Wednesday, May 07, 2003

The Case For Atheism

Brad Zellar came up with his baker’s dozen of greatest guitarists, and I considered doing the same. But I realized my list would be sorta predictable in the usual rock-and-or-guitar-heroes kinda way. Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Eddie Van Halen, Jimi Hendrix, probably Steve Cropper to outflank your Mark Knopfler. I also realized that the whole thing would eventually descend into a Jeff Beck Over Eric Clapton exercise, so I figured it would be best to drop the list and just hack out the Beck Over Clapton argument. Eventually I admitted that this guitarist vs. that guitarist is six-string fanwankdom at its worst, so I just decided to type up the bare notes of my rant and share them with you (i.e. Blogging 101) and then commence to blasting Beck-era Yardbirds on headphones whilst playing my Pabst hand. Hence:

… check the Yardbirds with Beck vs. the Yardbirds with Clapton. Like the very first notes on the first Beck track on The Yardbirds Ultimate! collection, “I’m Not Talking” – it’s menacing, arrogant and …

… the band was better with Beck, he was like Michael Jordan – making all the players around him that much better. Clapton left the ‘Birds to go become God, but do you want: 1) white-boy English blues, or do you want: 2) “Shapes of Things”, “You’re a Better Man Than I”, “Heart Full of Soul”, and “Over Under Sideways Down”? Those were tunes that pushed the rock ‘n’ roll envelope in a blistering, cocky way …

… Beck was all about the future: Feedback, distortion, vision, making your guitar sound like a distorted sitar, making it into a train whistle, experimenting but never getting in the way of simply blowing folks away in three-point-five-minutes. Clapton was all about the past and …

… don’t give me the whole “Beck is about technique, while Clapton is about feeling” bullshit because who are to you to judge Beck on what he feels while creating his twisted attack? What’s more important to me is the effect: Clapton’s blues reworkings are pleasant (at best), but Beck’s noise hits you in the gut …

… “style is character” – Joan Didion …

… since when are power chords, feedback and distortion NOT the result of feeling? In “I’m a Man” Beck brutally, brilliantly treats his guitar as a percussion instrument and I’ll take the punk attitude of that over the …

… then there’s “The Nazz Are Blue” – in the first guitar solo, Beck plays a couple rote (though of course bitingly distorted) blues notes, then abandons the been-there-done-that of THE BLUES and simply plays a dropping note of feedback that goes on for seconds. The only word I can think of to describe it is perverse and I guarantee you that Clapton does not possess the genius or guts to ever come up with …

… Beck makes his guitar sound like trains, bombs, tanks. He kicks ass, takes names. Clapton is reverent. Big freakin deal …

… in the thirty-five-plus years since the Yardbirds, Beck has learned one thing that Clapton never has: I have no business singing