the (bathroom) sink of his imagination

It's not easy to invent a new sound world on a guitar, and when you do, people are either pretty impressed or laughter ensues.  No matter what, the easiest way to come up with new sounds is buy new toys.  They did provide a certain comfort as I was finding fewer and fewer collaborators willing to indulge me, and soon the time had to come to strike out with a solo project: DJ DATA DADA.   The digital looper layering wall-o-sound is kind of widespread these days, so instead I decided to program some gurgling organ patches, rhythmic delays, and twiddle with the battery-powered sampler velcroed to the front of my guitar synth. 

One night at the local coffee house, I fired up everything I had and did my best to remember a stream of lyrics that represent either rampant existentialism or the online dating experience.

chatroom apotheosis

As you can tell from the tepid applause, tongue-in-cheek retro tech doesn't exactly have a wide audience.  Sometimes it takes the twisted mind of a natural-born musical comedian to to express it like a real virtuoso.

Sweden's Mattias IA Eklundh has taken that avant-comedic torch Frank Zappa pioneered and bottled it in a combustible compound that spurts of his hands like Silly String; his signature sound is tactile, fluid, and can be shaped in way too many ways.  It would still be easy to dismiss him as just another heavy metal wanker, I suppose... or at least until you check out his rendition of Ludwig van Beethoven's Triple Concerto on YouTube.  In Chopstick Boogie, though, he demonstrates that the chops he developed when he was originally a young drum student can be mashed-up, throwing in the (bathroom) sink of his imagination.  Along with pretty much anything else he can get his hands on.

moment of shock and awe

Untold numbers of guitars (or at least calories) have been burnt by players attempting to expand the possibilities of the instrument.  After xy techno theatre, I still liked my wild electronic sounds, but I wanted a more honest approach to the guitar, bare fingers on strings, letting the tone of the wood ring out on its own.  I ended up traveling to Cordoba, Spain, where I soaked up everything from the Medieval history of the Crusades to the Flamenco performances.  Mostly, I took pictures. 

Upon my return, I set to work on a new project which combined live video mixing of the pictures I'd taken, some Drum 'n' Bass mixes my DJ Doc Livingston had come up with and bassist Matt Deason had fleshed out, spoken word, and the sounds of my fingernails splintering against nylon strings.

When the John McLaughlin/Al Di Meola/ Paco de Lucia Guitar Trio began touring in the 1980s, McLaughlin's angular assault had been renowned for the decade since his days with the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Di Meola's gorgeous pattern flow had established a new benchmark for cleanliness of technique.  But the traditional integrity of Paco de Lucia's Flamenco background - and the fact that without a pick, with just the blurred fingers of his right hand he could compete with the others - placed him in a class by himself.   Though not without the headaches and backaches he suffered while performing, reportedly due to the strain of keeping up with the others' advanced knowledge of jazz improvisation!

"Some people assume that they were learning from me, but I can tell you it was me learning from them. I have never studied music, I am incapable of studying harmony - I don't have the discipline.  Playing with McLaughlin and Di Meola was about learning these things." 

Their 1981 Friday Night in San Francisco sold over a million copies and generated a significant interest in flamenco music, but by the mid-1980s, the Guitar Trio had stopped performing together.  Al said they'd run out of new spectacular fast runs to impress the audiences.  In an interview, he admitted a preference for the quieter side of music, something which Paco also felt, saying he preferred "controlled expression to velocity." 

Such blasphemy, coming from the greatest speed demons of their day, does ring of the truth.  But those unforgettable Guitar Trio performances, ones that resulted in rabid fan bases willing to support them through all the present and future chapters in their creativity, deserve their own moment of shock and awe.

a parallel future for the electric guitar

It was only a matter of time before what came to be known as electronic music captured the mainstream imagination, and I appreciated how the resultant rave scene was bringing concert goers together like never before.

In 2000, inspired by the demo cassettes from a prodigious teenager named Chad Carrier, I began to sketch out xy techno theatre, a portable extravaganza that combined Chad's production concepts, an interactive audience virtual environment, and live theater courtesy of my brother, Ian, and his wife, Andi.

xy techno theatre

Not only was all this techno multimedia a good excuse to experiment with crazed guitar processing, but there were times when I attempted a similarly multi-dimensional guitar technique that had just been taken to a stratospheric level of development by a one-time New York street musician by the name of Stanley Jordan.  

Like Van Halen, his childhood background as a piano student led him down the path of a two-handed string tapping approach, but his net effect was even more unbelievable: it's like each of his hands has its own independent brain, the sound of two guitarists playing at once.  After he exploded out of the blue and unannounced at the 1984 Kool Jazz Festival, some of the most successful players in the business wondered whether from then on, it would be impossible for any guitarist to ignore the new universe of possibilities he'd exposed; that an unforeseen, parallel future for the electric guitar was laid out before us all.  After a few years, though, it became clear that virtually nobody was going to retool their whole way of thinking about the instrument and follow in his footsteps, after all.  Now Jordan's delicate, spidery solos do not automatically endear him to head-bangers, but in this rendition of the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby, he proves that when tap comes to slap, he can still light 'em up:

Stanley Jordan - Eleanor Rigby

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: 

 

 

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!