and no more. Scientists have proven it.
Robert Johnson
Po’ Bobby, as I like to call him, probably never held – probably never saw – an electric guitar. He made just two recordings in his life, one in 1936 and another in 1937. Each contained the same songs as the other. A year after he made the second he was dead, killed in a fight over a woman at the rock ’n’ roll-approved age of 27.
His short, hard life distilled all the poverty, racial oppression and violence of the American South. His father abandoned his mother, fleeing Johnson’s birthplace, Hazelhurst, Mississippi, ahead of a lynch mob. Bobby himself grew up hungry and often in trouble with the law; he used at least eight surnames during his short life. Known today as the ancestral begetter of rock guitar, he was a mediocre player in his early years; he then suddenly disappeared (something he was wont to do) and reappeared a year later playing as you hear him on the recording below. Word got about that he’d sold his soul to the Devil at a crossroads outside Clarksdale, Miss., for the ability to play like the Delta blues hero Son House. House, doubtless feeling the young hellhound on his trail, wasn’t shy about putting that story about himself. Johnson was the kind of man of whom you would believe it.
If you’ve don’t often listen to old, pre-WW2 recordings, you’re going to have trouble with this. Persevere, however, and the music will eventually possess you. Playing in the style of Johnson remains a challenge even for capable guitarists today; just ask Eric Clapton about that. Fun fact: when Brian Jones first played Robert Johnson’s album to Keith Richards, Keith’s first question was, ‘Who’s the other guitarist?’
Richard Thompson In Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, the rock-snob narrator reserves for Richard Thompson the ultimate rock-snob accolade. I don’t know if I would go that far, but the man’s a master. Emerging from the seminal folk-rock band Fairport Convention, he carved out a career (and a life) that was very un-rock, becoming a strict practising Muslim and divorcing his wife and musical partner, Linda Pettifer, for not being religious enough or something. His austere onstage presence does evoke the mullah, and seems wholly at odds with the wrenching, often bitter emotional storm he whips up on his guitar. His searing music is a product of deep feeling and long study; in the clip below, you’ll hear the use of drones as in mediaeval European folk music, exotic scale snippets, atonal passages and a tremolo effect like the voice of Malak Jibreel, but the result sounds anything but schooled. He’s as good, or better, on acoustic, correctly treating it as a completely different instrument from electric – but I’d have to post another video for that, wouldn’t I? Here it is. Not-so-fun fact: he walked out on Linda just after they’d had their third child; Shoot Out the Lights was written during roughly the same period.
Reeves Gabrels
Tin Machine, the hard-rock band David Bowie unaccountably decided to form at the end of the Eighties when the mainstream career he’d begun to enjoy with Let’s Dance began to pall on him, were never a very attractive proposition. The rhythm section were two born-to-privilege louts who were best known for working with Iggy Pop. Bowie himself sang and played saxophone and wore shiny pea-green suits on stage. The music, played mostly on ugly headless Steinberger guitars, was mostly terrible. The saving grace, if you can call it that, was Reeves Gabrels.
The metal boys can play microdemisemiquavers at 300bpm and use the sludgiest of distorted tones but they’re a carnival house of horrors compared with the authentically intimidating Gabrels. This now-elderly man (he wasn’t young even in the Tin Machine days) is an expert at negotiating the interface between beauty and terror. What are those notes he’s playing? What scale is that? Hell, are those even notes? It all goes by so fast the questions become moot before they’re fully formed in your head. He’s also great at layering sheets of deliciously tormented chordal sound, rich with harmonies that shimmer like the blade of a kris, over rhythm tracks. His brilliance couldn’t save Tin Machine, a concept that should have been drowned at birth, but Bowie, who knew a great guitar player when he saw one, kept him on after the band folded, relying on him as a key member of his live backing group and also to help produce and play on those terrifying albums the Dame made in the Nineties: 1.Outside, Earthling, ...hours.
I think this live performance of a classic older Bowie tune captures everything I like about this guy. Yes, of course it’s schooled brilliance. And yes, it’s exhibitionistic and over the top – it’s meant to be. But if you ever heard Bowie’s original single (with Robert Fripp on guitar) and thought its razor riffage couldn’t be improved upon – c’mon, check this out. Fun fact: the song features a guest performance by Black Francis, aka Frank Black.
Andy Summers
Reeves Gabrels is not someone you can listen to every day. This guy, on the other hand, I could listen to all day. He’s a real veteran – his career goes back to the Sixties – and he began as a jazz musician, a form he returned to in later life after his world-buggering success with The Police left him able to indulge a taste for music that makes no money.
His work with The Police owed a lot to jazz; he stole from bebop players the trick of omitting thirds from his chord voicings to create major-minor ambiguity, often filling the resulting harmonic space with suspended seconds, suspended fourths and their dominant extensions. Sting was left to insert the thirds...where he could. The two ex-jazzmen each had harmonic gifts that complemented the other’s perfectly; Sting only found his mojo as a songwriter after meeting Summers. The whole-tone bass line on Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic: Sting could never have got away with that if he didn’t have Andy to help extend those notes harmonically.
Not content with rewriting the parameters of pop-song harmony, Summers is also important in musical history for adding an entire new palette of sounds to the electric guitar. He is the master of electronic tonal effects. People like The Edge and Ed O’Brien of Radiohead are just followers in his footsteps; only Fripp and Adrian Belew, who sprang from very different roots, can really compete. The Police arrived on the scene just as digital recording and tone shaping became possible, and he made the field his own. He also invented (or at least popularised) a new rock guitar sound, relatively clean and chorus-based, which became an Eighties cliché – Prince used it on Purple Rain – and which you can still hear at any Colombo nightspot where live music is played. I was going to post my favourite guitar solo of all time – on Driven To Tears – but decided not to because it’s in the same musical jurisdiction as Gabrels on Scary Monsters. So here, instead, is the song on which I think his sonic experimentation with The Police is most clearly and expressively heard. Remember, as you listen, that drums and bass apart, there’s just on guy on stage making all those sounds. Fun fact: at home or abroad, I have never seen any cover guitarist play the guitar parts of Message In A Bottle or Every Breath You Take correctly. The five-fret stretch required for those suspended chords (or the string-skipping skills you need to avoid the stretch) are very difficult to do fluently in a live setting – unless, of course, you happen to be Andy Summers.
Warren Haynes
The Frog King comes on like an out-of-shape redneck with a face that even a mother might have trouble loving. Then he opens his mouth. Luminous honey pours out. After that he starts playing his guitar, and that honey just keeps on drippin’.
Emotive, tasteful and steeped in tradition, Haynes is not really a songwriter, although his on-and-off jam band, Gov’t Mule, do have a few original numbers. He’s really a cover artist, at his best reinterpreting classic songs from the past. He’s been in the Allman Brothers for years, playing co-lead guitar with Derek Trucks. His net is cast wide: I’ve seen him sing and play Into The Mystic, Wish You Were Here, Son House’s Death Letter Blues and even Elvis Costello’s Alison. He’s also a promiscuous collaborator, playing with everyone from John Schofield (this one’s for you, David) to, er, the Grateful Dead. Here is one of my favourite performances of him on video: Haynes covering Neil Young’s Cortez the Killer with the Dave Matthews Band.
I’ve been having an email argument about guitar players with my friend David. He, like me, plays the guitar, and has done so, I think, for rather more than fifty years. He also plays stand-up bass, organ, piano and heaven knows what else, and has received the Order of Australia for his work in choral church music. As a musician, he functions on a far higher level than the amateurish one on which I operate.
Though he is only a few years older than me, David’s musical taste and mine are a generation apart. I love all kinds of music but am basically a rock fan, and though I play a lot of different styles of guitar, rock was my departure point. His taste, I suspect, ranges as widely as my own, but his preference set barely intersects with mine. He’s a jazz lover, and the kind of jazz he loves best is the kind that was popular when his parents were courting. He’s old-fashioned in that way – and in many others too, more power to him.
David is a temperate, courtly gent of becoming humility. It is very hard to argue with him because he won’t argue back. His sweetness and tolerance are thoroughly aggravating, so one is naturally driven to provoke him ever more outrageously. Mainly the effort is futile, but not long ago I found a tiny chink in the shining armour. I told him that no jazz guitarist ever knew how to get a decent sound out of an electric guitar till rock guitarists came along and showed them how.
That fetched him. In reply, I was frostily informed (this is the only portion of our exchange that I plan to quote directly) that he was ‘happy to leave the screams, the bent strings, the fuzz, the waa-waa and the burn-out to others,’ before proceeding to explain to me what jazz guitar was all about. He illustrated his exegesis with the names of famous jazz guitarists, each exemplifying one of the particular virtues he listed.
My riposte was not pacific. I was especially scathing about two offenders, Joe Pass and Howard Roberts, whose crimes against art and the guitar I regard as particularly black. He was, as he always is, gentle and forgiving in reply. Ah, David, if you but knew how those coals of fire burn...
I hadn’t the heart to trouble him further, but I thought it a bit of a shame that, after I’d roughed up his darlings, I gave him no opportunity to belabour mine. I thought at first to do it in an email, listing my favourite guitar players for him to have a go at, but then I thought: why not write a blog post and give everyone a chance to rough them up, and me too in the process if they felt so inclined?
So here it is, folks, Notes from Ceylon’s Top Twenty guitarists, plus a few extras thrown in because, like a certain big-selling brand of artificial snack, once you pop it’s hard to stop. I compiled the list by writing names down as they occurred to me, figuring that the ones I thought of first would be the ones I liked best, or at least the ones that have influenced me most as a guitarist. That didn’t quite work out, but I’ve kept the order, more or less as it came to me. Your opinions, etc, welcome.
😎
Los Lobos
Two for the price of one. These guys, to me, exemplify really good guitar music. David Hidalgo is the virtuoso and sometimes shows off a bit, but he and his southpaw buddy César Rojas are all about playing what suits the song best. There’s rarely a superfluous note; everything fits perfectly together to manifest the music and encourage the listener to embrace it. In addition to guitars both acoustic and electric, they are also capable players on a variety of guitar-like Latin American instruments like the bajo sexto and the charangua, which add an ethnic flavour to Los Lobos’s music that has grown more pronounced over the years. Their other flavours areR&B, country and rock. Fun fact: they once complained that Paul Simon had ripped them off on songwriting credits.
Cliff Gallup
Once upon a time there was Western swing, a forgotten musical form rooted in the blues and now hopelessly confused with country-and-western, which it helped engender. But Western swing also gave rise to another form – rockabilly, whose earliest big stars were Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and, er, Johnny Cash. Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps came along right after those pioneers.
Vincent’s guitar player, Cliff Gallup, was by far the best of the old rockabilly guitarists. His playing was influenced by Western swing as well as the more urbane sounds of jazz, but he could play in just about any style of the day. Rockabilly, though, was the art that he truly made his own. Unusually, he played with all five fingers of his right hand: thumb and index to hold a flatpick, middle and ring fitted with fingerpicks and the little finger reserved for the vibrato bar. Fun fact: When Cliff died in 1988, his widow begged the press not to mention his rocking days with the Blue Caps in the obituaries, but rather that he’d been director of transport and maintenance for the Chesapeake, VA school system.
Neil Young
Maybe it’s just sour grapes, but gratuitous exhibitions of virtuosity often leave me cold. Neil, whose playing on both electric and acoustic often attains the sublime, is as far from being a virtuoso as you can get; just listen to what George Harrison had to say about his lead playing. However, it was precisely Young’s ramshackle but compelling style that encouraged me to pick up the electric guitar; if he could get away with that, I reasoned, anyone could get away with anything. On acoustic, he’s a wholly different creature: his playing is fluent, economical and evocative, carrying a haunting quality that fits his music perfectly. I love his work on both instruments.
Something the people on my list have in common is that, unlike jazz musicians most of the time, they tend to perform music that they wrote themselves. This often makes it impossible to consider their playing as an entity apart from the music as a whole. Neil Young is one of two people whose music helped get me through the worst period of my life (the other is David Bowie) and his music means a great deal to me. He would have been higher on this list if I’d deliberately set out to order it by preference. Fun fact: Neil Young is so analog he used to fit his amps with pedal-operated servos to turn the knobs.
My introduction to Albert Lee was watching him play behind Eric Clapton at Guildford Civic Hall in 1980. I don’t think I’d really heard a chicken-pickin’ guitarist before and when he got to do his party piece at the time, Country Boy, about halfway through the set, I was blown away. Later, after I’d become familiar with the likes of James Burton and had a basis for comparison, I was still hugely impressed. He’s actually an all-rounder and a veteran of the music scene, but that high-energy style of country-rock is his bag. For a guitarist, at least, it’s exciting music to listen to. I said I don’t care much for virtuosity for the sake of virtuosity, but there are exceptions. Fun fact: he can sing too, and this more or less impromptu version of Jimmy Webb’s The Highwayman is ace. Listen from 1:56:00; there’s a slight preamble which is, I think, worth hearing, before he starts.
And then there’s this.
Paco de Lucia
I don’t listen to him as often as I do some other guitarists on this list, but he stands here not just for himself but for an entire musical form, flamenco. My friend and former bandmate Pascal, who plays keyboards and whose missus is Spanish, says flamenco and rockabilly are physically the hardest styles to play, and I agree; I can’t play flamenco at all. De Lucia remains, by general acclaim, Top Flamenco Guitarist; Martin Carthy of Steeleye Span once told me that he’d watched the Guitar Trio – John McLaughlin, Al di Meola and Paco de Lucia – playing live and ‘there was only one guitarist in it.’ I don’t go in much for exhibition matches, but who am I to disagree? Have a look for yourselves and see. Fun fact: it’s a wicked lie that you can’t be a proper flamenco guitarist unless you need to shave three times a day.
Tom Verlaine
If you had those initials, what else would you call your band? Television came out of the New York punk scene that grew up around a club, CBGB's – legendary today though it was a just filthy boîte not much bigger than a coffin. The Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and Blondie all came out of there. So did Television, which was a punk band who could (i) play and (ii) didn’t care who knew it. I think they only ever made two albums; their first, Marquee Moon, is the classic. The second guitarist, Richard Lloyd, is Verlaine’s ideal foil. Verlaine plays lead guitar, sings (punkily but Romantically) and, of course, wrote all the songs. His is a unique voice on guitar; no-one before or since has sounded quite like him. Fun fact: one of Television’s best songs is about falling into the arms of Venus de Milo.
Joni Mitchell
You never knew Joni Mitchell was a great guitar player? Well, listen to this: she milked the muse by tuning her guitar in strange ways (e.g. CGCEGC, or C#D#G#F#G#C#) and catching the melodies and harmonies that fell out of the instrument as she noodled about on it. She would turn them into songs, record them and play them live. In the early days, this meant this meant long pauses between songs while she retuned; later, it meant a guitar shop behind her on stage, every instrument tuned differently. Heaven knows how she kept track of them.
When you use an alternate tuning, you have to learn the fingerboard all over again. It would be, if you were playing a piano, as if some of the black and white notes suddenly had different values: the one that used to be C is now C#, the one that used to be F is now G. It’s not that hard to do if you stick to a few popular open or alternative tunings – open G or DADGAD, for instance – but imagine doing it for every tuning under the sun. Well, that was Joni. She got a lot of respect from jazz musicians (the Pat Metheny Group once served as her backing band, Jaco and all) but she transcends all musical forms. She is her very own unique amalgam of folk, jazz and Laurel Canyon Sixties hippiedom. Fun fact: she also paints, and her method is the same – slap on some paint, see what it suggests, then slap on some more to enhance the suggestion.
