Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith 1974; Photo: Bob Gruen
LR – We’re talking to a lot of guitarists and we’re putting together a large article. The premise of the article is the future of guitar but as we’re talking to people it’s a lot about exploring people’s personal stories with guitar, trying to put together the whole story of the power of guitar in our culture and music and what it can do, what it has done, how the ideas and techniques have changed over time and sort of what that points to in the future. Well, I’ll start where we’ve been starting with a lot of guitar players which is your own personal history with the guitar which I think gives a lot of insight.
LK – Well, I grew up in the era where the guitar became the magnate instrument. As a kid my dad played the accordion and the piano and he started me on the accordion and of course there was no real place to play it within the realm of the music I was interested in and when I was just about getting out of high school I thought I would start learning some chords. I was into folk music and learned “Gotta Travel On” starting with the G chord and I had hopes of you know becoming a lonely folk singer in the back yard and then a few months later on Ed Sullivan saw the Beatles as many ... (laughter) did at that moment and it changed the entire way in which you could approach the guitar and by that summer I had my first electric guitar and by the end of that year I was in my first band, The Vandals, out of New Brunswick, New Jersey playing the local fraternity circuit.
LR – That’s so cool. So then, I don’t totally know all the story behind, you know, Dylan’s bringing it back home but you know, I guess rock and roll obviously has its roots in the blues and American music but as an American kid, the shift from being into acoustic guitar and going back to electric guitar was more The Beatles, it wasn’t Chuck Berry or the blues or anything like that for you ...
LK – No, no, I mean, I grew up in New York City, I didn’t really know that much about the blues. Most of the musical inspiration I had were the kids singing on the street corner, doo-wop singers, and I aspired to that. But with the Beatles you got a new sense of how to be in a band. We didn’t have much country music in NY, we didn’t have rockabilly. It was pretty much street corner singing. So the concept of the guitar came initially out of folk music but then was kind of blasted into the stratosphere or should I say the Stratocaster by the coming of the English invasion and you know, it was also a particularly good time for the guitar itself because its electric sensibilities were just about to blossom. It wasn’t just an amplified louder version of the guitar. I think that all the sense of the growth of amplifiers, the tonal textures started as far back as Les Paul but of course really the part of the new medium called rock and roll, all of a sudden you had a lot of possibilities to play. There were a lot of music stores, there were a lot of entry level instruments and the guitar, being fairly easy to play initially, you know you can learn those first 3 chords in an hour or two and also have the infinite possibility of spending a lifetime of learning its intricacies was very attractive. It was portable, it could play rhythm, it could play melody, you could accompany yourself alone, you could be within a band context, it was a perfect instrument for its time. You also had the music to play. The music and the guitar leapfrogged over each other, new sounds were called for, the fuzz tone was about to be invented
by Gibson I believe, they had the maestro fuzz tone. It was a time of remarkable growth, and truly an explosion of guitarists and guitar oriented music was helped along a lot by surf music out of California, that heavily reverb’d sound. You could really find your place within the musical spectrum through the guitar. And in a sense for me the guitar is the instrument that will define the 20th century. I believe its growth and its eventual evolution defines a good portion of the music that the 20th century will be known for.
LR – I know you mentioned, and I agree with you that it marries this concept of you can pick it up and learn a few chords quickly and you can also study it for a lifetime and it has this sort of endless quality to it ...
LK – And it has a portability, I mean, when you’re learning the piano ... LR – (Laughter)
LK - You know, you can toss it (guitar) over your shoulder, it lent itself to a kind of migratory lifestyle. It could be played casually, it could be played formally. It was an instrument that had a lot of breathing room. You could adapt it to however you wanted to learn how to play the music you were attracted to. You could be a happy amateur, you could be a studious professional. The guitar has that ability to be all things and I believe that’s why it planted itself so firmly in musical culture as the century went on.
LR – I wonder if metaphorically the fact that it has this real acoustic/electric self to it fit into the 20th century as well.
LK – Well, you could go back and forth. It adapted itself well to electricity without losing its kind of acoustic ah, you know, little equipment ... you know, really the versatility of the guitar in coupling with the music that it inspired was really central to the guitar’s place in the musical spectrum. It was more versatile than playing a horn, it was more versatile than wheeling a piano around.
LR – I think it’s also a great songwriting device too.
LK – Songwriting device, late night companion, something that you could interact with your friends. It had everything going for it for someone on the verge of a musical career or even a musical dabbling. I’m sure a lot of guitarists especially in the 60s would never take it much further than their bedroom but you know, it made it very accessible, it made music accessible, it made the playing of music accessible. It was not an instrument that you needed to know how to read music (laughing), something that I don’t know is a good or bad thing, but you could learn to express yourself through song easily. You know that entry level was very important to the concept what was to become garage rock for me, the fact that you could learn your few chords and start playing and essentially learn on the job. And it looked like a modern instrument, especially in the electric guitar where you know, the sudden strange post modern shapes ... it seemed to fit the futuristic sensibilities of its era and as amplifiers and effects boxes got more sophisticated and it seemed like any type of music that you wanted to play could be guitar based.
If you wanted to have loud metal band, yes sure, but if you wanted to have the soft filigree undistorted tones of personal singer/songwriter, it was there too. You know, within those 6 strings you could find a universe.
LR – As a guitarist I definitely agree. So, some of what we were just talking about leads into my next question which is a little more about specific guitar language. I’ve been really interested in the last few years in the transition between rock and roll and psychedelic or classic rock and into punk rock and the different threads of the musical language; sort of how they got passed around in different scenes and players, you know, and the early rock and roll had a sort of stripped down kind of quality and then it kind of exploded into the psychedelic rock with a lot more melodic density and all this stuff and then punk, proto-punk seems to have started this back again. You seem like you were really playing guitar in those times and I’m curious if you have anything to talk about how that language sort of developed from rock to proto-punk to punk, how that happened, why that happened ...?
LK – Well, I think as musicians grow they tend to interact and react against what has come before when you’re trying to find yourself, your playing style, your sense of possibilities of who you might be, you measure yourself against what is the dominant mode of expression and sometimes you move against the grain, sometimes you move with it and sometimes you combine the two. Especially in NY in the 70s what was known as punk was possibly a lot more complex than is given credit ...
LR – What became codified punk in the 80s, yeah.
LK – Yeah, I mean, you know the Ramones’ template was the one that was declared punk where in a certain sense most of the earlier bands were punk by intent
LR – yeah sure. I mean television guitars are shredding and...
LK – Yeah, there’s a lot of ways in which you can move. I believe there was an overall sensibility to bringing it back to raw emotion as opposed to technical virtuosity. Something that as guitarists get more proficient, you know, there’s something really intriguing about learning your instrument, becoming more aware of its possibilities beyond the major and minor chords, in finding new sounds, in finding new ways in which to express yourself that are often sometimes not the entry level way in which people approach guitar. I mean I think there’s a certain sense of give and take to how one learns and expresses oneself on their instrument and I always think of it as a spiral staircase. You start on a certain level and you continue to go around and expand that level and soon it becomes time to bring it back to where you started, to remember why you started playing in the first place, and how you started to get a sense of life within you. But by then you’re also up a level. It’s never really returning back to where it began because that would just be too predictable. You have to utilize the lessons of the past as you move into the future and I think the dialogue of guitarists over the past century has been moving from one side of the seesaw to the other and then you’re back to where you begin to see if you can make use of the advances without being driven into a dead end. There’s virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake and then there’s virtuosity because you are actually using it to express a complex emotion but sometimes
that complex emotion isn’t as important as the simple one. I think this dialogue between guitar players becomes musical evolution, and continually changes the playing field and makes for music to be truly progressive. Progressive rock is not essentially complicated rock. It’s more that musical forms develop, change and keep us moving into the future.
LR – Well that sort of leads to another question ... it seems like you’ve been a very active musician your whole life as well as an active music writer and thinker and I’m curious if you can talk about the changes of how the guitar has been looked at and you know, maybe even culturally symbolically, poetically how the guitar has been seen in different decades or what you’ve seen it undergo as a symbol and how that has changed in the present time.
LK – Well, in some ways a guitar is like a totem. It instantly defines where you are on the musical spectrum. Sometimes it’s extra musical. The guitar as an instrument represents many cultural changes within its continuous shape and sound. It has been a leading instrument in our culture for a lifetime now, a long lifetime say if we’re counting from Eddie Lang’s time and in some ways for me its growth is just about done. We have lived through the era of the guitar and I believe in the 21st century as it develops, this ability to express yourself through a guitar will diminish because it’s been approached from just about all different angles. Guitars have been constructed, deconstructed, sent through the vortex and come out the other side looking quite unrecognizable. I find it quite ironic that in all these computer-modeling programs of amplifier modeling when a guitar is totally freed from being a guitar ... when does it start becoming something else? You know at this point I would say the instrument of the future seems to reside within future musicologists to entangle. For me one of the beauties of the guitar is its sense of physical manipulation, I like the hands on the guitar. I’m not one for changing my tone that much, in fact, my Stratocaster only has one middle pickup and no tones, just point and shoot.
LR –Yeah totally.
LK – I can draw from it through my fingers a range of sounds that cannot be modeled unless they clone me. But I would say as a cultural touchstone the guitar has done its duty to how the music sounds and how the music is created and how the music is disseminated. Nothing stays the same. The instruments that we play in this moment in time are not the instruments they played in the 1800s and it helps to change the shape, sound and texture of the music in ways that are evolutionary so I believe that the guitar having lived one amazing lifeline is due for reconfiguration in the coming century whatever that might be.
LR – Yeah, talking about electric guitars and computers. One of the thoughts I had about the difference in performance. I play the guitar, you know, I love rock and roll and guitar music but you know, I’m open minded and I like the possibilities on computer but I always find that seeing people perform on laptops is not ...
LK – (Laughter)
LR – (Laughter) it tends to not be very A) engaging and B) visceral, which is something I love about rock and roll and I love about the guitar and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit
about performance and the visceral live experience with the guitar and what that means to you and your experience with that.
LK – Well the guitar is a very physical instrument, I mean you play it, you hit it, you strum it, you wiggle those strings around. It’s very tactile and though you can in build these things into more digital realms the fact is that one of its pleasures is getting it to become an extension of your body and your hands. Will that change? Possibly. One never knows what miracles of technology will allow us to express ourselves through music, I mean, drummers, of course, have really had it hard because you can program drums and even quantize them so they can breathe a little bit, but for me and certainly for my generation of musicians, the feel of the guitar, the hand on the neck , the grasp of the strings, that to me is one of the things that makes playing the guitar such a joy. It’s physical. I like to look at the calluses on my fingers, I like to see that I’ve earned them. It’s almost like if someone is into running or exercising, the sense of meditation and physical effort is very rewarding on the guitar. Where this will go in the future, hard to say. I mean in the mid-century, horns of all variety, reed and brass, were the instruments that were most expressive in terms of being able to play the music of the day. We are really on the verge of a whole new frontier of music making and I hesitate to say one way or another how this will play out because one remembers when the actual electric guitar was regarded as a barbarity to real guitar players. When did it stop becoming a guitar, you know? As you ride a wave of feedback, is this playing guitar or is this moving through electronic circuit boards to make the sound? I personally like wrestling physically with a guitar. Sometimes I don’t even want the guitar to be as playable as I like. I want it to make me work within it, make me understand how it’s strong and what gives it a unique tone and quality and what it brings out in me. You pick up a 1946 Martin acoustic and you’re gonna approach it differently than if you pick up a Kramer pointy- head stock special. All guitars have their music. I like that sense of possibility, really. But to me it’s a physical instrument. Even in my amplifier settings, I don’t have it set where you hit the chord and the amplifier takes over for you, it’s not one of those heavily distorted endless sustained sounds. I like to feel the beginning and the end of the note, I like the sense of making the chord move through its bass and treble. I like the sense of hands on and definitely the guitar is beyond anything as a hands on instrument. I don’t know if that answers your question. (laughter)
LR – Yes, yes. It also triggered too a thought ... Do you think the spirit of rock and roll, I mean it’s been so tied to the guitar, but is this something that as the century changes in instrumentation and approach changes, that the spirit of rock and roll’s something that transcends even the limits of the instrument or are they something that tie together ...?
LK – Well, I think we’re talking two different things. There’s the spirit of rock and roll and the shape of the music itself, Rock and Roll. The spirit of the music will continue because really, its spirit is nothing to do with rock and roll. It has to do with the music that was chosen to express this human sense of energy and explosive emotion. For me, I would say that rock and roll as a genre and a form is kind of at the point where it’s a little bit like the blues or maybe bebop jazz. It’s been figured out so what you’re gonna have now within it is not so much innovation as interpretation. You know the great rock and rollers will essentially be interpreting a form whose
parameters have been defined by the words rock and roll in all its many many sub categories. I personally see that if the guitar is going to move into the 21st century, it will probably need a new music to give it a new sense of dimension. Otherwise it will be an historical music; it will be like harpsichord music in Bach’s time. These instruments will always be used and sometimes used creatively but the moment when they are at the tip of the arrowhead in terms of invention, I’d say for rock and roll, that’s pretty much been accomplished and you have I’d say about 60 years depending on when you want to start counting to draw upon which is about as long a lifeline as one could hope for in a music. I’m always interested in what comes next. I may not participate in it, I may not relate to it or even understand it especially as a guitar player. But at this point I understand me, I understand what I play when I pick up the guitar, how to make it talk for me. I’ve been playing for 50 years now, I celebrated my 50th band anniversary last November, amazingly enough.
LR – Congratulations ...
LK – Thank you. Very unexpected and one I would have never expected when I did my first gig at Chi Phi Fraternity at Rutgers but the fact is that I know who I am and the music I play primarily based in rock and roll is who I always will be. I see a perhaps and hopefully so that somewhere out in the great hinterland someone finds a 6 string guitar, maybe they tune it up completely differently or maybe they try to figure out how it was played in the 20th century and invent a new form that will take the guitar through the next 100 years. This is music’s challenge to all of us who want to move forward. That said, the canon of guitar is broad enough itself for anybody to lose themselves completely within it, to find their own combination and amalgamation of sounds and tones and approaches and become a musician and in the end no matter what instrument you have in your hand, if you’re a musician, it starts from music, it starts from building blocks on the scales we’re given and the shape of the sounds that our audience wants to hear even if they don’t know it yet. If anything, that’s the future.
LR – Well I guess to wrap it up I just have one last question. Currently with the guitar, if you have any interests or studies or things that you pick up that you’re thinking about now, or where you’re at with it now...?
LK – I always like to learn a new chord. One of the things that has always amazed me over this lifetime I’ve spent playing guitar is that sometimes you do get better. And sometimes in a way that one doesn’t expect. I think this is one of the privileges of being a lifelong musician is you get to see these different plateaus. I remember in the late 80s/early 90s, I wasn’t playing much. I was mostly producing records or writing and I’d occasionally go down in the basement and do my little guitar meditation and I figured yeah, I’ve kind of gotten as good as I can get and I might learn another chord or you know a nice arpeggio or something and then one day, I hadn’t played for about 6 or 8 months so I came back to the guitar having forgotten all of my old habits and I started playing and I started seeing the neck in a whole different way and as I followed this way of seeing how it all fit together I realized I’d gone up a notch; not like a little increment but actually enough that I would surprise myself and I thought yeah, this is how it happens as you progress through decades of playing guitar is that suddenly it reveals itself a whole different level
and you know, that’s exciting to aspire to and to hope to happen. I’m always trying to learn a new piece of music and take the guitar into a different place like my infatuation with the pedal steel guitar which I play passively ... (laughter)
LR – (Laughter)
LK – after 30 years, every once in awhile it’ll sing back to me. But you know, to me the guitar is just a broad-based instrument so universal, its strings so simple to place your hand around or to pick or to strum or to manipulate. It’s an endless instrument. There’s a sense of infinity to it for me and I’m really just on my way to, you know, on my way to seeing how far the universe will take me.
LR – That’s really cool and I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us about it.
LK – It’s my pleasure. I owe this great instrument for keeping me entertained and I would say out of trouble but in trouble as much as out of trouble over these many years. I feel like I really found the musical instrument that I could express myself on and I’m always grateful to it for that.