(insert title here) - Volume 2 Issue 1 - Too Many Notes... by Douglas Cowie

I’m always skeptical when somebody starts telling me about that guy from Phish, the one who plays guitar, and about how good he is, how he’s the best guitarist around, he’s amazing. It makes me wince, because I have to picture his goofy grin and his deliberately unshaven face, his hair flopping around as he looks knowingly from one member of his band to the next, that guy in a dress pounding on the drums as the guitarist plays a thousand notes a second. Then, I actually hear this guy play. It’s every bit as bad as I imagined it when somebody was telling me about him. Actually, it’s worse than being told about it. He’s horrible. The notes come thick and fast, lots and lots and lots and lots of them for hours and hours and hours, relentlessly hammering away at my fragile ears, trying to impress me with how fast his fingers are moving. But fast fingers are boring. Lots of notes are boring. Phish are boring, and every time some jerk starts to tell me about how great they are, especially the guitar guy, I get the urge to wrap the jerk’s designer dreadlocks around the jerk’s neck and wring his jerky opinions out of him.

Luckily, I haven’t had to listen to Phish once since I finished college, due to the lack of idiotic white dreads among my cadre and the British music-listening public’s blissful ignorance of this shithole band–surely one of the great advantages of living in this country. But other people play guitar solos, and I like them, so it can’t be that I just hate the things outright. There are guitar solos that actually make you want to stop and pay attention, to listen to them, to see what they’re doing, that demand attention, not because of their technical, fingers going in the right place prowess, but because of their musicanship, because they add something, they do something, they’re not just an opportunity for Yngwie Malmsteen wannabes to masturbate. Most of the guitar solos I like seem to come from songs that are punk rock in one form or another, so my little foray has basically turned into, as the title says, a brief and selective history of guitar solos in punk rock. Here’s what I found out.

I’m tempted, almost certainly because I’m listening to Please Please Me right now, to start with George Harrison. That doesn’t seem very punk rock, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the Beatles, at least at times, are a lot closer to punk than any of us would care to admit. At least, a certain aesthetic of theirs is. If it weren’t for the sad influence of those other two jackasses, I’m sure George and Ringo would have made a good punk band together. Listen to those guitar solos, especially on the early songs: not a whole lot of notes, but boy are they fun. It’s pretty standard early guitar pop stuff; just over halfway through a song, George rips off a couple of good, pseudo-bluesy riffs, making sure that every run of three or four individual notes ends up in a chord, so you don’t have to endure lots of single notes, which frankly, are pretty boring. I’m thinking, in particular, of the guitar solo in "I Saw Her Standing There" or the one in "Twist and Shout," although the latter is not techinically a solo, I guess. Part of the secret of George’s solos, I think, is the fact that he wasn’t a particularly good guitarist then, and he knew it, so he kept things simple, which has the benefit of making them better. Simplicity always has more of an impact. I think this must be one of the rules of guitar solotry, if not music in general, with exception being made, of course, for genius. The guy from Phish, it should be noted, is no genius. Mozart is. Thelonius Monk is. There aren’t many music geniuses working in the rock idiom, methinks.

So, anyway, enough of the Beatles. I want to make the claim that the standard for good guitar solos and punk rock is set by Television, the only one of these bands, actually, that plays guitar solos on more songs than not. Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd manage to pull off a rare feat: long guitar solos that are actually interesting to listen to. I find this vaguely disturbing. To be honest, I prefer Richard Hell, mostly because his songs are short (we might blame Sesame Street for this) and he can’t play all that well. Which, of course, is why Tom Verlaine gave him the boot. Anyway, I find it disconcerting that I like these long, meandering guitar solos, oh-so-pretentiously credited to the proper player in the liner notes (uptight pricks!). It goes against my usual aesthetic (or lack thereof) inclinations. But they’re great. They have shape; they always build towards something, rather than just being static, one-dimensional flurries. The one I like best is Tom Verlaine’s in "Venus," where he starts out actually striking the string with the volume down, and turning the volume knob after that, making each note a little thing that fades in and then disappears quickly. At least, that’s how I think he does it. Maybe he does it some other way. I’m not very good on these technical things. The point is, each note has its own, distinct existence, the solo builds very slowly, and then gets faster, but not very fast, Tom’s notes playing off of the one chord per measure that Richard Lloyd is playing, then the whole band crescendos with it, and then they go back into the chorus: "And I fell (did you feel low?) / not at all (huh?)." I like that "huh?" a lot, too.

Then there’s the Replacements, who are about as far away from Television’s end of the aesthetic spectrum as they come on Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash. It’s 1981, and (I imagine) some of the appeal of Kiss has made its way into Smokin’ (and drinkin’) Bob Stinson’s head. His solos are, by and large, of the wail, baby, wail variety: fast, high end of the neck monsters. The thing is, listen closely: Bob isn’t really that great of a guitarist; he’s fudging it, so to speak. He’s not actually fret wanking. There aren’t really that many different notes being played. Listen, for example, to my favorite ‘Mats song, "Customer." He plays the same note a million times, then moves up a third, maybe, and plays that one a million times, and so on, then does a kind of surf-guitar note by note slide down the neck, and ends the solo with several notes, but not too many, to be honest, and not as fast as before. The next song on the album, "Hangin’ Downtown," has a similar solo.

Bob’s style is a kind of prototype for the Joey Santiago guitar solo, which is itself a kind of standard for ingenious yet simple lead guitarage. Joey is the master of creating simple, haunting and above all, musical lead guitar parts/guitar solos. Let’s start with "Bone Machine." Mid-song, after they’ve been saying "You’re the bone machine," the band stops and Joey fills the gap; this is just one note, over and over and over for about four or five measures, I’d guess, although the band starts playing again after one, then Joey does that slide down, a faux-surf thing like Bob Stinson in "Customer." The solo ends with Joey going back into the same riff he’s been playing for most of the song. Another classic Joey Santiago solo is the one in "Where Is My Mind?" The lead part throughout this song is more or less the same two notes of the arpeggio of whatever chord they happen to be playing (I think it’s the first and the third, but my ear isn’t particularly good on these things), with power chords leading up through the chorus. But after the last chorus, Joey lets rip: the same note gets played twice, Joey bending it a little each time (think back to George Harrison), then runs partway down the scale, then back up, with a few short descents before shifting up an octave. This is as best as I can try to describe it, anyway. Again, it’s a pretty simple, very short guitar solo, and it throttles the energy of the song up a notch, something that long, note-heavy solos of the Phish-guy type never achieve; their energy flags as the notewankery stumbles on, boring the weary listener to tears. Joey Santiago’s guitar playing never bores me.

The single most exhilarating guitar solo in recent memory and the inspiration for this essay, actually, is one played by Judah Bauer on "Attack" by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. I’d never really paid all that much attention to it until I saw them live recently at a movie theater. I always liked the song, mostly because of the drumming, I think, but it really stood out that night (29 December 2000) and every time I’ve listened to the record since then I’ve immediately been pulled back to that live performance. The genius of this guitar solo (and of the solos I’ve discussed already) is not merely the doing of Mr. Bauer, but rather, the combination of everything going on in the song. Near to the end, Jon Spencer yelps in his customary manner, "Judah Bauer, step up to the stand!" At this point, due to the live experience, I’m compelled to have a vision of Judah Bauer stepping in front of the microphone stand, one foot slightly forward, nodding in time with that puckered-lip expression that says something to the effect of, "I know what you’re fucking thinking, and I’m thinking it, too." What I’m thinking is, "My God, that man is cool. And I kind of want to fuck him. Or I would, if I were gay. Or a girl." Rock ‘n’ roll does strange things to a boy. Back to the music, though: Judah Bauer’s guitar solo is just one note, played over and over and over and over and over, taking the Joey Santiago thing to a beautiful extreme. Meanwhile, Russell Simmons, who, I’d like to point out, has the biggest afro I’ve ever seen on a white man, pounds this heartbeat-altering drumbeat and Jon Spencer’s guitar is just a chainsaw, repeating one staccato chord like he’s turning a tree trunk into sawdust, on the first beat of every measure. I’m reduced to a sweating, shivering, mouth-foaming wreck on my bedroom floor, pissing myself with delight and trying to make myself deaf and insane with this full-volume rock ‘n’ roll ecstasy.

Meanwhile, the designer-dread jerk is slowly nodding off to another Phish-guy twenty minute ramble, the THC swimming through his brain while he says, "Dude," over and over again, "Dude, this is, like, so amazing, dude. He’s got a music degree from UVM, dude." And no soul.

The Beatles. "I Saw Her Standing There." Please Please Me. EMI, 1963.
–. "Twist and Shout." Please Please Me. EMI, 1963.

The Replacements. "Customer." Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash. Twintone/Restless/Roadrunner, 1981, 1993.
–. "Hangin’ Downtown." Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash. Twintone/Restless/Roadrunner, 1981, 1993.

The Pixies. "Bone Machine." Surfer Rosa. 4AD, 1988, 1992.
–. "Where Is My Mind?" Surfer Rosa. 4AD, 1988, 1992.

Too Many Notes: A Selective History of Punk Rock Guitar Solos

by Douglas Cowie