Back to guitarists - this is going on longer than Brexit!
I'm very fond of REM and their fantastic back catalogue of albums. And the work of their guitarist, Peter Buck. Predictably I got heavily into them with their first really big selling album, Out Of Time, which Wikipedia notes changed their status from that of a cult band to a massive international act. Though I rapidly caught up with Green, the previous album, which I think is even stronger if a bit less commercial. And their earlier albums - there were 5 before Green - contain some fabulous nuggets.
Driving around Cornwall on holiday with our then barely adolescent sons in the mid-1990s REM were the one band all of us could all agree to have playing on the stereo. Though Mrs H has always found them a bit gloomy and still makes that gesture of drawing a knife across her wrists whenever Everybody Hurts comes on, even though I've often told her it's meant to be an uplifting song:
When your day is long
And the night
The night is yours alone
When you're sure you've had enough
Of this life
Well hang on
Don't let yourself go
'Cause everybody cries
And everybody hurts sometimes
Though my favourite of this genre, from Green, is World Leader Pretend with lyrics which chime with anyone who has a habit of beating themselves up (not that I'm as good at this as some other people I know well.....):
I sit at my table and wage war on myself
It seems like it's all, it's all for nothing
I know the barricades
And I know the mortar in the wall breaks
I recognize the weapons, I use them well
This is my mistake
Let me make it good
I raised the wall and I will be the one to knock it down
I've a rich understanding of my finest defenses
......
I recognize the weapons
I've practiced them well, I fitted them myself
....
This is my world and I am world leader pretend
This is my life
And this is my time
I have been given the freedom
To do as I see fit
It's high time I've razed the walls that I've constructed
If you've never heard this track I commend it highly.
We saw REM en famille at Cardiff Millennium Stadium in 2005. I'm not a fan of stadium gigs but its was a grand day out. A lot of REM tracks use feedback but a personal favourite is EBow The Letter which, slightly surprisingly to me, recorded their next highest UK singles chart position. I had no idea what the song was about until I recently resorted to t'inernet: a letter Michael Stipe wrote to his friend River Phoenix but couldn't send as Phoenix had died from an overdose. (Yes, I know - more cheerful stuff eh?). So he had to send the letter by another means: an ebow. No, I didn't know what one of those was either, though I should have done. An ebow is an electromagnetic field-generating device that induces sustained vibration in an electric guitarstring, creating a violin-like effect. Which is why I first thought Ebow The Letter started with a cello until I realised the same sound shifts into echoing feedback at the end of the song. At the time I had no idea how Peter Buck did it.
I should have done because another of my favourite guitarists, Robert Fripp the ever present behind the many different versions of King Crimson, is a great exponent of the ebow if you believe what you read on the internet. Or is he? Well, if you google what an ebow is you rapidly get offered lots of youtube videos of King Crimson playing live. There was no sign that he was using such a device when I saw Fripp and Crimso twice in the early 70s, though it is small hand held device which the guitarist holds over the strings instead of picking them. However, the ebow, a brand name of a Californian company, though invented in 1969 wasn't marketed until 1976 several years after Fripp had established his very individual playing style. And I've looked at several of those videos and Fripp definitely isn't using one on any I've seen. So how does Fripp get his very characteristic sound which you can hear not just on King Crimson recordings, but David Bowie's Heroes and my favourite Blondie track, Fade Away And Radiate?
Well his axe of choice is a Gibson: fairly standard, though like many guitarists of the halcyon days of rock he prefers vintage equipment. He started out playing 1950s Gibson Les Pauls. Later Gibson made a signature version for him - the Crimson Guitars Robert Fripp signature, made on a Les Paul body. He does use other guitars including the Roland guitar synthesiser. He is naturally left handed but plays right handed. And was supposedly tone deaf aged 11 (yes, I know, I know: that explains the raucous ending to 21st Century Schizoid Man and a few other Crimson tracks). And he always plays sitting down. Now a lot of acoustic guitarists do that, but I've never seen another electric guitar player doing it. Fripp always sits on a kind of barstool. A 1974 edition of Guitar Player called him "the guitarist who sits on stage".
The one thing he doesn't use is an ebow to get the sustain and feedback he creates on those classic King Crimson tracks from Fripp's most productive era - 7 studio albums between 1969 and 1974. As well as playing most of his early stuff on 1950s guitars, Fripp has said* that he uses a "small pedalboard with volume, wah-wah and fuzz". The volume pedal he used until 1981 was the first he ever bought in 1967, the cheapest one he could get at the time. He also always used old fuzz boxes. By 1972 he was experimenting with tape loops using twin Revox tape machines and collaborating with people who would custom build kit for him, incorporting his ancient volume pedal and fuzz boxes.
But what about the haunting guitar line that hovers above the mix on Heroes suddenly changing pitch periodically? I read that Bowie's co-writer Brian Eno said when they invited Fripp in to play on the track they bounced him, giving him hardly any time to hear the backing track before recording, to put him on his mettle. But producer Tony Visconti said Fripp only had the weekend, so the limited time was due to Fripp's diary. And he definitely didn't use an ebow, he used "pitched feedback" by standing (so he doesn't always sit!) in different places around the studio**. They made three recordings and they all thought the third one nailed it. Then Visconti decided to play all three together and, to everyone's amazement, they synchronised to produce the version used on the record.
In another interview*** Visconti said:
Everyone who's played the song with Bowie since then has had to use an E-bow to duplicate it, but Fripp had a technique in those days where he measured the distance between the guitar and the speaker where each note would feed back. For instance, an 'A' would feed back maybe at about four feet from the speaker, whereas a 'G' would feed back maybe three and a half feet from it. He had a strip that they would place on the floor, and when he was playing the note 'F' sharp he would stand on the strip's 'F' sharp point and 'F' sharp would feed back better. He really worked this out to a fine science, and we were playing this at a terrific level in the studio, too. It was very, very loud, and all the while he was playing these notes - that beautiful overhead line - Eno was turning the dials and creating a new envelope and just playing with the filter bank. We did three takes of that, and although one take would sound very patchy, three takes had all of these filter changes and feedback blending into that very smooth, haunting, overlaying melody which you hear."
Indeed, some sources**** say Fripp has never used an ebow.
Heroes was 46th greatest ever song in a Rolling Stone magazine listing and 15th greatest in a similar NME list. Yet it only reached number 12 in the charts on original release, which just goes to show how some songs grow to achieve their status over time.
Now I didn't realise at the time that it was Fripp playing on Heroes though why it wasn't obvious to me I can't imagine. Fripp also guested for Blondie in 1978 on Fade Away And Radiate - as noted above my favourite Blondie song and this time I did realise it was Fripp when I heard it.
Somewhere in the ether (probably Wikipedia!) I read this description of Fripp's guitar technique:
"unlike most rock guitarists of his era... is not blues-based but rather influenced by avant-garde jazz and European classical music#. He combines rapid alternate picking and crosspicking with motifs employing whole-tone or diminished pitch structures and sixteenth-note patterns for long stretches in a form called moto perpetuo (perpetual motion". (I don't know what most of this means either, but if you listen he uses a lot of sustain and the notes flow into each other).
and
"He developed what he called a 'new standard tuning'."
(Hmm, that explains some of the stranger riffs...)
Fripp was offered a teaching position at the American Society for Continuous Education (ASCE) in West Virginia in 1984. He had been involved with the ASCE since 1978, eventually serving on its board of directors, and had long been considering the idea of teaching guitar. His course, Guitar Craft, was begun in 1985 and ran for 25 years.
Fripp's was probably the most virtuoso guitar performance that I have seen. I can confirm that he didn't produce sounds then by moving around the stage as he stayed plonked on his barstool. The songs that live in my memory from the first gig I saw, at Manchester's Free Trade Hall in 1971 or 1972, were the encores. For two reasons: firstly it was well known that Crimson did not do encores. Fripp had often said in interviews "how do you follow 21st Century Schizoid Man?". So as soon as the deafening crescendo finished me and a buddy started making our way out of the building. Fortunately we were up with the gods in the third tier balcony so, as we were on the steps at the front of the building, we heard them come back on and dashed back into the stalls. I was a dedicated reader of the music press at the time and this change of policy in what was Crimson's first tour in some time was an unexpected surprise. The wonderful bonus came with the answer to Fripp's question - do a couple of acoustic tracks. So it was they played the delightful and haunting Cadence and Cascade and Lady of the Dancing Water and hearing these confirmed to me that, like Page, Fripp is a master of the instrument in both its main forms, even if he rarely plays acoustic live.
Peter Buck is a fine guitarist but he's not on my shortlist. For me Robert Fripp is a very special guitarist and he joins David Gilmour and Jimmy Page on my shortlist. Which will get one name longer yet.
* https://www.elephant-talk.com/wiki/Interview_with_Robert_Fripp_in_Guitar_Player
** https://originalfuzz.com/blogs/magazine/84621252-how-robert-fripp-recorded-the-guitar-line-on-david-bowies-heroes
*** https://www.thegearpage.net/board/index.php?threads/bowie-fripp-and-heroes.930892/
**** http://et.stok.ca/articles/1020-18.html
# There's a lot of classical stuff plagiarised in the early King Crimson material, notably Holst's Mars on The Devil's Triangle. But then as Ian Anderson once said when we saw Jethro Tull, it has the advantage of being long out of copyright.
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