My nephew Tristan turned 12 last weekend. A week or so beforehand, I called his mother -- my sister Victoria -- and asked her what sorts of stuff he was into these days. Apparently, the little man's taken a huge interest in guitar and Vick & her husband Scott are being wholly supportive. I thought that was rather cool. Our mother wouldn't have ever considered such a thing ("you showed absolutely zero interest at the time," she asserts today .... largely oblivious and/or in denial of the fact that the walls of my teenage room were covered from floor to ceiling with images of guitar shoguns like Ace Frehley, Angus Young, Dave Gilmour, etc. and every available inch of space was gradually gobbled up by boxes of records). In any case, Tristan's got himself an axe of his own and is currently learning how to play it (cue strains of "Juke Box Hero"), and anything I could give him that was "guitar-oriented" would be well received.
Despite being a slavish music fan, I'm afraid that I really don't know much about guitars. Oh sure, I could certainly tell you that, say, Billy Duffy of The Cult swears by his signature hollow-body Gretsch White Falcon or that Geordie K. Walker from my beloved Killing Joke is most renowned for malevolently strumming a strikingly beautiful, vintage Gibson ES-295 (a.k.a "The Golden Harp"), but if you try and engage me in a conversation about pickups or tablature or tunings, I'll probably stammer, mumble, give up and then stare at you blankly. To this day, the only thing I can play on a guitar is "Horse With No Name" by America. It's a ridiculously simple, two-chord job (with no fussy middle-eight changes), so I can play it and almost sound reasonably credible (the irony being that I absolutely hate the song in question). But beyond that, I'm all thumbs.
So, I didn't really know what to get Tristan. Strings? A tuning fork? A gift certificate to Guitar Center? I decided on an easy route. I strolled down nearby Eighth Street and bought him a couple of t-shirts (much like his uncle, Tristan's a sucker for a cool band shirt). Being that they're among his faves, I got him a Red Hot Chili Peppers shirt (black with the logo) and because no wardrobe is truly complete without one -- a signature black Ramones t-shirt.
Beyond that, I figured I'd pick him up a couple of discs that shaped my lifelong love-affair with the sound of the electric guitar. I don't have a pile of money these days, but I love giving these sorts of gifts. Several years earlier, when Tristan's older brother Whalen was getting into music, I dumped an avalanche of compact discs on the boy, hoping to wean him off an ill-considered diet of Linkin Park and Blink 182 and onto "the real stuff" like The Clash, Minor Threat and Motorhead. I don't know if he actually appreciated or even ever listened to them (both Whalen and Tristan are of the generation of music fans that seemingly don't actually seek out or own tactile albums -- everything they like comes off a computer), but it felt like the right thing to do at the time.
So I picked out three for Tristan. First up was Wish You Were Here by ye olde Pink Floyd. Oh sure, I can hear the groans from the peanut gallery now, but this remains a truly splendid album, especially for Dave Gilmour's plangent, lyrical guitar playing. It certainly fostered an acutely detail-oriented awareness to my air-guitaring habits as a nascent rock aficionado. I was tempted to get him Dark Side of the Moon (which also features some amazing guitar playing, most notably on "Time"), but being that head-of-the-household Scott is a dyed-in-the-wool classic rock fan, I assumed that there was already an oft-played copy of same somewhere in their home. Actually, my sister herself introduced me to the trippy joys of that particularly iconic album (along with other crucial hand-me-downs like Mothership Connection by Parliament and A Night at the Opera by Queen), but seemed to undergo a rigorous taste-ectomy some years later. Nowadays, she listens to stuff like Michael Bolton, Basia and truly dreadful world music. Not sure what went wrong there.
To balance out the shaggy fuddy-duddyness and sleepy-eyed hesherism of the `Floyd, I also picked up Nothing's Shocking, the first proper studio LP by Jane's Addiction. I first bought this record as a senior in college in the early Spring of 1988 without having even heard a solitary note off of it. I'd heard their name and read some rapturous reviews in a few dubious music rags and my curiosity was piqued. When I spied the cover (a sculpture of lead singer Perry Farrell's then-girlfriend cast as a flaming pair of nude siamese twins), I rightly deduced that there was no way on God's green earth that the album in question could be boring. I was not disappointed. Nothing's Shocking is -- to my mind -- a virtually flawless collection of music from start to finish. Seamlessly fusing the heft and sonic sprawl of heavy metal with the aggressive insouciance of the best punk rock, Jane's Addiction seemed fleetingly poised to be the greatest of all possible bands (many of my best friends still consider them as such). Though he'd go onto become an annoyingly inescapable and evidently contractually shirtless media whore in the last decade or so, guitarist Dave Navarro really delivered with all cylinders blazing on this record, his fat, effects-laden style lending each song a lush, cinematic scope. The record certainly made me wish I could replicate those sounds on a guitar.
I needed a third disc to bridge the gap between the elegiac grace of Wish You Were Here and the frenetic squall of Nothing's Shocking. Since both of those albums feature guitarists that are universally regarded as seasoned musicians in the conventional sense (however radically different in style), I needed an example to reinforce the theory that you don't need to be a virtuoso to coax interesting sound out of your guitar. My first thought was a Ramones album. Even though the late Johnny Ramone's signature down-strumming style singlehandedly destroys the notion that you have to be a fastidious prodigy in order to play exciting, 'credible' music, it seemed like a lazy, over-cited choice. Moreover, as radical as the Ramones sounded upon their explosive inception, they were still dealing within the parameters of a time-tested formula. No, I needed someone who turned the whole concept on its head.
I settled on Gang of Four. Sure, I might have chosen any number of similarly unconventional combos, but I wanted the album to still be accessible to my nephew. To my mind, Gang of Four handily harnessed the power of experimental cacophony while still remaining viably tuneful. Atop the muscularly funky rhythm section of bassist Dave Allen and powerhouse drummer Hugo Burnham, Gang of Four guitarist Andy Gill released an electrical storm of guitar noise that precious few have been able to rival. Largely bereft of wanky, twiddly bits and other needless filigree, Gill's playing consists mainly of choppy, staccato riffs and thick, jagged slabs of untethered sound. To these ears, Gill gruffly manhandles his guitar in a way that is just as inspiring and heroically inimitable as the way Jimmy Page plays. Along with fellow post-punk guitarists Keith Levene of Public Image Ltd., John McGeogh of Magazine/Banshees and the afore-mentioned Geordie Walker of Killing Joke, Gill divined his own method of producing sound from a guitar and inspired a new generation. For all their breathless homage-paying to Delta bluesmen, I dare say that U2 would sound drastically different (and much duller) had it not been for guitar players like Andy Gill.
I then fretted over which Gang of Four release to get him. My first choice proved to be elusive. I wanted to pick up their debut, Entertainment! -- rife with pavement-cracking favorites like "Damaged Goods," "I Found That Essence Rare" and the eardrum-ravaging "Anthrax" -- but given the decrepit state of New York City's vanishing disc shops, I couldn't put my hand to it at short notice. I then sought out the Another Day, Another Dollar e.p. (since appended to the re-released CD of Solid Gold), but I couldn't track that down either. The live versions of "Cheeseburger" and, more specifically, "What We All Want" on that find Gill's playing at its most fractured. On the latter track, it sounds as if the guitar is literally coming apart in his hands while simultaneously wailing like a wrathful pteradactyl. It's astonishingly great music.
I ended up picking up 2005's Return The Gift, a somewhat hotly contested re-recording of the band's classics by the original four members. While arguably needless (the fleetingly reunited band felt that the original recordings didn't do them justice), it provides a accurate -- if not wholly updated taste of Gang of Four's capabilities. Even as an avid fan of the original recordings, I quite like Return the Gift for its newfound amplification, percussive wallop and feral attack. I also liked that it had a more current feel, considering that I was basically imposing music onto my nephew that was, for the most part, recorded well before his own parents ever met.
Will Tristan ever actually listen to this stuff? Who knows? Was it really just a self-serving gesture on my part to try to flex my dulling knowitall chops (as I'm rather hoarily doing right here)? Maybe so. Tristan's a rather polite, soft-spoken kid who isn't about to wax rhapsodic about how something may or may not have blown a new part in his hair, so I'll probably never know. Even if he simply ends up using these discs as coasters (his mother's coffee table should be so lucky), I just hope that he finds music that colors, contextualizes and enriches his life in the way this stuff did for mine. Maybe he already has.
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