The Politics of a Guitar List

 This song is is now over forty years old. The arrangement is faithful to the original version. Guitar genius still.


Maybe you caught my last post on Rolling Stone Magazine's top 100 rock guitarists. I can only say the list is the list for the year 2011. And is/was created solely for the people who voted on the large talent pool of guitar wielding professionals who made rock music the interesting diverse string-driven sound-scape it became over all these decades. The combined votes and editing missed on Roy Buchanan. Well, a lot people missed Roy Buchanan over the years.

I also mentioned the Rolling Stone top 100 rock guitarist list started in the brain of David Fricke back in 2003, and Rolling Stone has his list archived, which you can check out by hitting the link in my previous post. Fricke's, and the current guitar top 100 differ quite a bit. Fricke includes a host of San Francisco Bay area guitar talent on his top 100, but only Carlos Santana and Jerry Garcia make the 100 cut this time around. And apart from Jeff Beck and John Mclaughlin no progressive jazz-rock player gets mentioned. Brian May and Robert Fripp are the only dudes I find who get included with real progressive post 1960s pedigrees. 

I find the end result disappointing, but not altogether unexpected. Ever notice an underlying disdain from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Nashville, Bakersfield, Kansas City, New Orleans, Detroit, Philadelphia, Austin, Boston, Miami and Anyotherplace, USA -except Seattle- for all things San Francisco over the years?

Maybe it's the culmination of thirty years shitting daily on the words liberal and progressive by hosts of conservative radio to people who ever scanned a dial on AM radio and could not escape a few seconds of lockstep right-wing spew. Too many Bill O'Reilly barf downs on San Francisco over the years. Add up all those seconds over a multitude of years for car bound commuters everywhere and you might associate the words liberal and progressive with every worst excess and depravity that has hit the world from hippie environmental terrorism and drug addiction to gay lifestyle and its supposed threats against the sanctity of marriage and the viral spread of disease.

The saddest part of this ever enduring daily aural brainwash bath has been to equate all progressive venues from socio-economic-political to cultural idioms as worthless to the listeners, who are routinely exalted for their ability to call and mimic, like myna birds, the ever repeated hypnotic messages extolling the eradication of all social liberalism.

And so by decades of cultural beat-down comes a new Rolling Stone Magazine guitarist list where we have very few players who stretched the guitar boundaries in a progressive and liberal feel flow manner, whether from San Francisco, London, Berlin or Liberalbasement, USA.

I cannot figure out why Andy Powell (with first Ted Turner & then Laurie Wisefield) of Wishbone Ash, who defined the twin lead guitar sound that so many bands adopted throughout the 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s, gets excluded. How does Steve Howe of Yes not get included? Jorma Kaukonen of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna cannot wriggle by Lou Reed, or Steve Jones or Willie Nelson? John Cippolina is not one of the top 100 guitarists, but Leslie West is? Robin Trower with Procol Harum and his own bands over 40 years could not garner votes, but Kurt Cobain's in this list?

Understand, I'm not in any way suggesting Kurt Cobain was not an important guy in the annals of rock. Many could/would say he was the last rock star. The Nirvanna recorded statements were vital shit. Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols was an important figure in the band and the Punk movement. I believe his guitar skills, and guitar impact were way less than both Brian Setzer or Rick Nielson, and I would not put them into a top 100. When I think of Lindsey Buckingham I think of Jeff Lynne. Great writer, instrumentalist and producer, not a guitar god, and though I really dug a lot of Buckingham tunes his place on this list seems weird.

But all of this just affirms that the tight tunes contain far more value today than the extended and spacious instrumental tracks that give a person time and opportunity to expand his/her horizons. The message of conservatism- limits and reductions is always at odds with the liberal message of boundless and limitless. Think of it another way. How does anyone define a liberal portion? How does anyone define a conservative portion? One is generous, one is smallish. One is vast, one is confined.

I like headroom when I listen to music, and I take my time. When I listen I'm not in a hurry to get anywhere, but into my head. I don't sense most people listen that way much anymore. It seems the act of the download is more important than what is on the download.

And so this clip ends this post, a post really more about why certain artists are or not included. Here is the brilliant Bill Nelson, of Be Bop Deluxe, and so much more. Dude is on my list of most influential and in my top 20, but then again I'm a liberal.



Thanks for the taking the time, and stopping by. Until next time.

Lists on a Turkey Day

Happy Thanksgiving! Nice holiday with food and family gathered to say thanks to one another for hanging in there with each other for one more year. Thanksgiving like every other holiday is about tradition, and one tradition we all see at this time of the year is the various lists of top what-evers which pop up to let us know what was best, or worst, about the year/decade/millennium in virtually every conceivable category.   

Today I was perusing the news and caught the latest list of the top 100 guitarists put together by Rolling Stone Magazine. Lists intrigue. Good lists (even when you vehemently disagree with the results) fuel interest and comments. As for for this list you'll find it here (Rolling Stone Top 100 Guitarist this year's version). David Fricke, one of my all-time favorite music journalists, started this guitarist list venture back in 2003 for Rolling Stone (here is his list).

The just-out new Rolling Stone list contains worthy musicians. Some omissions from the latest top 100 bug me. And so, one more blog post for posterity.

Not to see Roy Buchanan mentioned anywhere among the new100 truly stuns me. No man ever defined an instrument as eloquently or as forcefully as Roy defined Leo Fender's Telecaster. Fricke put him in at #57 on his list. Bless him.

I guess time fades away many things. Neil Young comments on that over and over in many of his songs, and I believe it to be true. If I could unlock Mr. Peabody's time machine with his trusted boy, Sherman, I would take you back to the thumb slice of fresh plastic on a record album released in 1972 and plucked from a White Front aisle. I'd just read the Robert Hilburn review. He's another critic I trusted for finding my pet musical sounds.

Aside:
By 1972 many of the top guys in the current Rolling Stone list of 100 greats, were either prematurely dead, or very busy doing there frets frescoes in late youth. The bloom of newness over the blues, and the various permutations the 1960s wrung out of ears who caught the blues fever phenomenon were just about over. Original British and American bands into pure blues like the Rolling Stones, the Paul Butterfield Band, Savoy Brown, John Mayall, the Yardbirds, Fleetwood Mac all were gravitating, or had moved to more pop or jazz sensibilities and made the various band personnel changes that sealed the transition.

The trends of the early 1970s were more folk derived-singer songwriter stuff of Paul Simon, James Taylor, Jim Croce, Neil Young, CSN, Bread, Carol King meets orchestral progressive rock of Yes, the Moody Blues and individual Beatles sprinkled in with lots of Motown, Memphis and Philadelphia soul. Country music was all on its own, and bands like the Burrito Brothers and the Byrds had a very difficult time selling any records trying to put country into rock, but the Eagles had no such problem with a much more pop driven focus sprinkled with country-lite. - Aside ended


The black and white photo of a bearded man holding an electric guitar on the Polydor record jacket, PD 5033, gives no indication of the forces squeezed into the grooves held between the glued cardboard. The black and white back-jacket photo of four skinny longhairs looking into the camera in an archway while a resigned looking anti-pop figure in sandals (who really looks a lot Stonewall Jackson with those sad faraway eyes) stands just in front of the archway also offers no clue to the contents. 

From the opening harmonic intonations on the Don Gibson classic "Sweet Dreams" that Chet Atkins and Patsy Cline both previously made so memorable, which Roy and his Snakestretchers have just redefined through sheer country and other worldly harmonic blisters of stretched/bent notes and rifle burst fills to the two lengthy blues instrumentals, demonstrating a mastery of the idiom and the instrument in a way no other guitar had sounded up to that point in time, through the four other county song covers and the majestic soul searching ballad where the guitar wrenches tears and cries of plaintive pleas cascading above the slow rhythm, this was an amazing earful of no compromise artistry.

Lots of crossovers in rock music where rock meets classical, or rock meets jazz, or rock meets blues, or rock meets country. This album was country, and this album was blues. There was no crossover- just guitar virtuosity in both genres alone. What made the record, and Roy Buchanan, so unique was the no compromise rule. Play them straight and true.

Maybe once in your lifetime you've sat in a bar and heard a band take on all songs the patrons could shout. Each song rang true, thanks to the vibe in the room, and thanks maybe to that 3rd scotch you were sipping through the second set. Roy Buchanan gives the listener the very rare small-crowd-held-in-awe testament to a great bar band held together by one virtuoso.

Other Roy records always teased. Some great moments or songs, but undone by either too much production, which was the case on the three Atlantic albums, or just not enough strong material to make the album stand as a singular statement. The Alligator Records release, When A Guitar Plays The Blues,  is essential, and very rewarding. In The Beginning also offers a great total album with strong tunes and incredible performances throughout, which display s versatile mastery of the guitar and genres Roy Buchanan totally owns.  

Part of my appreciation of Roy Buchanan comes from having met and talked with the man several times and from concert dates, and sweaty small club shows on many occasions. The concert he gave at the Berkeley Community Theater in the mid-1970s I still remember being one of the most riveting and awe inspiring shows of guitar wizardry, and all done without the many pedals or sonic devices so in vogue today, that I have ever seen. He was always so cordial, but by the mid 1980s so dispirited by the number of shows and the lack of money to show for it, he had begun his efforts to drown his frustrations.

I can remember reading his obituary in my office in West Sacramento, CA in 1988 and being gripped with such a sadness. To have one of the greatest guitarists in the world hang himself in a Fairfax County jail cell after being arrested on charges of public drunkenness seemed cosmically malicious.

Time has moved more than 23 years since that morning, and the fade continues to blur the memory of this sweet soul with magical powers on a fretboard with strings. I'll blame the power of the fade for this omission. Enjoy the Roy.




Thanks for stopping by. Next up some other guitarists who should have gotten more love from the Rolling Stone voters.