This is some kind of milestone, for sure. There are now guitars, well, one at least, worth as much as Stradivarius violins. David Gilmour of Pink Floyd held an auction of his guitars on Thursday and netted $21 million. The highest-selling item was his famous black Stratocaster.
But the star attraction was Gilmour’s legendary Black Strat — it was snatched off the block by Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay for $3,975,000 — setting a new world record for any guitar sold at auction, Christie’s said.
The is the axe heard on Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” “Money” and many others, Guitar World’s Jackson Maxwell reported.
“The guitar went through many modifications over the years, which only added to its mystique,” Maxwell said. “With its battle-scarred surface, it wouldn’t be hard to believe this guitar had been to The Dark Side of the Moon and back. And in some ways, it had, appearing on that album, as well as many others in the Floyd catalog.”
He is donating the funds to the climate change charity ClientEarth. Oh, well...
I was a fan of Pink Floyd in the early days of Ummagumma. Here is a song from that album that seems appropriate:
The sad news yesterday was the announcement that Gibson Brands was filing for bankruptcy.
Gibson, which makes its Gibson-brand guitars in Tennessee and Montana, employs about 875 people on the instrument side of the business.
The company is particularly dominant in the market for high-end guitars, with market share of more than 40% of electric guitars priced more than $2,000. Gibson also makes instruments under a number of brand names including Dobro, Epiphone, Kramer and Tobias. The company also owns such brands as Slingerland drums and Wurlitzer pianos.
But it hasn’t been enough to overcome the debt the company took on to finance acquisitions of home-entertainment and audio-equipment makers years ago. Among businesses the company has added are some of Royal Philips’s home-entertainment systems, TEAC home audio electronics and Onkyo stereos.
Under a restructuring pact filed with Gibson’s chapter 11 bankruptcy petition, a group of bondholders—among them funds managed by KKR & Co., Silver Point Capital LP and Melody Capital Partners LP—will take control of Gibson’s musical-instrument business.
Follow the link above to the Wall Street Journal article that has a photo gallery of famous musicians who played Gibson guitars. Such as B. B. King:
I guess that the news isn't so bad. The people that acquired the company in 1986 made a lot of business missteps including with guitar design and those mistakes are coming back to haunt them. The new owners, a shadowy investment firm, will hopefully put the company back on course again. And yes, you will still be able to buy Gibson guitars. Way back when I played electric guitar, I owned an old Les Paul model from the 1950s. Never should have sold it!
Let's listen to B. B. King showing us how it's done on his Gibson named "Lucille":
There's a video clip making the rounds on YouTube that is kind of interesting, though perhaps not for the obvious reasons. A reader sent me the link to this article on it. Their take is "guitarist makes history". Well sure, in the Guinness Book of World Records sense. It is an impressive bit of virtuosity and musicianship to put together the key melodic licks from the last sixty years of rock and roll and execute them this smoothly. We can see what his hands are doing, but a lot of the distinctiveness of each 'riff' depends on the tone-color and electronics. He has a bunch of foot pedals out of sight of the camera and adds in or removes various effects such as fuzz, wah-wah, tremolo and others--probably some that I don't even know about since I haven't played electric guitar for a very long time. For one lick he picks up a tubular slide, which was a very common feature of the early--pre-electric--blues guitar. I used to have a 1953 Gibson Les Paul--Alex Chadwick, the guitarist doing the video, is playing on a 1958 Fender Stratocaster. Here is the video:
There seem to be several other "100 Riffs" clips on YouTube that I haven't investigated. What I find interesting about this is that it offers a cross-section of typical 'riffs' in pop music. Most of these take their structure from blues--you will probably notice that the same gestures keep coming back again and again. These are mostly short phrases and, in the absence of the bass and drums, tend to show their weakness as melodic ideas, being often fragmentary and with incoherent melodic shape. There are a few licks that have a strong harmonic component--one in particular uses secondary dominants, but I forget which. Occasionally a lick will recall traditional harmony, especially some of the very earliest ones. A bit of jazz harmony comes in now and then. Notice how often a simple melodic idea is sometimes harmonized with bare 4ths or 5ths.
If you were teaching a course in popular music, this video would be an excellent resource.
UPDATE: After listening all the way through the clip above I found myself humming one of the licks for the rest of the day. Which one? Not "Day Tripper", oddly enough, which is an occasional 'earworm' of mine. (An 'earworm' is a melody that keeps circling round your brain. Usually the only way I know to dislodge one is to hum the subject of a Bach fugue. That usually gets rid of it.) No, the lick that kept bubbling in my brain for the rest of the day was "Layla". I started wondering why and I think, when I get a chance, I'll put up a post analyzing the "Layla" riff. But I don't think any of us will be too surprised if the best guitar lick of the last sixty years turns out to be by Eric Clapton!
The electric guitar is a fairly new instrument. It was invented and popularized by Les Paul (1915 - 2009). The early electric guitar, essentially just an acoustic guitar with a pickup, had problems with feedback which Les Paul solved in 1940 by creating a solid body electric guitar. This basic design is the one still used: the body has no real acoustic properties, so won't feed back. Instead, the sound is a function of the strings and pickups. By 1952 the Gibson company was selling a commercial version, the Gibson "Les Paul":
Les Paul with an early prototype in 1947
The six string electric guitar proved to be enormously successful though it took a few more years before they perfected the necessary amplifier systems. It is probably better to think of the electric guitar as a music system including the guitar itself, a selection of foot pedals to modify the sound in various ways, and an amplification system that not only sends the sound out to the audience, but also modifies the sound.
The first generation of electric guitar players were probably so delighted that they could finally be heard alongside brass and drums, that they didn't do too much experimenting, though Les Paul is credited with quite a few innovations in multi-tracking. Here is what the first generation of electric rock n roll guitar players sounded like. Keith Richards makes a few cameos in this Chuck Berry clip, but I think you get the idea:
The early George Harrison comes out of this kind of playing with some "rockabilly" influence from Carl Perkins as well:
Here is George Harrison with a smooth, jazz-influenced solo (at the 1:08 mark):
Another influence that was to become important in the 60s was that of an earlier, non-electric, tradition from the black blues singers and guitarists of the 30s and later. Here is Robert Johnson, the most famous of these:
This kind of blues just kept being played and after the electric guitar came along, the guitar solo got to be a lot more important. Here is B. B. King, one of the great electric blues guitar players:
So take the rock n roll foundation, add in the blues influence, give the players some new sounds with the wah-wah and fuzz pedals, add in the experimenting with psychedelic drugs and you get a positive explosion of creative innovation from 1966 well into the 70s. One important figure is Eric Clapton, who was most influenced by the blues. Here he is at the beginning of his career:
And here he is using a wah-wah pedal a few years later with Cream on a song from the album Disraeli Gears:
That gives you a nice feel for the 60s. Incoherent lyrics--and camera work, probably due to drugs! But notice also the big amplifiers by Marshall and the sound of the wah-wah on guitar. Towards the end they get into the kind of inspired, rhythmically-complex improvisation that Cream was famous for. Eric Clapton's most famous guitar solo was one that for many years he got no credit for. When George Harrison needed some very special guitar playing on his song "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" he asked his friend Eric to sit in, anonymously. Here is the result:
Eric Clapton is certainly a virtuoso and on electric guitar that means not only being able to use and control all the electronics, but also to use the long sustain to develop new kinds of vibrato not possible on acoustic instruments. But he is also a great musician and is able to use the resources of the electric guitar to create and shape solos that are powerfully expressive. He uses tone-color, volume, bent notes and other devices all constructed on the foundation of the blues, to create some remarkable solos that are really only comparable to the cadenzas of opera singers of the past.
Another great guitarist developing a new style built on the blues was Jimi Hendrix, a more spectacular soloist than Eric Clapton, but whose career ended prematurely. Here he is with an iconic song of the 60s, "Purple Haze":
That song also demonstrates some of the problems that began to pop up. As the music of the 60s left its roots behind and began experimenting with new techniques, it also began to become incoherent and self-indulgent. We see a small example here in the guitar solo from 1:30 to 1:40 where nothing relates to the rest of the song. Wild, instinctive and self-indulgent improvisation became the typical failing of the later 60s. Here is an example:
I can only repeat what the Emperor Joseph said to Mozart: "My dear fellow, there are simply too many notes!"
The era of the big electric guitar solo didn't last a long time. Bands like The Police and the Talking Heads largely banished the guitar solo and that continues with contemporary bands like Radiohead. Still, there was that golden period from the mid-60s to the mid-70s when it all started to go to seed, when the electric guitar solo strode the earth like a colossus. Here is a late example, where the guitar sounds very much like some ancient dinosaur coming to life. The solo is from 3:10 to 3:42 and the end, with the rising unisons, probably is a reference to Jimi Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower" where he does the same thing.
The guitarist on "Beat It" also didn't get credited--nor paid! It was Eddie Van Halen. I probably should mention some other great guitarists who came along a bit later. Prince is certainly one. Just ignore the video for this song from the movie "Purple Rain" and listen to what you can do with an over-driven Stratocaster from around 3:40 to the end:
One last great guitarist is one who also died tragically young but seemed at times to be almost the reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix. Here is Stevie Ray Vaughan doing an instrumental version of the Hendrix tune "Little Wing":
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