By John McGlasson
At age 39, I've lived in 5 different decades that were all very different musically. The 60's brought so much revolutionary music to us that our heads are still spinning! Then, from a guitarists' point of view, the 70's brought musicianship to a pinnacle with Mahavishnu, Jen Luc Ponty, King Crimson, Gong, Brand-X, Yes, Rush, Gentle Giant, etc. When I was around 10, the radio top 40 was Rush, Led Zep, Yes, Styx, Kansas, Boston, Journey, Cheap Trick, ELO,etc. the bar was very, very high back then, even your local cover bands were ungodly musicians, look at what they were covering!
With the so-called hair bands in the 80's, even the worst guitarists out there were woodshedding hard to keep up with guys like Warren DeMartini, George Lynch, EVH, Malmsteen, etc. so, what happened? Why are the vast, VAST majority of today's guitarists such a dissapointment for most people my age?
Well, as Sebastian Bach called it, it was the Revenge Of The Nerds, the grunge revolution. Curt Cobain made it cool to be a crappy guitarist! He made it cool to constantly ask, why me? and write song after song after song about how crappy mere existence can be, while pushing out-of-tune barchords around in various box patterns. He made it cool to be an unshowered, depressed underachiever, and he made it cool to be a really, really shitty guitarist. Soloing, good technique, good fundamentals all became "showing off". And this is the "voice of a generation"?!? My generation was hearing songs about how great life is, how we should celebrate and grab it by the balls and get all we can out if it! And it had a huge affect on my outlook, guiding me to do what I'm doing today.
Yeah, I know, every previous generation of guitarists complains about who the new guys are ripping off, but this is different. This is paint-by-numbers, clip art. There is no effort whatsoever to be original by the vast majority of modern musicians. Even the young players out there today who are technically proficient are such obvious hacks that I turn them down every day at my label, mostly pure Satriani clones. So what's next? Where are the new guitarists for people like me to work with? People who want to spend money on them, make great albums, promote them globally. and bring the world the Next Big Thing in guitar?
With such a deficiency of new, original guitarists out there, I've had to change my focus a bit as a label owner, and work to sign some legendary guitarists who've gone unnoticed to the kids up to now, but who led the way with their originality and hard work. I feel an equal responsibility to making sure the kids today know who started it all as I do with finding the next generation of great guitarists, maybe more so at this point. It would appear that the only way for guitar playing to advance is to shove the likes of Morse, Holdsworth, McGlaughlin, DiMeola, Uli Roth, etc. right in the kids' faces and show them how high the bar used to be, and how we've slipped backwards because the grunge generation made all these overachievers, with their flashy, impossible techniques "uncool."
Punch in the names Holdsworth, Zappa, McGlaughlin, Fripp, DiMeola on YouTube and spend some time hearing how exciting that time period was for guitar, the competion between men who probably could've been achieving near-light speed or curing cancer were they not so in love with this contraption made of wood, strings, magnets, tubes, and circuits, all tied together with cables and pedals into a single electrified unit of self-expression the pen could never match! This isn't nostalgia, it's necessary to bring the bar back up to eye level, and off the floor.
No doubt bring the bar back up!!!
Posted by: Rick Z. | November 07, 2006 at 12:49 AM