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The Devil’s Right Hand
The world needs more and better rhythm guitarists.
If you’ll allow me to get all curmudgeonly on you, I will tell you what’s wrong with music today. On most radio hits, synths and drum machines have taken over most the rhythm duties. Where there is guitar, it lacks personality. Somewhere along the line, we as a society stopped valuing great rhythm guitar work, and we are clearly worse off for it.
One of the unfortunate hallmarks of modern production is a sanding down of the rhythm. Every beat is put into place digitally. A song’s chording is run through compressors and digital overdrive to give it a focused, buzz-saw tone. It’s placement against the bass and drums is deemphasized. We allow our songs to be driven by click-tracks rather than allow it to flow organically from the musicians. It’s clear that this style has lead to the increasing homogeny of the last 15 or so years of American popular music.
If I could give one bit of advice to aspiring guitar players out there, it would be work on your right hand. This is the hand from which the rhythm flows. It can lead the band, controlling the tempo, providing accents and character to the song. Your right hand provides propulsion and defines the beat. And too many guitar players today treat it as an afterthought.
I’d like to live in a world where learning guitar meant spending as much time practicing a Bo Diddley riff as learning scales. Where we recognize that rhythm is the soul of a song. Where you can tune your radio to damn near any station and dance.
Like Geocaching For Music Nerds
Sometimes… something just sticks in your craw. An obsessive can stare at a beautiful painting for ah hour, agonizing over a single brush stroke. A reader can find themselves going over and over a particular passage in a novel, looking for it to suddenly reveal a hidden meaning. We are born to see patterns and trained to solve mysteries. I understand these impulses.
So I link to Bob Elgin’s blog, PopSpots, with no small degree of jealousy that he was the first to create a project of finding the original locations of some of rock and roll’s most famous album covers and photographs, and that he did it so damn well.
Scroll down a little bit. Skip the Billy Joel section. I won’t tell anyone. Then do yourself a favor and click on the individual entries. Bob writes an engaging narrative about each photo, going into exhaustive detail on his effort to track down the exact wall, intersection, or doorframe that appeared in photo taken generations ago. Excellent detective work leading to pieces of history. It’s like a Dan Brown novel that isn’t terrible.
We’ve created such a mythology around this classic era of rock and roll, decades later it all seemed a bit larger than life. I’m glad someone is out there setting these images in concrete.
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As a side note, I am particularly shocked to find that the cover to Highway 61 Revisited was taken outside. I always pictured that to be backstage in some historic theater, or in a hip brownstone.
Nothing Was Delivered 