When it comes to guitar sound, Jimi Hendrix is more or less the alpha and omega. Oh yeah, I know that there have been other guitarists who have built a whole lot on what he did. But he’s the guy who really started us on this path where the guitar was something more than just a musical instrument. It probably isn’t a coincidence that he came around at the same time that the Moog really started to enter popular music.

What is there to say about Jimi Hendrix? Really, there isn’t much that I can add. I do think that people tend to forget just how experimental those first few albums were. They are amazing. And I can only imagine what they must have sounded like at the time. When I was introduced to them when I first went to college, they blew me away and I had grown up listening to plenty of people who were ripping him off to one degree or another.

I’d like to highlight something that doesn’t exactly speak to the full complexity of his work, “All Along The Watchtower,” off his third album, Electric Ladyland. It is, of course, a Bob Dylan tune. But Hendrix makes it so much more. And it shows that he could play a straight rock guitar solo as well as anyone. It also shows his absolute mastery of the wah-wah pedal. You don’t much hear that kind of total control of an instrument ever. It’s almost like listening to the very best classical music. And I fully expect that it will still be admired in hundreds of years.

When I was young, my favorite guitarist (by far) was David Gilmour. That was probably because he is one of the few lead guitar players who thinks in terms of melody. Most guitarists get too lost in scales and not much more. I believe after Roger Waters used his inner pain to banish all other songwriters from Pink Floyd, Gilmour was still given songwriting credit based purely on the basis of his guitar solos. See, for example, “Dogs” off a fairly unlovable album, Animals.

Here is David Gilmour with Richard Wright (who Waters threw out of the band — as you can see, I have a bit of an attitude toward Waters) performing “Comfortably Numb” off The Wall. It’s a great performance:

Okay. I’m willing to admit when I’ve made a mistake. And I’ve made a mistake with this poorly considered week of sound-oriented guitarists. So I’m going to finish out the week with guitarists who aren’t necessarily so into sound (although all electric rock guitar is a lot about sound). I’m just going to go with some guitarists who I admire. One of them is Dick Wagner. Another is Steve Hunter.

They are probably best known for their work with producer Bob Ezrin (one of my all time favorites — one of the unsung greats of rock music). In this capacity, they worked with acts like Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, and even Kiss. Well, Wagner played the lead guitar on the typically stupid Kiss song, Flaming Youth.

You can hear the two of them play together on a bunch of Alice Cooper albums. Dick Wagner was particularly close to him. But I thought we would listen to the two of them off the beginning of Lou Reed’s album Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal. They played so beautifully together. This intro — before “Sweet Jane” — was written by Hunter. I think Reed especially sucks at this period where he was addicted to speed. But the band is so great that it doesn’t much matter.

Today, we come to the guitarist I was most thinking of when I started the week talking about guitarists who were focused on sound: David Howell Evans — better known as The Edge of the band U2. I’m not a huge fan of the band or even of The Edge as a guitarist. But he is a great guitarist and he is an even greater sculptor of sound. I think of him as the Brian Eno of the guitar.

What we have here is a collection of featured guitar parts from him on eleven different U2 songs. As I’ve noted, I’m not at home, so I’m not going to the trouble of making sure the following list is correct. But of the songs I know, it is right:

1. 11 O’Clock Tick Tock
2. Sunday Bloody Sunday
3. New Year’s Day
4. Bullet the Blue Sky
5. Until the End of The World
6. The Fly
7. Mysterious Ways
8. Love Is Blindness
9. Please
10. Miracle Drug
11. Unknown Caller

It’s pretty amazing stuff. At the same time, it isn’t really my kind of stuff. I’m not that into sound. But I greatly admire it. And The Edge has been enormously influential. There are now two generations of guitarists who his thinking totally dominates. It’s pretty amazing, especially coming from such an unassuming fellow.

Update

I just found this article, The Top 5: Overrated Guitarists. It contained this, “Most sensible critics see the iconic U2 guitarist for what he is: a great sonic pioneer who turned out to be the perfect receptacle for Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’ sonic experimentation.” I had never really thought much about the guy, so I was pleased to hear that my take on him was actually widely shared.

I’ve long felt that Frank Zappa was one of the most underrated guitarists of all time. But it has only been over the last decade or so that I really began to appreciate his later work. When I was younger, I tended to miss what he did. Now, its brilliance seems self-evident.

In 1981, he released a double album of instrumental tunes called, Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar. He eventually went on to release two followups. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this. I think most people recognize the brilliance of Frank Zappa. It’s sad that we lost him so young.

Here is a nice pseudo-reggae tune, “Treacherous Cretins”:

I’ve decided to just run through some guitarists I admire. But not just any guitarists. Last week I did guitarists I admired: acoustic blues guitarists. I want to focus now on electric guitar players with a focus on people who craft sound as well as music. Today, I’ve picked Joe Satriani. Now he isn’t such a sound craftsman. But I do love the sounds he makes. But mostly he’s just really good without a lot of nonsense. He keeps the focus on the music.

Well, I’ll admit: live he can become a bit much. But that’s what you expect from a jazz musician. And that is basically what Joe Satriani is. It’s just that he insists on not playing jazz. He is a lot like Frank Zappa. They are guys who I think want (wanted) to play jazz but know (knew) where the money was. Regardless, Satriani’s music has a jazz fusion feel to it. But it’s missing the harmonic complexity to really delight me.

Still, it’s hard not to listen to him play just about anything and not sit in awe. Music is interesting in that an instrument in the wrong hands just is noise. And that’s especially true on the guitar. In the hands of someone like Joe Satriani, it sounds like he was born attached to it — like he’s singing rather than playing.

Anyway, here is probably the first song of his I ever noticed, “Always With Me, Always With You” off his second album, Surfing with the Alien. It appeals to me more than his hard rocking numbers. Because I’m an old guy now. But really, how can you not love this, except that it was once overplayed:

I’m at a loss as to what to do for music this week. The truth is that my day job is taking a lot of time. This is good and bad. There’s been a lot of interesting stuff. But also, my boss asked me to write a resource page about XML. I can’t escape the feeling that she gets a slight thrill out of giving me projects that are nearly impossible. Right before Christmas, she had me write a thousand words about SMIL. I know you haven’t heard about it (unless I’ve complained earlier), because it’s a project that kind of started and ended 15 years ago without ever working quite right. All of these projects are difficult for different reasons. XML is hard because it is either trivial or enormously complicated. In order to really understand XML, you have to understand XSLT, and so on. Not that I don’t love it. But when you start with a blank screen, it is very lonely. (The reason I, an editor, write these things is because I’m the only one in the company who can, apparently. So lonely indeed.)

Anyway, I’m going to start with Adrian Belew and see how it goes. I’m not much of a fan. I admire him, of course. I especially loved the work that he did on the best Talking Heads album Remain in Light. And the song “The Lone Rhinoceros” has been going through my head for days. It’s off his first solo album, Lone Rhino. I do rather like the rhyme of species with feces. But the main rhyme offends my sensibilities: “I’m the lone rhinoceros; there ain’t one hell of a lots of us.” If he had just used “lot” instead of “lots” it would be fine. And the rest of the lyrics are really quite clever.

More important, there is something amazingly compelling about the song. It isn’t just guitar processing. I love the rhythm section. It kind of reminds me of another Talking Heads album, Fear of Music. So here’s the song. I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow. Maybe another Adrian Belew song. Or maybe Joe Satriani.

For many years, I have been fascinated by the blue duo Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley. They recorded four songs in 1930 and two the following, which are classics to people like me who love all that old blues music we associate with the Mississippi Delta. In addition to it being really unique in that here you have two great blues singers and guitar players working together, there was the fact that we didn’t know anything about them. And I did look into it. But unlike Robert Johnson who we at least have lots of legends about, there was nothing about these two. But then I found this amazing article by John Jeremiah Sullivan in The New York Times magazine, The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie. It was subtitled, “On the trail of the phantom women who changed American music and then vanished without a trace.”

If you are interested in this music or the period or just the work that ethnomusicologists do, stop reading right now and go read the article. It is fantastic. A great mystery is unraveled right before you. But I will warn you: at the end, you will want more. It is a very long article, however. I’ll give you the lowdown here. And the first thing I should probably do is introduce you to Geeshie and Elvie. Although most people who are into this kind of music would totally disagree, their most accessible tune is their version of Luke Jordan’s “Pick Poor Robin Clean.” I also think it is the best introduction to them:

One thing that is most interesting about this whole story is the centrality of Mack McCormick, an ethnomusicologist who knew more about this period than anyone else in the world. From the age of 16, he’s investigated 888 counties in the south. He is now 83 years old when the article appeared with tens of thousands of pages of interviews, photos, and much else documented. It was his life’s work, yet most of it has never been released because, having collected the data he found himself under the crushing burden of trying to make sense of it all.

What’s interesting to me is that I know of McCormick because I went through a phase when I was crazy for Robert Johnson. I still am as far as his music goes; but I don’t especially care about his life story anymore. And the reason I don’t is because I read an interview with McCormick where he laid out the case that we probably don’t know anything about Johnson. Regionally, Johnson was such a star that there were a lot of Robert Johnson impersonators. Not in the sense we think of with Elvis Impersonators, but a lot of blues singers of that time just grabbed the name. So the story of Robert Johnson getting poisoned by a jealous husband? Maybe that was the guy who created those songs we love; and maybe not.

What I didn’t know was that this was just one small part of McCormick’s work. And in an interview with John Jeremiah Sullivan, McCormick revealed that he had interviewed a woman near Houston, TX in 1961 by the name of LV Thomas who used to be a professional blues musician. Through a lot of twists and turns, we learn that LV was in fact Elvie Thomas. She had always lived in Houston, so she wasn’t from Mississippi at all. Even though Geeshie is now the more famous one, Elvie was the veteran. Six years ago, I wrote a short article complaining that not only did Wikipedia not have a page on Elvie Thomas, when she was mentioned on the Geeshie Wiley page, it claimed she was a man! That should give you some idea of just how exciting this new information is.

Apparently, Wiley’s real name was Lillie Mae. It was LV who gave her the nickname Geeshie, which was slang for something like a country bumpkin. Geeshie seems to have come from Louisiana originally — or maybe even Mexico. She was in her early 20s when the recordings where made whereas Elvie was almost 40. So the power structure seems pretty clear. After those recordings, it seems they worked together for another four years when LV found God and decided that her music days were Satanic.

But the most interesting thing is that LV was a lesbian. I don’t know if that was why she was hiding in the church. Baptists have lots of funny ideas about the world. Regardless, one year after the recording was made, Geeshie murdered her husband — stabbed him in the neck. But we know she didn’t go to jail for it, because she and LV continued to perform together for three years after that. What’s more, in 1961, LV indicated that she knew where Geeshie was — west Texas, supposedly. It is speculated that Geeshie could have gotten off by claiming self-defense. She and her husband were black and the authorities didn’t much care regardless.

This raises all kinds of interesting questions. Could Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wileyhave been lovers? Did Geeshie kill her husband because he found out about their affair? Did LV find God after Geeshie dumped her? There are too many great novels that could be written with the fragmentary information that we have. But what’s most frustrating is that McCormick did another interview with LV during which she was apparently more forthcoming. And we don’t know at all what she said. (McCormick died last November and seems to have been a bit difficult.)

At least for now, we have the music. Here is a playlist of the six songs they recorded, more or less in the order they were released:

Bo Carter is perhaps the greatest character of the Mississippi delta. He is known mostly for his bawdy songs like Banana in Your Fruit Basket and Your Biscuits Are Big Enough for Me and many others. But he was a whole lot more than that.

I quite like his guitar playing, which reminds me a lot of Mississippi John Hurt. It’s an intricate picking style, clearly designed to put the focus on his voice. I’ve also heard him play some slide guitar, which sounded very good.

Now I had meant to provide you with one of his straight songs, but I think you should hear “All Around Man.” It’s probably his most clever song of sexual innuendo. Although if you try really hard, you can see it as a plea for a place to stay and work because he’s a jack of all trades. Still, when he talks about being able to help out until the milkman comes, I’m afraid he steps over the line of innuendo.

One thing you really hear in the earliest blues recordings — which you don’t much just a few years later — is the field holler from the slavery days through the sharecropping days. It’s a bit offensive that Hollywood has made so many movies about the Jews persevering through what are almost certainly mythical acts of oppression thousands of years ago, but so few movies about African Americans somehow surviving through our dark recent past. (And that’s not even to get into our modern outrages like the murder of Tamir Rice.)

Blind Lemon Jefferson was the youngest son of Texas sharecroppers in 1893. Given the date, his parents must certainly have been former slaves. He started playing the guitar in his early teens and before long was a street performer. From there he worked his way up to playing dives. According to his cousin, he would start performing at 8:00 in the evening and sing and play until 4:00 in the morning — just him and his guitar.

One great thing about Blind Lemon Jefferson is that he was well recorded. He recorded roughly 80 sides over the course of five years: 1925 through 1929. His records sold well, and he did all right financially — although certainly not to the level that he deserved. He died in late 1929 of myocarditis. He was just 36 years old.

It’s hard to know what song to pick. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s work is really quite varied. And the way I’m feeling right now, it would be appropriate to listen to, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” But I want to push against that and listen to something a bit more upbeat. So here is, “Match Box Blues.”

I’ve got to make this quick, but I’ll come back to it later this week. I first learned of Geeshie Wiley during a library performance by Eric & Suzy Thompson. At that performance, Suzy did her version of the Wiley tune, “Skinny Leg Blues.” But on an album, she did Geeshie Wiley’s best known tune, “Last Kind Word.” In fact, I use the introductory guitar part for the fade music of my videos.

Geeshie Wiley is more myth than woman. She seems to have been an itinerant musician, traveling around in the early 1930s with the other great female blues guitarist, Elvie Thomas. Thomas was about a generation older. She also seems to have kept Wiley in check. There are stories. For example, it is possible that Wiley killed her husband (probably in self defense).

In March of 1930, the two went into a recording studio in Wisconsin and recorded the two songs already mentioned along with two that Thomas sang: “Motherless Child Blues” and “Over to My House.” They returned a year later and recorded two more songs. I’ll discuss those when I get around to Thomas. I do tend to think that Thomas gets short shrift because there is less myth about her. We even have a picture of Elvie Thomas!

But to give you some idea of the legend of Geeshie Wiley, let’s listen to “Skinny Leg Blues.” I’m not absolutely sure what the lyrics of the song are. But as much as I can make out, it is one of the most violent songs I’ve ever heard. What’s so amazing is how calm she is about it. She lays it out: she’s little, but you should be afraid. If you see her coming, you shouldn’t run — that would be pointless. But you might want to pull down the shades so that you aren’t embarrassed when she cuts your throat. It’s an amazing song:

Another of the great icons of Mississippi delta blues is Tommy Johnson. I have a story that relates to him. I was sitting at a barber’s place. The guy that owned it was really into old blues and Robert Johnson was playing on his sound system. So I told my sister the standard story about how Robert Johnson supposedly met the Devil and exchanged his soul for his amazing guitar abilities. The barber interrupted me to say that it wasn’t Robert Johnson, but rather Tommy Johnson.

Now, I actually knew that the story was associated with Tommy Johnson as well. This was well after O Brother, Where Art Thou? But the truth is it wasn’t Tommy, Robert, or Santa Claus Johnson. It’s a legend. It didn’t happen to anyone. What’s more, the story has been applied far more to Robert Johnson than to Tommy — probably because Robert Johnson is so much better known. (It’s also true that Robert Johnson wrote Crossroad Blues and other things about the Devil.) I hate when people correct me over things that are meaningless and wrong.

But what is true is that one source of the story was started by Tommy Johnson’s brother, year’s after the guitarist’s death. Apparently, Johnson liked to tell the story to give himself a “dangerous” reputation — probably a common thing for itinerant musicians. But even that may have been based upon earlier legends. You can see the way these things get messed up given that they had the same last names. But Tommy Johnson is very different from Robert. For one thing, Tommy was a generation before Robert. Tommy Johnson was playing professionally when Robert was in diapers. None of this is to put down Robert Johnson, who was the greater guitarist and the one who I prefer.

But Tommy Johnson was hugely influential. In his way, he was as important as Charlie Patton, but as a vocalist more than a guitarist. His guitar playing is excellent, but it is secondary to his vocals, which are capable of incredible emotional range. Most of his recordings are just him and his guitar — which is enough. But I’m going to feature a 1928 recording of a wonderfully complex number, “Maggie Campbell Blues.” In addition to him on guitar and vocals, someone else seems to be playing a mandolin. I don’t think it is necessary to the song.

The song is based upon a traditional stanza, “It looks like Maggie, but she walks too slow.” But Tommy Johnson claimed that the song referred to him being at a bar and seeing his wife coming for him. That makes it sound like she’s mad, but the song itself is, if anything, about love.