altar of fire

A lot of lonely woodshedding has to occur to produce a bonafide shredder, but rock and roll is still supposed to be about getting together and having a good time.  Those last years of graduate school, I drafted all my friends, friends of friends, girl friends, people I wanted to be girl friends, all rounded up for what became semi-annual multi-media musical events at the local planetarium, Pink Floyd-style.


Some were seduced by the Blues Brothers reunion ambience for a time, though by all accounts, I was a harsh task master, and few lasted long.  Blinky's Last Ticket, which resulted in an album called QUADRIVIUM, was a collection of originals, each of which was supposed to represent a different amusement park ride.  For our haunted house segment, like so many horror flick soundtracks, there were definitely some classical music stylings...


O.K.

This might have been a pretty original approach had it not been for the spectre of the most notorious shredmeister of them all, Ynwgie Malmsteen.

His raw speed and articulation had already made such an impression that guitarists were unwittingly absorbing influences he brought back from old dead white guys; here was a rock star who actually thanked Antonio Vivaldi and Johann Sebastian Bach on the back of every record.  But bounding onto the international stage at a time during which it seemed Eddie Van Halen had already canvassed every single possibility of the heavy metal guitar, the young Swede succeeded in contributing one final element that would elude so many of his many imitators: emotional intensity.  And for every blues purist who would dismiss the long-haired Viking's output as merely notes per second, there shall be two who worship at his altar of fire: 

 

 

language of the spheres

 



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. 

Zeke Clemens in a rare moment of repose

Most of the guys lived down the hall from me in the dorm, but they managed to introduce me to the senseless partying such music is all about.  For the first (maybe last) time in my life, my guitaristry was rowdly acknowledged .  I even got a real live "groupie" named Pamela Huckleberry.

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...

 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdcuTtj-bno