Tommy´s Tracks 1 - White Horses

The Fine Fifty Nine

Most guitar lovers covet the Gibson Les Paul 59, even if they don't use one.

Is it a better instrument than a 2012 Les Paul?

Yes.

Let´s do a little potted guitar history here.

Les Paul was a genius, in everything from guitars to multitrack to delay and chorus. The Gibson Company have always claimed that the Les Paul guitar was mainly their idea, but this isn´t true. In the 40s they laughed at the mad inventor with the broomstick and only came after him when Leo Fender got in there first with the solid body guitar. Gibson even screwed up the bridge on the first Les Paul, giving the guitar an arched top like a violin, although Les Paul preferred a flat top. 

In the 50s the guitar was built using the best tonewoods, Bumble Bee capacitors, silkscreen logos, deep tenon joint right into the neck pickup cavity, flamed tops, and much more. Gibson´s policy was to cut trees down only so far, so that the wood wasn't too dense and the guitar would have better sustain, better natural tone, better dynamics, and better natural harmonics. Most of these had huge baseball bat necks that contributed to the tone – although in 1960 Les Pauls had thinner necks - laquer that cracked easily, paint that faded into a myriad of beautiful colours, pickups with many different amounts of winding (hot and not so hot) all of which made each guitar unique.

Yet, incredibly, by the 1980s no rock guitarist wanted a Les Paul! Everyone wanted a Charvel, Jackson or Kramer. Eddie Van Halen got incredible sounds from his bastardised Charvel with it's Floyd Rose whammy bar. The Les Polsfuss was totally out of fashion (though it could could kick the bejeesus out of all of the above with its beautiful blend of mahogany body, maple top and warm - yet brutal - Alnico pickups). Even when in the late 80s Slash of Guns ´n´ Roses seemed to be playing a Gibson and resurrecting the Les Paul, he was actually playing a bastardised guitar with a Gibson neck. The body was built by a great guitar luthier called Max who could build a better Les Paul than Gibson, using the best possible tone woods.

So how did this happen?

In the 70s the Gibson company evolved into Corporate Gibson and they began to use everything but the tree roots for their famed guitars. This made the guitars so heavy that guitarists started to suffer from the dreaded “Les Paul neck”. This encompasses a host of problems such as severe neck and shoulder pain and slouching over the guitar to alleviate the strain.

In short, skill and passion had been replaced by the greedy pursuit of profits and the quality suffered. The CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled) router system and the plek system were introduced, replacing real instruments made by skilled instrument makers.

In my view, corporate is a disgusting word because wherever it appears there´s no beauty. So, predictably, Corporate Gibson sucks and quality is decreasing so fast that soon the mythical name of Gibson will stand for no more than crap. Mass factory built guitars are a complete rip off - what you now get from the Gibson Custom Shop (which is another story!) is closer to what you got from the Gibson factory floor in 1959. Bog standard, dense, hollowed out mahogany. Orville Gibson, a man who believed in quality to the extent of using fiddle back (flamed maple) on his guitars because he found it so beautiful on violin backs, would turn in his grave.

Now that Gibson have been taken to court for illegaly obtaining rosewood for their fingerboards, we now have baked maple instead. Gibson´s CEO, the profit-hungry Henry E. Juszkiewicz deserves to be taken and shaken. He has no love of guitars and no respect for the people who play them and is on record as saying that the higher the price, the more people – or fools - will believe they´re getting better quality. 

To this day, Slash uses, not Gibson Les Pauls, but the results of what's known as ghost building. Gibson permits an independent builder to put their logo on Slash's guitars. Slash endorses Gibson and everybody makes a fortune.

In conclusion, while I'm still a Les Paul lover and own a nice, cherry sunburst with a great, powerful rock tone, when it comes to playing, I sling on a Fender strat. Even though it has wider fret spacing, much weaker pickups and a higher action, I love it because it's really comfy around my neck and I can reach the higher register without being obstructed by a huge mortice and tenon joint. A contemporary Les Paul is still a great guitar with a great tone - but it´s not worth half its retail price.

Who Needs a Guitar Hero?

An interesting thing happened to me in the late seventies.  I was learning to play the guitar by listening to all the contemporary rock guitar greats to figure out what they were doing. As you can imagine, my bedroom wall was covered with posters of these giants of rock.

One day, in a record store, I came across a poster of a really striking guitarist.  Posing and pouting in a black catsuit, his long, blond hair flying about, he brandished a white Flying V.

I remember thinking, this guy´s either something special or a complete plonker!

Some time later I went to see a British band called UFO.  They had a guitarist called Paul Chapman, who I thought was really good.  I subsequently came across a UFO album in a bargain bin and bought it.  Chapman was really good, so I bought a second UFO album.

Yet as soon as the first, hypnotic solo kicked in… I could tell that it wasn't Paul Chapman!  This solo was like nothing I´d  heard before:-  the tone, the vibrato, the microtonal bends, all of it melodic and precise.  The guitar playing on that whole album was astonishing, so I checked the album cover and noticed this guy with long, blond hair ……. A bit of research later, I found out that the guitarist was, indeed, the poser with the Flying V.

He was none other than the great Michael Schenker, of course.

I have a framed picture of that poster on my wall, for two reasons.

One: because it connects me to the feelings I experienced when I first heard Obsession.  I still love it and it will always be my No.1 rock guitar album.

Two: because it makes me feel good!  When I listen to that album thirty odd years later, I´m taken back in time. 

Moral of the story.  The best thing to inspire any guitarist is a guitar hero.

If you don't have one,  find one!

Queen. Best Band in the World?

I admit to a certain bias here as I loved Queen.  From their first album, Queen, their music suited their name perfectly.  Grandiose, regal, sophisticated, beautiful, soulful, arrogant, splendid. …there are so many highflown words to describe the music of this essentially studio band that used multilayers of vocals and guitars on their records.  Bringing some of their songs to life, live on stage, was quite a task for them but they managed to pull off the almost impossible in their concerts, which is to their credit.

They were an incredibly inventive band; I´d call it collective genius.  While Queen were really Freddie and Brian with their strong grounding in harmony, Roger was a good drummer with a brilliant vocal range and John was a great, inventive bass player who could also write good songs.  Brian and Roger were the rockers (as was Freddie until Studio 54 in New York got his disco hormones raging) but John wasn´t. He was a a bass player of the times who loved funky, bass grooves as heard on the hit Another One Bites the Dust (which should, perhaps, have been entitled Another Queen Fan Bites the Dust……) and on his brilliant Millionaire Waltz. 

While it´s true that none of Queen was a technical virtuoso on his instrument, collectively they were musical wizards, with minds that absorbed and encapsulated many styles soon moulded, uniquely, into a sound called Queen.

With seventies Queen, we had Freddie's beautifully distinctive falsetto voice that could switch to a raspy tenor in the blink of an eye.  We had Brian's sixpence scratchings against the strings of his unique, home-made, wooden, wonder guitar that could emulate anything from a horn to a cello.  We also had Roger's impossibly high, screamed harmonies along with beautifully crafted songs, stunning arrangements, heavenly harmonies and melting movements.

And the most commanding and beautiful singing voice ever.

Sometimes I wonder what they were on! In my thirty six years as a Queen fan, I have yet to hear such perfect harmonies from any other artist, or such brilliant guitar orchestrations as the likes of Brian May.

 In my view, no one can touch them, despite the inferior output that reared it's ugly head in the band´s mid musical career.  Queen sounds will live forever in my heart and in my head and I judge everything musical according to their standards.

Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Aerosmith, AC/DC, KISS, Van Halen, Journey, Rush …. etc, etc.

Yes, I think Queen were the best band in the world.

And I make no apologies for it.

Peas in an i-Pod?

Tonight I'm listening to a musical genius who is a complete master of melody, harmony, chord stuctures, dynamics and lyrics.  He´s also a wonderful vocalist and guitarist. 

I'm talking about the great Todd Rundgren.

Years ago, my cousin insisted I borrow a horrible album. I dragged it home, gave it a listen and thought what a pile of trash.  But Rudgren was using typical pop and rock progressions fused with jazz-influenced movements and blended with clever, and sometimes complex, vocal harmonies.

This was one clever dude (that I probably hated for it). 

(Thanks John, for forcing bands on me).

I´m lucky to have great ears and a mind that can judge for itself.  While I didn't like everything I was hearing, I knew that I was listening to someone with great musical talent and  who was writing from the heart. 

So I have a question.

Why is the melody being erased from music? 

We press buttons to function from day to day.  Our sense of melody and  harmony – that we´re born with -  is slowly decreasing.  We can't survive without sound. We are sound. Like the atoms of which we´re made, we vibrate to stay together. Vibration is sound.

Now, we hear about good and bad vibrations. What are they?  It's quite simple. Good vibrations resonate with our bodies in a good way (make you feel good) and bad vibes are the opposite. So imagine what happens when something fools you into enjoying bad vibrations. Imagine we only listen to synthetic drums and synthetic (by definition, non-natural) sounds.  A drum has indefinite pitch (bad vibrations) and is never in tune.  So what if you make the drum the strongest part of the music then add an unresolved (no resolving cadence) robotic loop.

You get continuous, robotic bass drum, low end bass loop with no groove or ebb and flow - and don't forget that the vocals are often rap with no melody.  Ebb and flow, rhythm, is good for us because our heart beat actually flows (look it up, it´s true).  Take that away by using computerized drum loops and we´re left with a monotonous, static unnaturally bad vibe.  An invisible musical cage.  And as we all know, or perhaps have forgotten, expression can't exist in a cage. But that´s the kind of music with which we´re swamped daily.

Canned carrots, canned peas, canned music. 

As most good musicians know, melody is nothing without harmony. When we hear a melody with no harmony our ears have nothing to relate to, so they can't sense the harmonic stucture. But when we put harmonic structure (chords) behind the melody our ears can make more sense of it.  When we hear a song our brains automatically absorb both the melody and the harmony. Even though you might not understand this interplay, you can hum the tune and get a sense of the movement behind the melody. 

Rundgren's melodies, on the other hand, are strongly enhanced by contrary and oblique motion within the chord structures with the vocal harmonies giving a feeling of depth and breadth.  And so we´re taken on a musical journey with unexpectedtwists and surprises.

We need to follow Rundgren´s example and bring back the Music Grocery where we could pick something fresh.

Not some pre –cooked, tinned peas in an iPod.