the greatest note in guitar history

When I shipped off to college and the competitive reality of undergraduate violin studies, it was the guitar that kept me sane.  I couldn't really put a rock band together surrounded by classical music geeks, but I returned home the next summer to discover my old friend George had created a basement recording studio.

"The studio was centered around two Sony ElCaset machines purchased for about $50 each from a Hi-Fi store my friend's father owned,"  he recalls.  "I quickly discovered that even though I COULD record, I had nothing TO record, and so my own songwriting career was born as well!"  

Songwriting had already become inseparable from guitar playing for me, too, but multi-track arrangements, a quest to find sounds that not even Hendrix could have made with analog synth filters, and gutsy attempts at vocals brought out our best:

https://soundcloud.com/#gregory-ts-walker/allison

When it comes to the Hendrix sound, the torch-bearer in the 1970s was an ex-Procol Harum, six-stringed poet named  Robin Trower.

Like Hendrix and Johnny Winter, Trower is also a bluesman at heart with an immense tone that's pretty much capable of swallowing a listener whole.  Unlike those two, his most renowned work involved James Deware, a man's man of a vocalist who, during his all-too-brief life, was capable of singing a single word and pulling your heart out through your ears: "Hannah."

After 4:02, in the distance, see if you can hear - in response - the greatest note in guitar history!

the possibilities of the guitar changed right then and there

For a kid, an electric guitar can be many things.  That vessel of teenage angst that never yells back no matter how hard you swipe it.  A hypnotic forest of surprises awaiting from string to string.  And then there are the kids who can't help but notice the bestiary of noise you can draw out of a loud one. 

Gregory and His Bike
 

One of the most accomplished high school musicians I knew was my friend George, a drumming fiend who has since gone on to distiguished careers in music and ministry.  Every summer I'd find an afternoon to jump on my bike and head down the street to George's, my beater electric swaddled in a pillowcase.  We would jam, though it was all I could do to keep up with him.  Even if that guitar never would stay in tune, imaginations were running wild:

http://soundcloud.com/gregory-ts-walker/the-beast

Much has been written about the legend that is Jimi Hendrix.  The range of the sonic palette he developed enabled him to reach for things - wildness, psychedelia, poetry, protest - that nobody before even knew were there.  A lot of guys will point at Purple Haze or Star-Spangled Banner or even Machine Gun and say the possibilities of the guitar changed right then and there.  But by the time I finally caught up with Hendrix, I was still too young to appreciate such epic hallucinogens.  However, I was ripe for the effortless display of cool that was Johnny B. Goode.  Even before I got hold of the footage and saw that he actually plays one of the last solos with his teeth...