[Slowhand] Just a few more ideas...

[Fabio Dwyer]

Hello Nick, Gerd, Mel, James & everybody, nice to see SHD live again!

Just to complement a few thoughts about EC & JB. Nick, I totally agree with you that when Eric first appeared, he really was the one who "wrote the book". Before him, we had (here I come again with my groups!ahuahua): 

1- Blues players: they developed the "touch", the grip carachteristic of the electric guitar - the bends, vibratos and slides that merged to the classical-guitar techinques as leggatos and harmonics, basically different & creative ways to go from one note to another, that's what non-players generally describes as "vocal-sounds" or as if the guitar is "crying". I love all these guys but they were (and still are) generally pretty tied to rigid rules, like playing just within traditional forms as 12-bar blues structure (sometimes 8-bar, like Key to the Highway, or 16-bar, like Hoochie Coochie Man, but the 12-bar Before You Accuse Me/ HYELW / Sweet Home Chicago formula is 90% of the traditional blues). They simply don't have the harmonical knowledge to play within a jazz structure. Their solos didn't flow as a jazz solo. They are small bits of great emotional playing, just like B.B. King.

2- Jazz Players: People like Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, Joe Pass, Kenny Burrell and Wes Montgomery were light-years ahead of blues and rock players in which comes to play over complex structures / structure-architecture of solos. They could improvise in any harmony. It's a common situation, I believe many players here in the list can relate to that: just try to jam over a John Coltrane or Charlie Parker song, playing your traditional blues-scales, when you find the right key to play over, the song has already changed to another key, your always running behind (alway hitting wrong notes!). Jazz players, OTOH, can do that very well; the problem is that whenever you approach a jazz guitar player and ask what guitarrist he/she uses to listen to, 9 out of 10 will answer: "I don't listen to other guitar players, just horn and piano players"... They think it's cool to answer that, but the fact is that you don't listen much emotion in many jazz players, simply because they play guitar *thinking* they're playing saxophone! They don't use bends, vibrato and all these great guitar techinics that blues players use.

3- Rock players: before Clapton, we had guys like Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Keith Richards and George Harrison - all great musicians that I love, but their playing came straight from blues. They didn't have the fluency of a jazzist neither the feeling/originality of the first blues guys.

Then came Clapton. In Beano he had the energy of a rock'n'roller, with the fluency of a jazzist (even not beign able to play over jazz-changes) and the feeling/technique of blues players. That was his first innovation, he was/is COMPLETE. 

I agree with Nick about his sound-innovations, like beign one of the first (aside from classical music and jazz recordings) to make use of the ambience of the room, the proposital leakage of mics to create and bring a club-atmosphere to the recording; he was the one to really find the sound of a Les Paul through a driven Marshall - someone posted a clip of Bill Halley's second guitarrist playing a black Les Paul through a Marshall 10 years before then Clapton, but not getting "the sound", I believe it was you, Nick. And I remember Clapton being the first one to record with the wha-wha effect, and Hendrix telling that after he heard Tales of Brave Ulysses, he ran to the store, bought his first wha and recorded Voodoo Chile or something like that.

My point is that all this sound-revolution Clapton created lasted for a 2/3 years period of time in his early carrer, between Beano and Disraeli Gears. Most of his career is not oriented to the search new-sounds, actually he's much more searching for old-sounds! Which is great too:-)

Beck, Hendrix and Van Halen are guys whose entire careers are *devoted* to find new sounds, techniques and develop new effects. Sometimes, many times, indeed, and that's the point Nick mentioned, they sacrifice musicality for technique. I can't visualize EC melting wax on the back of guitar pick-ups or boiling old sets of strings to get a different sound as Eddie Van Halen! The closer I believe he got was when he bought six strats and put together the best components to build Blackie and Brownie. It was in 1969, and he kept playing that for the next 17 years or so! 

I remember reading and interview somewhere that Clapton explained about his upgrade in his use of guitar effects during the 80's as being consequence of working with Steve Lukather from Toto during Behind the Sun's session. He then realized how much outdated his guitar sound was at that time and began to experiment with a Roland Synthesized guitars and by the end of 80's, during the Journeyman tour, he used to play a Peter Cornish projected guitar rack that was 6 feet tall, and to my ears, he used almost none of the effects in there, like many people that buy the brandest-new cell-phone every 6 months just to be "updated" with technology, before even learning how to use 5% of the possibilities of his new toy! Everybody have an uncle like this! hehehe

The categories of players that I proposed are not hermetically closed, players can change category from time to time - for instance, I highly reccomend Jeff Beck's Crazy Legs album, where he plays just straight rockabilly, he even used a pick for that!

Nick, great description about Buddy Guy's style, he seems always missing note, attempting to play something that his fingers can't follow! But I LOVE him anyway, he's just about passion! 

Open to be flamed!
Cheers,
Fabio 


 		 	   		  
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