When The Music Died The Guitars Cried 2

Surf's Up! (in Malibu)

What is it about surf music that you love?
That’s the peak of it, there’s rock music that has all those forms, but then there’s surf music which is a whole lot more elemental. They’re using the form but then there’s this bluster over the top, y’know dick-a-dick-a-dick-a-dick-a-dick and it has this sort of subliminal quality. It’s got a lull to it but it’s also intense.
- Chris Heazlewood, interviewed in Pull Down The Shades

There was a tremendous amount of power I felt while surfing and that feeling of power was simply transferred into my guitar – Dick Dale

Have another listen to Buddy Holly’s cover of “Bo Diddley” in last week’s post – there’s something about this that works as an instrumental. If Buddy’s vocals didn’t come in, we wouldn’t miss them. It has that “elemental” quality Chris talks about – the earthy rumble of the Bo Diddley drumbeat, the metallic zing of the guitar strings, the echo, which outside the studio is a phenomenon associated with awesome rock formations. The space following the decline of the great rock’n’roll idols was a golden age for instrumental music, and discoveries made then went into the mix that became 60’s rock.

Let’s start with Duane Eddy’s “Rebel Rouser” (1958); this has a twang we associate with cowboy music (it reminds us of the jew’s harp, a simple metal drone instrument that a cowboy could carry in his pocket), the melody played deep-throated, on the wound strings, emphasizing the music’s manly character (we’ll find solos played like this in many of Marty Robbins’ cowboy songs, tales of manly endurance, and in the songs of Rebel Rouser’s cowriter Lee Hazelwood). Sean O’Hagan played solos with a similar tone in some Microdisney songs in the 1980’s, painting Ireland as the Wild West of Britain.

Link Wray, a Native American of Shawnee descent raised in dire poverty in a North Carolina town dominated by the KKK, had a rare “problematic instrumental” hit with “Rumble” (1958) when some radio stations banned it, concerned that the title glorified gang violence.¹ The unsustained distortion gives Wray’s guitar an edge like he’s forcing it through sandpaper, and on hearing such a nasty sound, guitarists everywhere either crossed themselves and checked their valves or wondered how they could go one better – Pete Townshend of The Who being in the latter camp. Also note the increasing depth of the tremolo, threatening to choke out Wray’s guitar by the end.

The way Wray peals off notes in descending scales is something Chuck Berry did clumsily (or, expressionistically) in the intro to Johhny B Goode; Wray’s cleaner, stronger, and more systematic approach to this effect is probably what inspired the way Johnny Kidd and the Pirates play “Shaking All Over”.

On the second track of the above Cadence Sessions album, “Pancho Villa”, Wray, to give the track the Mexican flavour of the famous revolutionary general (1878-1923), brings in a couple of frenetic strumming patterns and a flamenco chord change, factors that will go into surf music (where the major chord going up and down a semitone represents the peaking of a wave, e.g. “Pipeline”, 1963 by the Chantay’s – which is how it’s spelt on the label and dust sleeve, or Dick Dale and the Deltones’ “Misirlou”). On “Genocide” (1969), Wray plays a melody on what sounds like the outside edges of the frets, exceeding the then-known limits of the guitar to find a more elemental way to represent the spirits of his murdered ancestors. There’s a Hollywood horror movie trope where someone unwisely builds something on an “old Indian burial ground” which also describes the grit in Wray’s playing that gives it the haunted quality that drags me back in.

Dick Dale may not have been the originator of surf music but he was the pre-eminent original who brought together all the genre’s strands and developed the formulas that came to define it, as Chuck Berry did with rock’n’roll; his surf music wasn’t just instrumental rock’n’roll, vulnerable to colonization by vocalists, but an institution which could stand alone. Dale’s guitar sound – left-handed, he played a right-handed Fender Stratocaster upside-down, with its heavy-gauge strings in reverse order (instead of restringing it like Hendrix), with a rapid staccato picking pattern on Eastern scales based on his earlier playing of the tarabaki and oud, Middle Eastern instruments learned from his Lebanese uncle. A sweeping downward glissando captures the feel as the surfer’s outstretched hand touches the face of the wave curving over him.

Here Dale covers an instrumental from a guitarist he influenced, Jimi Hendrix. “Third Stone From The Sun”, a melody in octaves over a driving jazz bass and drum groove in the original version, may have been Jimi’s attempt to stretch out like Miles Davis and John Coltrane on “Milestones”, but there are a few mumbled asides including “then you’ll never hear surf music again”, because what he’s playing and the way he’s playing it has reminded him of Dale.

Meanwhile, a couple of Italian kids from Brooklyn, far from the surf, wrote one of the definitive instrumentals of this period. Santo and Johnny’s “Sleep Walk” (1959) was a dreamy, impressionistic piece, the rock’n’roll equivalent of Eric Coates’ “Sleepy Lagoon” (which The Platters covered in a vocal arrangement that same month of August 1959), and would influence Brian Wilson’s dreamy Beach Boys instrumentals.

“Sleep Walk” featured a steel guitar part played on a three-necked Fender Stringmaster.²

A cover of “Sleep Walk” features on the first album by an unlikely group of rock magicians from Great Britain, The Shadows (1961). The Shadows first came to prominence as the backing band for Cliff Richard, the UK’s answer to Elvis – their 1958 hit “Move It” was a decent rocker and showed the chops of lead guitarist Hank Marvin over a solid rhythm from Bruce Welch. A long career backing the super-successful Cliff left them time to record just as many hits of their own, and in their increasingly intricate and long-fought-over arrangements Marvin and Welch worked out how to play two lead guitars in harmony. 12-bar type rock songs, which tend to be call-and-response chants, are limited in their melodic range, one reason why the “singing” or indeed “gently weeping” guitar solo hadn’t come to the fore previously (another was the absence of the “sustain” option before the mid-60’s, which Santo and Johnny’s steel guitar was one way round). The Shadows solved this problem by covering and rocking up an eclectic set of songs and instrumentals with enough harmonic interest to challenge their arranging skills, and by using as much sustain as vibrato arms and expert fingering could give to a note. Here’s what may be their signature tune, “Apache”, which Link Wray would, naturally, include in his own sets.³

When The Beatles started writing their own songs, Lennon and Harrison began with an instrumental, and they called it “Cry For A Shadow” (1961). The Beatles are going to start putting melodic, singing guitar solos into rock songs, partly because they’ll write harmonically advanced songs able to sustain such solos in rock style, partly because they’re already exhaustively rehearsed musicians and The Shadows have shown them how a two-guitar arrangement works.

But what also helps is the idea of the guitar hero, the myth that arises first around blues players like Peter Green, Jeff Beck, and Eric Clapton. The guitarist becomes a personality rock fans want and expect to hear from even in a song sung by someone else, the way a jazz fan wants to hear from Lester Young when listening to Billie Holiday.

All of these guitarists were sorcerers. The instrumentalist who brings to life aspects of nature or the spirit world and dowses for the subconscious emotions they evoke within the play of wires and magnets casts an elemental spell - an instrumental that comes to life in the way that a song does is a kind of golem (a famous Edgar Winter Group instrumental of the early 1970’s, which older Kiwi readers may remember as the theme from the first two seasons of TVNZ’s Radio With Pictures, was called “Frankenstein”).

I’m not sure when the first properly lyrical solo guitar verse appeared in a rock song. The Beatles nibbled at the idea with brief melodic fills (like that in “Ticket To Ride”, played by Paul), country picking spectaculars, Shadowsy experiments like the solo in “A Hard Days Night” (positively avant garde for its day), and the even more experimental backwards solo for some time. George Harrison eventually attained its Platonic ideal in “Something” (1969), where his solo is more expressive than his vocal and is really a separate composition based on the same chords. By the 70’s, there are such fine examples as Tony Peluso’s solo in The Carpenters’ “Goodbye To Love” (1972), arguably the first fuzz guitar solo in a power ballad, and Tim Renwick’s solo in Al Stewart’s “The Year Of The Cat” (1976).

New Zealand is a land of surf and surfers, some of whom play rock music that shades into surf styles (David Kilgour, Ian Henderson), but its pre-eminent surf act, King Loser, weren’t anything but sidewalk surfers in real life. When Chris Heazlewood, who I quoted above, met Celia Mancini in 1992 they bonded immediately over their love of Dick Dale and The Ventures and though their music wasn’t exclusively instrumental their songs also used surf forms and effects, Chris supplying the exciting guitar “bluster”, Celia the pipeline bass and chromatic keyboard hooks that define dynamic instrumentals like “76 Comeback”.

King Loser never did anything by halves and Andrew Moore and Cushla Dillon’s King Loser documentary, previewing in this year’s film festival, is a rough and exciting ride with the constant threat of wipeout. King Loser may not be an cosy watch but it is an honest portrayal of what Andrew described to RNZ as “the last really dangerous rock’n’roll band in New Zealand”, and it’s filled with more great music than you even knew existed.

allgorhythm sez - Booker T and the MGs, McLemore Ave (Abbey Road covers)

1. Link Wray’s brother Vernon, who played in his band and ran the studio he often recorded in, was the creator of one of the earliest and best alt-country LPs, the self-released Wasted (1972)

2. The steel guitar is a variant of the Hawaiian guitar, invented circa 1885 and popularized in the USA by Oahu native Joseph Kekuku.
"Joseph told me that he was walking along a road in Honolulu forty-two years ago, holding an old Spanish guitar, when he saw a rusty bolt on the ground. As he picked it up, the bolt accidentally vibrated one of the strings and produced a new tone that was rather pleasing. After practicing for a time with the metal bolt, Joe experimented with the back of a pocket-knife, then with the back of a steel comb, and still later on with a highly-polished steel [bar] very similar to the sort that is used today."

3. Instrumentals engage a specific set of emotions, relating to adventures, experiences, and identification with outsider characters, men of few words, like “Apache”, a tribute to the “courage and savagery” of the character Massai, played by Burt Lancaster in the 1954 western film Apache. In other words, the instrumental was something of a Boy’s Own Adventure, while the male vocal pop music of the day expressed feelings about boy-girl relationships, traditionally a female preoccupation.