How can anybody who calls himself a guitarist be drawn to the instrument just with artsy pretensions? After all, the whole thing is supposed to be about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Though the closest I ever got was under the gifted tutelage of a quintet of Bloomington, Indiana garage rock gods known as Zeke Clemens and That Band.
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| Zeke Clemens in a rare moment of repose |
Under the nom de plectre Dreg Stalker, much of the following Van Halenesque performance was spent gyrating atop one of the Second Story Nightclub's bar tables:
Implosion
Trolling the car stereo one sunny Sunday afternoon, I can still picture our yellow Chevy Vega's precise location when I first locked into the opening chords of Edward Van Halen's You Really Got Me. I had already taken a crack at the Kinks' original, but this kid's twisted swagger engulfed my mind then and there: a rock guitarist with a brave new modernistic musical language of the spheres!
And despite all of us who immediately began to rip off the colorful, two-handed techniques he had so strategically guarded prior to his major label debut, after all these decades, there's still nobody else who has captured the man's unique energy, linear unpredictability, and timbral mastery. As early as this uninhibited demo, before he had found a new way to play heavy metal, he had already found a new way to think...
