CRITICAL MASS : For guitarists, nothing can beat the old solid-bodies
Posted on Tuesday, August 26, 2008
One of the realities of the modern world is that technology improves. The computer you’ll be able to buy six months from now will be faster, more powerful and cheaper than the one you just bought. However nostalgic you might be for the cars of your youth, today’s machines are more reliable and safer. If you are playing golf with a 5-year-old driver, you’re likely handicapping yourself.
In general, gear gets better.
But not solid-body electric guitars. The best were made more than 50 years ago, and modern instruments follow the basic design of these antique guitars.
This is an agreed-upon fact among most of the world’s rock ’n’ roll guitar players, and in the nearly 40 years I have been (badly ) playing guitar the consensus hasn’t changed. The two most important electric guitars are the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul.
This is so obvious to many musicians and rock ’n’ roll enthusiasts that they don’t think about it. While there are plenty of other fine electric guitars that have played significant roles in rock history — Roger McGuinn’s 12-string Rickenbacker, Neil Young’s hollow-bodied white Gretsch Country Gentleman, Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstein — Gibson and Fender have become the Coke and Pepsi, the Mac and PC of American popular music. Almost every important guitarist has at one time or another been identified with these instruments.
This rivalry is examined in Solidbodies: The 50 Year Guitar War, a 2007 documentary by Guy Hornbuckle, formerly a news anchorman and producer for the Tupelo, Miss., NBC-TV affiliate. (The DVD can be bought for $ 19. 95 through the Web site www. solidbodiesthemovie. com. )
The sprightly paced 50-minute film is a delight for guitar wonks as it traces the parallel (and sometimes dispiriting ) histories of the instruments and employs the considerable chops of guitarists Wes Jeans, Steve Selvidge and John Roth in demonstrating the capabilities — and signature tones — of each. Hornbuckle interviews these guitarists and others (including Joe Bonamassa, Gary Hoey, Derek Trucks and Los Lonely Boys axman Henry Garza ) as well as historians and guitar experts in an enjoyable survey of the electric guitar’s place in pop culture.
Solidbodies is careful not to exaggerate the depth of feeling guitar partisans feel. While the instruments inspire deep loyalties, there’s no one best instrument for everyone.
My own preference is for Fenders — I have a Strat and owned several versions of the instrument over the years, including a Japanese clone, made by a company called Tokai, that I wish I’d never sold.
Part of my preference for Strats is based on understanding my limits — I know I can’t play like Jimmy Page and honestly don’t want to; I like the Strat’s bright percussive tone and am intimidated by the syrupy sustain of a Les Paul.
While the Les Paul is said to be more forgiving, with a silkier feel, I’m better able to block out chords on the Strat, to wrangle the sort of sounds I want from it. There’s something punkier, less lyrical about the attack of a Strat as compared to a Les Paul; something my ear registers as more democratic and earnest than the sweet peal of Gibson. A Strat is a massproduced machine for making noise; a Les Paul is more of a player’s guitar. Given the provenance of the guitars, this makes sense — both of them predate the music they made possible. Fender’s first market was western swing-band guitarists who wanted to be able to cut through the group sound. Les Paul is a jazz player (at 93, he still performs most Monday nights at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York ), who developed one of the first solid-body electrics (although probably not the famous Gibson model that bears his name, most likely designed by Gibson’s Ted McCarty ).
Fender — an upstart company headed by Leo Fender, an engineer who could barely play guitar — sought to build a sturdy instrument that could be cheaply produced and sold to the masses.
Gibson was a venerable instrument manufacturer that produced dozens of different models of acoustic and electricacoustic guitars.
Its Les Paul was a high-end model designed to fill a niche, primarily for use by professionals. It was a heavy instrument derived from the hollow-body models Gibson made for years. It featured a maple top over a mahogany body and noisecanceling double-coil pickups called “humbuckers” that gave the guitar a rich, dark, smooth tone. It hit the market in 1952, a couple of years after Fender had introduced its first solid-body guitars — Telecaster, Broadcaster and its antecedent, the “No-caster” — and a couple of years before the Strat appeared on the scene with three singlecoil pickups and a switch that allowed the player a great variety of sound, from a stinging staccato to a bright ring. When Buddy Holly adopted the Strat, its place in rock history was secure. At least as important as the Strat’s musical versatility was its “populuxe” body design and automotive paint jobs (such as Cadillac’s Daphne Blue, Buick’s Seafoam Green and Inca Silver, used by Chevy on the Corvette ).
SUNBURSTS ON MAPLE The first Les Pauls were offered in gold and black, and it took a couple of years for the company to offer the instrument in iconic carved maple tops with orange-red natural sunburst finishes. (According to the talking heads in Solidbodies, the company never seems to catch on to the fact that players perceive a qualitative difference in these finishes, and that the heavier “flamed” guitars are preferred. They apparently made no attempt to sort the maple used for the tops — some of the sunburst finishes are pretty bland, others are spectacular. )
It wasn’t until later that the Les Paul began to achieve prominence among rock guitarists, largely through the influence of blues-influenced players like Keith Richards, Mike Bloomfield, Eric Clapton and Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green, who first saw the instrument in the hands of blues players like Freddie King and Howlin’ Wolf sideman Hubert Sumlin.
While Gibson had effectively discontinued the manufacture of the Les Paul model in 1960 (in 1961, it changed the body style, apparently in response to the success of Stratocaster, to a double-cutaway style. Paul objected to his name being used on this instrument, which Gibson subsequently re-branded the SG ). It would be eight years before Gibson would re-introduce the Les Paul. By then Gibson had been sold to a larger company more interested in maximizing profits than upholding the brand’s reputation for quality. Most guitarists insist that none of the later models are the equal of the original 1952-1960 production run.
Similarly, Fender was bought by cost-conscious CBS in 1965. Not coincidentally, the 1965 Stratocaster is considered by many to be the best — the punchiest, the most powerful — version ever made.
But it all comes down to the politics of tone, that ineffable quality that fits the individual ear and heart.
We have built machines for making sounds for as long as we have recognized ourselves as human. We have learned to sculpt in the air, to make noises intricate and precise, ordered and repeatable. Music is extraverbal communication, a language in which that which is inexpressible in words might be conveyed.
Electric guitars work differently from recorders or oboes or their acoustic brethren. They not only make the sound, but they can — in a very real way — become the sound, as the whole instrument vibrates.
It is not just the notes that come from the guitar. There’s a sonic palette of overtones and sympathetic resonances between the strings. You don’t play an electric guitar the same way you play an acoustic guitar; the electrified instrument is more forgiving in its potential for emotionally coherent noisemaking and more complicated and harder to master than its acoustic cousin. There is another dimension to the electric beast. It’s not just pitch and rhythm and timbre, it’s squall and rattle; ghosts wrought by human hands from a machine. E-mail pmartin@arkansasonline. com
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