Wagner's unfinished Ring

Like most folk I'm perplexed by the weekend's developments in Russia, with a significant part of the Wagner Group mercenary force taking two Russian cities and setting out for Moscow only to turn back, leaving us with a confusing media soundscape from Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Progozhin and Russian President Vladimir Putin. It's a bit like an opera...

Act One of the Wagner Ring was the development of the "private army" force and its deployments (to Russa's ends) in Syria and Africa. Act Two was its deployment to Ukraine and significant expansion through recruitment of convicts given five minutes - or maybe as much as ten - to decide whether to sign up in exchange for a pardon after serving, an offer many of them felt they couldn't refuse, whether they believed the promise or not. Act Three was Prigozhin marching a chunk of them a fair way towards Moscow to protest about the Wagner Group being disbanded and/or to put pressure on his president to remove his bete noire, the Defence Minster Sergei Shoigu - and maybe, I wonder, so he could be put in charge of the Russian army himself. The fact that Wagner forces seem to have been the subject of quite a few "friendly fire" hits while serving in Ukraine might have been part of the reason for them being willing to risk going out on a limb and mobilising against their own country. Act Four was the U-turn, with Prigozhin backing down and scuttling off to Belarus in exchange for his forces and himself not being charged with serious criminal offences.

Now Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle has four component operas but I wonder if this cycle has finished, or will there be a fifth act?

The broad concensus seems to be that Putin has been seriously weakened by these events. Clearly, having a private army operating in an adjacent country that turns on you is sub optimal and the very fact that it happened has dented Putin's aura of domestic invincibility. But could Putin yet be considered to have handled it well once the insurrection happened? Wagner Group was getting too powerful and had potential to act out of control; it is now being subsumed into the Russian army as its members have an option to sign a contract for the regular army or join Prigozhin in exile in Belarus. That would appear to put most of Wagner's forces under the control of Shoigu and the regular army leadership. In which case it's not clear how that weakens Putin. For a start it would appear to reduce the risk of an armed insurrection against him. 

All of this and no loss of blood. Regular Russian forces didn't have to shoot at their mercenary compatriots. We can wonder whether they would have done or not. Maybe Putin wonders that too, but it wasn't tested. 

So is he really weaker? He looks it at the moment if only because clearly a significant armed force was acting entirely outside of his control and then because of a strange media silence for 48 hours after his initial statement. The presidential plane flew to St Petersburg on Saturday though we don't know wheher Putin was on it. But we can wonder whether he did a chicken run from Moscow to St Petersburg or his palatial bolt hole on the Black Sea, though he might say he just went home for the weekend. (Apparently he doesn't stay in Moscow much now). We can also wonder if Prigozhin realised his battalion was nowhere near large enough to take Moscow and was headed for disaster (numerically it was much smaller than the regular army forces stationed in Moscow). Or it might have become clear to him that they were not going to be greeted with open arms leading to him being acclaimed as the new president.

I realise all of this is a very western perspective (especially the "no loss of blood" bit) on events we don't much understand. 

For now it's not clear what implications this has for the war in Ukraine, though it can't have done any harm to the Ukrainian cause in the short term if only because of the distraction and the diversion of some forces away from the conflict. 

It's also not clear what implications this has for the next Russian presidential election, due in 2024. For all Putin has established himself as an overwhelmingly powerful leader, his control isn't quite as absolute as in, say, China. Russia has an interesting attachment to at least pretending to have a proper legal system, albeit not one that works in anything like a way that we would consider independent from the executive. But Putin did, for example, stand down as president as required by the Russian constitution after his initial two terms and was nominally prime minister with his placeman Medvedev as president for four years before being relected, probably legitimately if you accept the lack of any opposition allowed to function properly. He then held a referendum enabling amendments to the law allowing him to run for two more terms, potentially until 2036. A curious attachment to due process.

So what next? Will the valkyries (in Norse mythology the choosers of the slain) come for Putin or for Prigozhin and tell them it's time for their soul to go to Valhalla? Will Prigozhin live quietly ever after in Belarus, where Putin can probably make sure he doesn't become an opposition in exile? Or will he find, like Alexei Navalny, that his underpants have been contaminated with novichok or, like Alexander Litvinenko his afternoon tea has been spiked with radioactive polonium?

Actually Putin may be in a stronger position than China's Xi Jinping in some ways. Despite Xi's grip on  the CCP if things got sufficiently shaky I suspect the party is strong enough to tell him "time's up". I don't see anything or anyone in Russia strong enough to say the same to Putin.

And if they could and did it's not clear it would be particularly helpful from our perspective.

Anyway, despite the Ring being some 15 hours long, it seems Richard Wagner cut it short at four acts and we wait for the music to start on the fifth.

Clapton isn't God

"Clapton is God" the famous graffiti said in the 1960s*. And he was for me, along with Jimi Hendrix in 1969. But it struck me the other day that, by my criterion for the best guitarists I've seen (see 28 July 2022 and previous posts in that thread) that no, Clapton isn't the god of the electric guitar. And, dare I say it, possibly he's somewhat over-rated.

Oh sure, he's a brilliant guitarist. And he can come up with great riffs and melodies (Layla and Wonderful Tonight for example). And his extemporised solos on those live Cream albums still sound amazing - if a bit cold and, as Mrs H's would put it, "messy". For me Clapton's best guitar work is on Cream's album Disraeli Gears** which features some fabulously tasty licks and fills which fit the songs perfectly. But nothing that amounts to a killer guitar solo.

So if you want a punchy killer guitar solo that contrasts with but complements the riff in a classic rock song then he's probably not your man.

This thought occurred to me after listening to Jetthro Tull's We Used To Know featuring a superb solo by one of our favourite guitarists (probably Mrs H's all time favourite): Martin Barre. Now Barre, good guitarist though he is, wouldn't be among the names you'll find near the very top of greatest ever guitarist lists in the music mags. And yet I'll stick my neck out (what's new, I hear you say) and posit that the solos on We Used To Know and Aqualung are at least as good as anything Clapton produced in a short(ish) form rock song. 

To be fair Clapton wouldn't necessarily claim he was your man for a concise rock guitar solo. After all he left The Yardbirds after they made their 1964 hit For Your Love because he thought it was too commercial. Musicians, like artists, often do what gives them satisfaction, even if it doesn't lead to platinum discs. On the other hand I remember the words of a leading prog rocker (I suspect it was Robert Fripp) when a journalist made some diparaging remarks about commercial pop music the response was "we'd all write songs like ABBA if we could".

And then I look at Clapton's solo career, listen to him singing Lay Down Sally and Bell Bottom Blues and think - you left the Yardbirds because they were too commercial? Yet you still ended up playing rather limp soft rock?

I realise I'm not quite comparing like with like but if you want to hear a killer guitar break, rather than a great riff, melody or extended solo, execution is secondary to composition, structure and fitting the song. I'd venture that it's hard to beat some of the following

• Nineteen year old Paul Kossoff on Free's All Right Now perhaps matched only, in a pop song, by Scottish guitarist Hugh Burns playing on Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street. Burns played on loads of stuff, including George Michael's Careless Whisper
• Martin Barre on Jethro Tull's We Used To Know (which does use basically the same guitar break twice, but then why not? (see below). And of course Aqualung. You can hear both on youtube. It was once put to Ian Anderson that the Eagles purloined the chord sequence for Hotel California from We Used To Know. And the Eagles did support Tull on a tour of the US in 1972 just before they became mega famous, so would have heard the song. I can't hear the resemblance myself, which isn't surprising as the chord changes happen at half the frequency in Hotel California, which is in 4/4 time compared with 3/4. Anderson pooh poohed the idea saying in an interview "It's not plagiarism. It's just the same chord sequence. It's in a different time signature, different key, different context." He said he'd feel flattered if they'd come across that chord sequence by hearing it in his song. Meanwhile Barre was so nervous when he auditioned for Tull as they were about to make their breakthrough Stand Up album that he couldn't play and blew it. When they didn't select anybody he was offered another shot and did better. He then spent 3 weeks learning all the guitar parts to the songs on Stand Up  before it was recorded. Barre felt he couldn't really play guitar until Aqualung, two albums later. For me it's the other way round and after Aqualung I felt his inspiration seemed to wane. It seems musicians often produce their most creative material while they are still learning. 
• More whimsically perhaps Mick Jones's simple but perfectly composed and executed solo on The Clash's Remote Control (Noted later: Oops! Nothing wrong with the guitar on that but of course I meant Complete Control)
• And, if you're going to use basically the same break twice, Joy Division's Bernard Sumner delivers in full on their punchy song Shadowplay

If you type best guitar solos into Google you get (from "sources across the web") a pretty good list with, ahem, Hotel California; Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower and Purple Haze; Mark Knopfler on Sultans of Swing; a lot of candidates from Led Zep - Heartbreaker, Stairway to Heaven, Since I've Been Loving You (yes!!) and Whole Lotta Love; Steely Dan's Reelin' in the years (another personal favourite), Eddie Van Halen's outstanding effort on Michael Jackson's Beat It; Deep Purple's Highway Star (for which Richie Blackmore composed the solo beforehand, not his normal practice); Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit (which for me is a candidate for an outstanding riff rather than solo, but there you go); Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody and of course, Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb which also has two gorgeous guitar solos. 

Comfortably Numb is arguably verging on a long form solo rather than a guitar break but nevertheless is superb and was voted at number one by Guitar Player magazine's readers in 2021, who also included Eddie Van Halen on Beat It, Sultans of Swing and All Along The Watchtower. It had The Beatles While My Guitar Gently Weeps in the list so Clapton did feature. It also had Steely Dan's Kid Charlemagne from their tremendous 1976 album The Royal Scam. This was the track I chose to audition components for my first serious system at a hifi shop in 1977 and which I barely registered has a guitar solo - it's vaguely jazz influenced and is absolutely immaculate but perhaps limited in excitemement compared to some of the others in this list. 

Sweet Child O' Mine by Guns N' Roses with Slash on guitar also gets a lot of mentions in these lists.

To be fair, quite a few guitar magazine lists include Clapton's Crossroads in addition to lots of the songs mentioned above which feature many times. Far Out magazine has Clapton on Cream's Spoonful as the "best live guitar solo of all time" and I'd find it hard to disagree with that, though my favourite is Neil Young's Like A Hurricane (see post of 7 March 2017). But Clapton doesn't get anything like as many mentions as Page, or Hendrix, with one list having Little Wing, justifiably described as "beautiful" by Del Bromham in his Hendrix tribute track Jimijam, at number one. 

This is of course another question for which there is no answer as it's a matter of opinion. But I still don't think the answer would be that Eric is the all time guitar god.

* No one knew who was painting these graffiti in London in the 60s when Clapton was playing with the Yardirds, though it was assumed to be a fan. But a few years ago Clapton said he thought it was probably a chap associated with the Yardbirds management drumming up publicity. See https://www.express.co.uk/celebrity-news/679055/Rock-legend-Eric-reveals-Clapton-is-God-graffiti-was-stunt

** I read recently that the title for Disraeli Gears came from one of the engineers who thought that was what derailleur gears for a bike were called

The Guitar Player readers list is at https://www.guitarplayer.com/news/the-greatest-guitar-solos-of-all-time

Del Bromham's wonderful Hendrix tribute Jimijam, can be heard at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyR-VIFZG98. I had a 60th birthday do at a pub where Del was playing and this song was part of his set

You can read about Hotel California and We Used to Know at guitarworld.com (Did the Eagles get the "Hotel California" chords from Jethro Tull?) and faroutmagazine.co.uk (How Jethro Tull influenced the Eagles 'Hotel California')