guitar antics

In the 20th century, musicians have lost all respect for the guitar, and begun subjecting it to all kinds of creative abuse. Geoff Nicholson surveys the destruction wreaked by Thurston Moore, Derek Bailey, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix and more

Love, devotion, disaster

There is a story that in his early, drug-crazed days, John McLaughlin once fell off the stage while playing and landed on top of his guitar. A strange and wonderful chord rang out. Fortunately Jack Bruce was in the band and he wrote down the notes in the chord for use in a future composition, but something tells me that when he came to play that chord it lacked something that the original had. Falling off the stage may sound like a rather extreme form of extended technique and McLaughlin almost certainly didn't intend it, but the sound he created probably couldn't have been created any other way. This is not an orthodox way of wringing music from a guitar, but the electric guitar is an instrument that thrives on misuse, and indeed abuse, and you could argue that it's as good a way as any.

A plectrum is what a plectrum does

Look up "guitar" in any well-meaning dictionary of music and you'll read some flannel about it being "a musical instrument related to the lute but having a flat back and usually six strings that are plucked or strummed."

Even as a definition of classical or folk guitar technique this seems a little creaky. What about the use of bottleneck? What about hammering on and pulling off with the fretting hand? But perhaps it would just about do as a working definition for acoustic players. When it comes to the electric guitar however, plucking and strumming isn't the half of it.

If you're going to misuse a guitar then the first thing you might do 'wrong' is not pluck or strum it at all, or at the very least use a wacky sort of plectrum.

Now ultimately, a plectrum is what a plectrum does; you can use a filed down coin or a piece of old plastic and it may sound fairly orthodox, but if, for example, you use the leg of a toy doll - as Frank Zappa has been known to - it quite simply makes a different sort of noise. But dolls' legs are tame stuff compared with some of the things that get used. Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth have employed drumsticks, pieces of rag and screwdrivers with which they break the strings. Paul Gilbert of Mr Big assaults his guitar with an electric drill, while Reeves Gabrels prefers to use a vibrator. Davey Williams used to play what he calls "object guitar", attacking the strings with an egg beater, a toy mouse or a wind-up dinosaur. There is also a photograph of him using what appears to be a six foot long metal girder.

(Incidentally Davey Williams also used to play two guitars at once, one on his lap played conventionally, the other open-tuned, placed on the floor and played with his bare foot: a form of abuse later taken on board, not necessarily unwittingly, by Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap).

Some players like to rub their guitar against the microphone stand or the corner of the amplifier, in which case the stand or the amp does, in some highly specialised sense become, I suppose, a plectrum of a sort. But this is a difficult business and at some point it probably merges into the area of the 'prepared guitar'.

Be prepared

Derek Bailey was asked in interview whether he ever used prepared guitar. He replied, "I used to have an old flat-top Epiphone 12 string on which I did that. I had loose strings and squeakers and all the usual stuff. See, at one time in the 60s, there weren't any free players who didn't prepare their guitars. I can remember a piece I played with four other guitar players where you got a bag of paper clips, things that would stick on the strings, and you stuck 'em on the strings and then you got something else out - four guys doing this for as long as you can stand it."

About 45 seconds might be enough for some, but even someone as mainstream as Johnny Marr has used this kind of thing to create texture on The Smith's albums. And Marc Ribot is to be heard on Elvis Costello's "Pads, Paws And Claws" playing a guitar that is customised with alligator clips. He says he got the idea from Fred Frith, but of course they are both only borrowing and transferring John Cage's technique of prepared piano which dates back to at least 1938 (and a piece called "Bacchanale"). Since Cage was using a grand piano he was able to balance a pie plate on the strings. Guitar players are forced to use smaller, handier objects.

The twang bar kids

The Tremolo arm, aka the whammy bar, aka the twang bar, must indeed have seemed an abusive device when it was first invented. It wrecked your strings and destroyed your tuning, and still does, largely, but today it seems a natural, even a highly conventional part of any guitarist's technique.

Its use was popularised by the likes of The Ventures, Duane Eddy and (especially) Hank Marvin. For these players it became a recognisable 'sound', a stylistic trademark. Undeniably they sounded hip and exciting at the time, but today their tremolo sound seems largely a way of achieving added twanginess. They were making pop instrumentals, not pieces of experimental music.

In case you think there's anything new-fangled about the tremolo arm, it's worth knowing that the Rickenbacker Vibrola, designed by Doc Kaufmann and looking pretty much like a modern tremolo arm, was patented in 1929.

When used by a certain kind of metal player its capacity to create dive-bombing sounds and its ability to get between the notes, can be highly exciting. I always thought Richie Blackmore's use of tremolo was the most, make that the only interesting thing about his playing.

Tremolo is also achieved by bending the strings below the bridge or above the nut, and in the case of Adrian Belew, he of Twang Bar King, it is frequently achieved by yanking the guitar neck and wiggling it in the opposite direction to the guitar body. This is definitely not one to be tried at home unless you have a ready supply of spare Stratocasters to hand and don't mind breaking one or two in practice.

Feedback my baby to me

Feedback, of course, is the "howl or squeal when a microphone or pickup is too near its speaker, thus picking up its own output and reamplifying it." (From Making Music, edited by George Martin).

It's intimately associated with the electric guitar, although, as any acoustic guitar player will tell you, amplified acoustic guitars feedback like the devil. The difference is largely that acoustic players want to avoid it, while electric players love it.

There was a time when Dave Davies, Jeff Beck and Peter Townshend used to argue about which of them first used feedback creatively. It seems a futile argument. There's definitely a touch of feedback on the opening of The Beatles' "I Feel Fine", released in November 1964, before either The Who or The Yardbirds had a hit record.

Electric blues players like BB and Albert King often used highly controlled feedback as a form of sustain, but admittedly they didn't use it the way Beck or Townshend or The Grateful Dead or Quicksilver Messenger Service used it.

And in an important sense those American bands used it quite differently from the way the British bands did. Beck has said that when he was playing the club and ballroom scene the sound systems were so lousy and his amps were so overloaded that his guitar was howling and feeding back almost the whole time. Whereas The Dead used feedback as a token of avant gardism, Beck was fighting with his equipment and making a virtue out of necessity.

Not least of feedback's attractions for the rock musician is that a simple change in the physical position of the guitar, or a change in the way the player is standing, will change the sound of the feedback produced. This enables posing to become a form of technique.

Feedback may indeed be a rockist mannerism, but in 1969, say on "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy", even a comparatively restrained jazz player like Lenny Bruce was discovering the creative possibilities of feedback.

The use and abuse of technology

Given that we have whole albums that are 'machine made', it may be a little late in the day to ponder the status of the guitar 'effect'. Nevertheless, you may still find yourself asking questions such as, is a Big Muff distortion box a musical instrument? Is a wah-wah pedal? Well the answer is obviously not, and yet when you hear Clapton on "White Room", you hear a great bit of wah-wah pedal as much as you hear a great bit of guitar playing. There are times when bill Frisell's real instrument seems to be an Electro-Harmonix 16 second delay as much as the guitar, so essential is it to his sound. Where would Vini Reilly be without a fuzz box? Certainly I've seen Buckethead play a solo on a jackplug, and Reeves Gabrels has been known to hand his jackplug to the audience so they can play 'solos' on it while he fiddles with his effects boxes.

It seems to be the rule that the best guitarists embrace rather than eschew new technology. It takes a bonehead like Noel Redding to ask, as he did once in interview, "If Hendrix was such a good guitarist why did he need so many boxes?"

Control freaks

Of course Hendrix occupies a central position in our ideas of what might be the right and wrong way to play a guitar, and of what skilfully 'abused' guitar might sound like. His use of distortion and feedback hardly need recounting here, likewise his use of elbows, teeth and crutch in guitar playing, but his trashing and burning is worth some consideration.

It might be nice to think that his burning of the Strat at the 1968 Monterey festival, and elsewhere, was some ultimate flowering of extended technique, some kind of testing to destruction of the guitar's powers of expression. But I don't really buy this. And the reason I don't buy it is because he used such a cheesy old guitar for the burning. The crackle and hum you can hear from the pickups isn't musique concrète, it's the sound of a knackered guitar. If you wanted to really make a sacrifice why not do it with your shiny new Gibson Flying V? The burning of the midnight Strat seems at best a highly effective bit of rock theatre. At its worst it becomes vaudeville, as when done years later by Yngwie Malmsteen.

However, smashing up the guitar is in many ways a more interesting area. For both Hendrix and Townshend, destructive tendencies seem not merely showmanship but an integral part of their art. Even at the peak of their popularity The Who were losing money because they were destroying so much equipment. It may have been rock excess and conspicuous consumption at its worst, but it did have an undeniable integrity. Not that its aesthetics were ever entirely clear.

Pete Townshend has complained, "Someone would come up and say, 'Well, why did you do it?' And the thing about autodestruction is that it has no purpose, no reason at all. Some fool in the Bee Gees said, 'You wouldn't break a Stradivarius, would you?' The answer is, 'Of course I wouldn't break a Stradivarius.' But a Gibson guitar that came off a production line? Fuck it." Keith Moon had an even subtler theory however. He said, "When Pete smashed his guitar it was because he was pissed off."

Smashing a guitar to pieces is certainly 'expressive'. It can say as much to an audience as any amount of riffing or trading of licks. But it does signal the loss of control. Eric Barrett, Hendrix's road manager, used to say that if he ever picked up Hendrix's guitar it was so distorted, so overcranked and alive, that he couldn't get any noise out of it except painful, demented feedback. Not least of Hendrix's skills was his ability to coax an articulate guitar sound out of all this fearsome noise. But one may be fairly sure that not even hendrix knew at all times precisely what sound his guitar was going to make.

The joy of the electric guitar is that beyond a certain level of amplification and distortion the instrument takes on a life of its own, and makes sound that surprise even the best player. Sometimes the guitarist can just stand there and let the guitar speak for itself, or like Neil Young, the player's intervention may be no more than gently blowing on the strings. The greatest joy of all is not so much that a guitar can take a lot of abuse and survive, but rather that at some point it starts to fight back.