enigma at any speed

 

As the 1980s mercifully drew to an end, not only was Eddie Van Halen's breakneck complexity still in the air, but the New Wave and glossy pop production spiked an interest in synthesizer technology.  The few guitar synths that were affordable were notoriously glitchy, but I was impatient and even released a one-sided (!) LP called Minstrels & Minimoogs featuring one with some University of Colorado buddies.  In the meantime, a whole new generation of fleet-fingered guitar flagellants was emerging. 

 

And They called Us "Shredders"...

 





 

Hear Tomorrow, Call Today

But no matter how hard we tried to shock and awe each other, the simple mention of one name often punctuated the conflagration: Allan Holdsworth.

 

 

 

Van Halen, who has championed Holdsworth's relatively obscure career, understood that Holdsworth's virtuosity was on an utterly different plane.  In fact, the man's velocity was merely one of a labyrinth of innovations each induplicable in isolation, let alone combination.  It's a sad statement that despite his genius, had Allan Holdsworth not been so fast, he would have continued his oblique arc below most rockers' radar.  In The 4.15 Bradford Executive, he demonstrates his enigma at any speed.
 

 

 

 



 

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


 

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...

Great White Hope of the American guitar

I actually grew up in a house of classical musicians.  I'd started violin lessons, but my violin teacher's 8-year old, Mike, just a year older than me, decided he wanted to start a rock band with another friend who played the drums.  I still picture the afternoon he opened the door to the rec room out back, and his electric guitar, which had maybe most of its strings.  The idea of that shape, those colors, the mystique, like a window into another way of being - the seed was planted deep!  A year later, I'd made the deal with my parents: if I agreed to continue to suffer through the violin lessons, I could get my own electric guitar. Guitar playing wasn't actually even allowed in our house on Sundays, but it didn't take me long to catch up with Mike and start living the dream, playing lead guitar in Mike's band, The Fiery Flames.  While there remains no extant recording of The Fiery Flame's two-gig career,  my little brother, Ian (pictured with big brother's rig below), took up the drums a few years

later and together we laid down this incendiary rendition of Rick Derringer's Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo:

https://soundcloud.com/gregory-ts-walker/1-age-12

At age 12, I was already intent on becoming the next Rick Derringer, or better yet, his bandmate Johnny Winter - my personal favorite.

John Dawson "Johnny" Winter III is not exactly a household name anymore.  After the continuous devastation of decades of substance abuse, he doesn't really resemble the studly Great White Hope of the American guitar he was in the late 60s (see above), when he scored a $600,000 advance from Columbia Records, the single largest in the history of the rock industry at that time.

Winter's first big break was a performance of B.B. King's It's All My Own Fault.  When he plays this tune, it's really not even blues guitar anymore, just the raw, steely-tongued lashings of an improvisor who realizes emotional escape is no longer an option.  Many, many recordings have been released by this artist, but for me, few hold this emotional focus and pacing, as devastating for me now it was when my big cousin Jeff introduced me and Ian to this man so many years ago...

Judge for yourself...

 

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