Читать книгу Hell Bent for Leather: Confessions of a Heavy Metal Addict - Seb Hunter - Страница 15

Think punk, think punk guitars. Could you tell a punk guitar from a non-punk guitar? Think reggae, think about the guitars reggae groups use. Could you tell these guitars apart from, for example, New Romantic guitars? Think Britpop. Think 60s pop. Think Stax. Think ska. Think Krautrock, think anything. There’s only one kind of music where you can tell what you’re going to get just by looking at the instruments.

Here is an electric guitar.

It’s the most popular and famous guitar in the world, the Fender Stratocaster, a design classic, popularised by Hank Marvin. Pop into any pub that has live music and chances are there’ll be somebody onstage with one of these.

Here are some Heavy Metal guitars.

Aren’t they much better?

Metal is the only genre that has thought, hang on, why don’t we make the guitars look like us? So that’s what they did.

It was probably Jimi Hendrix who first came up with the idea of turning the guitar from a straightforward instrument into something more ambitious. He was left-handed before the invention of left-handed guitars, so he spun the thing around and strung it upside down. Then he played it with his teeth and after that, he set it on fire. He knelt onstage with the guitar lying between his knees squirting lighter fluid into the flames, coaxing them higher, sometimes up to six inches in the air. The Who smashed their guitars up. Blue Cheer blew theirs up. Kiss made theirs fly! But I’m getting excited. Let’s calm down and have a look at some more guitars.

This is a B. C. Rich Warlock guitar, an early Metal prototype. It’s not as modern as it looks; these guitars date from the early 70s. I’ve always been deeply fond of this model, it’s not as ostentatious and zany as others we’ve seen, I think it retains elements of classicism. Joe Perry from Aerosmith used to play a red one, which definitely counts in its favour, but then I was always dead keen on Joe Perry as well.

Here we have a Gibson Explorer. It was popularised in the early eighties during the ‘New Wave of British Heavy Metal’, and subsequently embraced by groups such as Metallica, whose tough-guy mainman James Hetfield sometimes plays a black one while wearing black clothes. They have a mixture of nice clean lines and a slightly old-fashioned look, but still manage to look very Metal. If you’re playing one of these in this day and age you’re either doing it ironically, or you’re rather beautifully unreconstructed.

Bow down to this sturdy mutha. You know this one for sure – this is the definitive Metal guitar – this is the Gibson Flying ‘V’. You would be forgiven for thinking this meaty specimen dated from the 80s. In fact it was first seen in the 60s, when Jimi Hendrix, no less, occasionally strapped one on. But it was Metal that suited it best. Randy Rhoads, Michael Schenker, all the NWOBHM bands, every longhair worth their salt had to own one of these (and it was a good idea to customise it, maybe with an airbrush). One of the great things about Flying ‘V’s is that they are impossible to play sitting down. Look at them – of course it’s bloody impossible! – so you had to strap them on, thereby becoming an instant Metal guitar god. I don’t know how anyone ever got around to taking theirs off.

This is another design classic, the Fender Telecaster. Jimmy Page used to play one of these before he switched to the Les Paul. Its most famous devotee is The Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen. It symbolises everything he stands for: a complete lack of pretension, no frills, simple plain shape, hardy, manly, it makes a noise that sounds like chicken wire, and positively thrives on sweaty forearms. You don’t come across them very often in Heavy Metal. I once bought a second-hand Telecaster off a guy in a junkie flat in Muswell Hill. I was selling my Les Paul, going in the opposite direction from Jimmy Page (not for the first time) and we got into a discussion over the pros and cons of both guitars.

‘The great thing about Telecasters,’ he said. ‘Is that you can chuck ’em through a wardrobe door and they come out fine the other side. You can do anything to ’em, whatever you like, and they can always ’effing take it.’

‘Right,’ I replied, and paid him in cash.

Here we are, the second most popular electric guitar behind the Fender Strat, the Gibson Les Paul. This guitar was invented by a gentleman called Les Paul, way back in 1954. They’re not only satisfyingly heavy (weight, not Metal heavy, though they’re that too), but they also sustain a note for hours (when plugged in). They have a very distinctive fluid sound, all belly and full-tone. Famous devotees of this model include Jimmy Page, Slash and Ace Frehely. Mick Mars out of Motley Crue liked these axes so much he named his first-born child after them. Les Paul Mars.

Here’s Angus Young again, my first ever guitar hero, with his trademark model, the Gibson SG, and of course his usual school uniform. SG players seem to be fanatically loyal to their instrument; I don’t know why, I think they look crap. They sound good though – raw and fiery – and are probably the sturdiest guitar that Gibson ever made.

Normal.

A guitar war broke out in the mid-80s. It was triggered by the headstock – the end bit of the electric guitar, where the tuning pegs are. First of all, guitars had normal headstocks. They looked like this:

Stylish, classic, nobody had any problems. They were just the end bits of the guitars. Then somebody at Jackson Guitars designed the world’s first pointy headstock, and the guitar world went completely mad for them. They looked like this:

Pointy.

This new development shook the Metal world to its stack-heeled foundations. Much like the Spandex explosion after years of denim and leather, pointy headstocks smashed the floodgates open. All of a sudden even the most traditional and old-fashioned guitars came with these new pointy headstocks welded on the end. They looked absurd – it was like putting spoilers and racing stripes on a Morris Minor – but the momentum was unstoppable, and it soon became obligatory for every axe to sport one. These headstock daggers signified poise, sleekness, modernity, fashion … and fashionable things were rare in Heavy Metal, so here was a chance to really get one over on your less streetwise Metallist.

Even basses weren’t immune. The first pointy bass-stocks followed soon enough, and the usually ultra-cautious steady-Eddie legs-akimbo bass players of the Metal world bought them too. These headstocks and the new body shapes that followed had invented a whole new way of expressing ourselves. Guitar bodies started to look like this:

The Metal world began to dribble. We’d been the ugly duckling of the music world and at last felt that we were becoming sexy. And we were.

But hang on, what happened to the war? Check this out:

Again:

Reverse pointy.

Yes, it’s the other way around!

Normal pointy.

Reverse pointy.

This new development threw us all into turmoil, and a nasty squabble ensued as the forward pointys faced off against the Robespierrean reverse pointys. The kingdom was split. This fierce, uncompromising discussion raged for years, until the huge success of Guns n’ Roses turned the wheel slowly back in favour of the Gibsons and the Fenders and the plump, rounded, normal headstocks.

Even today, if you’re real Metal, your guitar has a pointy headstock. And if you want a quiet life, it looks like this:

Points both ways.

The next picture is the Metal equivalent of the bullet that killed JFK or the arrow that hit King Harold in the eye at the Battle of Hastings. It’s important to boo when you set eyes on this next specimen. It is an evil Excalibur of a musical instrument; it’s the guitar Kurt Cobain used to kill Metal.

The Fender Jaguar is actually a damn fine, if expensive, piece of sonic machinery. It resembles a knackered old Thames barge, and can be made to sound quite similar. This is one of those guitars that I want to lick.

At the opposite end from the Fender Jaguar’s ramshackle elegance is Cheap Trick’s ‘madcap’ guitarist, Rick Nielsen. Cheap Trick were Pop Rock, but slid into our territory by virtue of their long hair. They had a moderately successful career throughout the 70s, and happened to write two of the all-time great pop-metal songs; the heart-string-tugging-but-punch-the-air-at-the-same-time ‘I Want You To Want Me’ and the even better ‘Surrender’. Nielsen’s problem was that he was short-haired and strange-looking while the lead singer and bassist were drop-dead gorgeous. Cheap Trick album covers always featured the handsome two on the front, and Nielsen and rotund drummer Bun E Carlos on the back, so Nielsen needed a hook to grab himself a piece of the attention. First of all he came up with this:

Crikey.

Then this:

This is an accurate representation of Nielsen himself.

This too:

This is actually an electric guitar.

And finally this:

This is actually an electric guitar.