Electric Guitarist Quotes

But since we’re on the topic of identity and narrative voice - here’s an interesting conundrum. You may know that The Correspondence Artist won a Lambda Award. I love the Lambda Literary Foundation, and I was thrilled to win a Lammy. My book won in the category of “Bisexual Fiction.” The Awards (or nearly all of them) are categorized according to the sexual identity of the dominant character in a work of fiction, not the author. I’m not sure if “dominant” is the word they use, but you get the idea. The foregrounded character. In The Correspondence Artist, the narrator is a woman, but you’re never sure about the gender of her lover. You’re also never sure about the lover’s age or ethnicity - these things change too, and pretty dramatically. Also, sometimes when the narrator corresponds with her lover by email, she (the narrator) makes reference to her “hard on.” That is, part of her erotic play with her lover has to do with destabilizing the ways she refers to her own sex (by which I mean both gender and naughty bits). So really, the narrator and her lover are only verifiably “bisexual” in the Freudian sense of the term - that is, it’s unclear if they have sex with people of the same sex, but they each have a complex gender identity that shifts over time. Looking at the various possible categorizations for that book, I think “Bisexual Fiction” was the most appropriate, but better, of course, would have been “Queer Fiction.” Maybe even trans, though surely that would have raised some hackles. So, I just submitted I’m Trying to Reach You for this year’s Lambda Awards and I had to choose a category. Well. As I said, the narrator identifies as a gay man. I guess you’d say the primary erotic relationship is with his boyfriend, Sven. But he has an obsession with a weird middle-aged white lady dancer on YouTube who happens to be me, and ultimately you come to understand that she is involved in an erotic relationship with a lesbian electric guitarist. And this romance isn’t just a titillating spectacle for a voyeuristic narrator: it turns out to be the founding myth of our national poetics! They are Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman! Sorry for all the spoilers. I never mind spoilers because I never read for plot. Maybe the editor (hello Emily) will want to head plot-sensitive readers off at the pass if you publish this paragraph. Anyway, the question then is: does authorial self-referentiality matter? Does the national mythos matter? Is this a work of Bisexual or Lesbian Fiction? Is Walt trans? I ended up submitting the book as Gay (Male) Fiction. The administrator of the prizes also thought this was appropriate, since Gray is the narrator. And Gray is not me, but also not not me, just as Emily Dickinson is not me but also not not me, and Walt Whitman is not my lover but also not not my lover. Again, it’s a really queer book, but the point is kind of to trip you up about what you thought you knew about gender anyway.

Young has a personal relationship with electricity. In Europe, where the electrical current is sixty cycles, not fifty, he can pinpoint the fluctuation --- by degrees. It dumbfounded Cragg. "He'll say, 'Larry, there's a hundred volts coming out of the wall, isn't there?' I'll go measure it, and yeah, sure --- he can hear the difference." Shakey's innovations are everywhere. Intent on controlling amp volume from his guitar instead of the amp, Young had a remote device designed called the Whizzer. Guitarists marvel at the stomp box that lies onstage at Young's feet: a byzantine gang of effects that can be utilized without any degradation to the original signal. Just constructing the box's angular red wooden housing to Young's extreme specifications had craftsmen pulling their hair out. Cradled in a stand in front of the amps is the fuse for the dynamite, Young's trademark ax--Old Black, a '53 Gold Top Les Paul some knot-head daubed with black paint eons ago. Old Black's features include a Bigsby wang bar, which pulls strings and bends notes, and Firebird picking so sensitive you can talk through it. It's a demonic instrument. "Old black doesn't sound like any other guitar," said Cragg, shaking his head. For Cragg, Old Black is a nightmare. Young won't permit the ancient frets to be changed, likes his strings old and used, and the Bigsby causes the guitar to go out of tune constantly. "At Sound check, everything will work great. Neil picks up the guitar, and for some reason that's when things go wrong.

...but Freddie was a very sweet man. He was a good arbitrator. Chris and [Jeremy Gallop, guitarist of Sour Milk Sea] used to argue like hell. I used to have fights with the bass player—and get beaten up—and Fred was always the one who’d cool down the situation with diplomacy. On stage, Freddie became quite a different personality—he was as electric as he was in later life. Otherwise he was quite calm. I’ll always remember him being strangely quiet and very well-mannered. Extremely well-mannered, in fact. My mum liked him.

While this signifier can be difficult to pin down with precision, it can clearly be heard in the records of Duane Eddy and many other guitarists of the period. It usually involves a relatively nondistorted electric guitar timbre articulated with a strong attack and a melody played on the lower strings. Reverberation is ubiquitous, and almost equally common were echo, amplifier tremolo, and use of the guitar’s vibrato bar. This overall guitar sound is often called a Fender sound, but that is a bit misleading, since Gretsch guitars were equally specialized for the purpose, and many other brands were also used. What makes the twang guitar interesting in topical terms is that it not only signified the western topic but also was key to a linked set of genres that intersect one another in complex ways: western, spy, and surf. Because these were all signified by overlapping musical features and in turn resemble one another in some of their broader connotations, we could speak of a twang guitar continuum: a range of topics that coalesced only shortly before psychedelia and were cognate with it in a variety of ways. Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida point out that the twang guitar, often in a minor mode with a flat seventh, was a common factor between spaghetti western and Bond/spy scores in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I would add surf guitar to the list, with its sonic experimentation and general relationship to fun, escape, and exoticism: “[The twang guitar] probably owes some of its immediate success as a spy sound to its similarity with various pre-rock ‘Viennese intrigue’ sounds like Anton Karas’s Third Man zither licks (1949). But in the 1962–64 period that produced The Virginian (1962), Dr. No (1963) and Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964), steely Fender guitar was well on its way to becoming an all-purpose excitement/adventure timbre” (Tagg and Clarida 2003, 367).

Numerous other researchers have also been fascinated by how we form connections. As Sievers began reading science journals, he learned that in 2012, scholars at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany had studied the brains of guitarists playing Scheidler’s Sonata in D Major. When the musicians played their guitars separately, with each person focused on their own musical score, their neural activity looked dissimilar. But when they segued into a duet, the electrical pulses within their craniums began to synchronize. To the researchers, it appeared as if the guitarists’ minds had merged. What’s more, that linkage often flowed through their bodies: They frequently began breathing at similar rates, their eyes dilated in tandem, their hearts began to beat in similar patterns. Frequently even the electrical impulses along their skin would synchronize. Then, when they stopped playing together—as their scores diverged or they veered into solos—the “between-brain synchronization disappeared completely,” the scientists wrote.

And I wish that the electric current could be shut off from guitars and instead connected to chairs to which I would personally tie all guitarists.

Unfolding according to the contemplative logic of their lyrical orbits, Astral Weeks’s songs unhooked themselves from pop’s dependence on verse/chorus structure, coasting on idling rhythms, raging and subsiding with the ebb and flow of Morrison’s soulful scat. The soundworld – a loose-limbed acoustic tapestry of guitar, double bass, flute, vibraphone and dampened percussion – was unmistakably attributable to the calibre of the musicians convened for the session: Richard Davis, whose formidable bass talents had shadowed Eric Dolphy on the mercurial Blue Note classic Out to Lunch; guitarist Jay Berliner had previous form with Charles Mingus; Connie Kay was drummer with The Modern Jazz Quartet; percussionist/vibesman Warren Smith’s sessionography included Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Nat King Cole, Sam Rivers and American folk mystics Pearls Before Swine. Morrison reputedly barely exchanged a word with the personnel, retreating to a sealed sound booth to record his parts and leaving it to their seasoned expertise to fill out the space. It is a music quite literally snatched out of the air.

well formed. ‘Angi’, Graham’s most famous composition, first appeared on 3/4 AD, a 1961 Topic EP split with blues guitarist Alexis Korner. Based around a deceptively easy four-chord sequence, the plucking right hand appears to do the work of a jazz trio, the thumb maintaining a steady bass pulse while the rest of the fingers tweak out the tune’s ruminative syncopations. Combined

Like Miles Davis, Graham often used to turn his back on his audiences. This was primarily between songs, while he was retuning his guitars. For Graham, in the early 1960s, was privy to a secret alternative tuning system known as DADGAD, which he was reluctant to share with any rival guitarists in the crowd. He began using it around 1962–3, on a trip to the bohemian Beat capital Tangier, where he spent six months and earned his keep by working in a snack booth selling hash cakes to locals. The raw Gnaoua trance music preserved in Morocco’s town squares and remote Rif mountain villages stretched back thousands of years, and Graham was hypnotised by the oud, a large Arabic lute which resembles a bisected pear (the word ‘lute’ itself derives from the Arabic ‘al-ud’) and has been identified in Mesopotamian wall paintings 5,000 years old. The paradigm of Eastern music, defining its difference from the West, is the maqam, which uses a microtonal system that blasts open the Western eight-note octave into fifty-three separate intervals. DADGAD is not one of the tunings commonly used on the eleven-string oud, but Graham found that tuning a Western guitar that way made it easier to slip into jam sessions with Moroccan players. The configuration allows scales and chords to be created without too much complicated fingering; its doubled Ds and As and open strings often lead to more of a harp-like, droning sonority than the conventional EADGBE.