LR - We’re writing this sort of wide spanning article with interviews and contributions from different guitar players all about the future of guitar and we’re talking to our favorite guitar players about the story of the guitar, what gives it such power and makes it such an iconic thing in our culture and where it came from and sort of where it’s going as well. Sort of rock and roll as an iconic figure too, and just trying to look at it like a living legacy and trajectory in our culture and not treat it as something that just happened in the past but sort of looking where it’s going as well. I’ll just jump in and ask you a few questions and let you get back to your scoring session. So our first question is to ask you to tell some stories about your personal history with guitar, you know, stories about how you got infatuated with guitar, how you got into guitar, your early guitar story ...
WK - Sure. Well, I came of age in the 50s and 60s when there was a tectonic shift. The guitar became the electric guitar. Before then the guitar was a six-stringed instrument and it was used in country and folk music and historically going back to ... actually, if you want to go all the way back, it goes back 30,000 years and the first stringed instruments they’ve traced in cave drawings had a gourd with a string on it and they could make a sound. But it really came of age with the Greeks and Pythagoras when he discovered the modern theory of music, the octave theory, and the Greek lute or the our in middle eastern culture was carried to Spain when the Muslims, the Islamic empire expanded into Spain with the Moors and then the Spanish made some improvements on it to become the acoustic guitar that we know basically today. Kind of side- stepped the Europeans in a way (laughing). They had violins coming along and the cellos and the double bass but the guitar’s path really comes through the middle east through the oud. The oud is a language extension of the lute. So here I am, kind growing up in the late 50s and I’m hearing a sound on a juke box that’s moving me in a way that nothing ever moved me before. It’s the sound of Duane Eddy’s guitar on Rebel Rouser, that deep bass tremolo (makes the sound) ... and I said, “Whatever that is, I want more of that!” (laughter) And there was this other guitar playing guy who sang this song about playing a guitar like ringin’ a bell and maybe someday your name would be in lights and people would come from all around to hear you play and his name was Johnny B Goode and that kind of set the template for me.
LR - Cool.
WK - It was really the electric guitar that was the sound of freedom for me. It was the sound of the future, it was the sound of “there-might-be—different-path” that I could take. You know, growing up in Detroit your options were pretty much you could go work in the factory or you could go work in the factory. (laughter) My folks were blue collar people and college wasn’t a part of our family history so I attacked the guitar. I became obsessed with it and got a guitar teacher. He would come over once a week for $2 a lesson and teach me how to play standards and read notation and...
LR - Was he more of a jazz guitarist, your teacher?
WK - No, he was a gypsy really. He always smelled like garlic. (laughter) We moved a lot when I was a kid; always on the hunt for the great American place, you know, the slightly better apartment, the slightly better neighborhood. So we’d always get a new guitar teacher everywhere we moved. I finally got to where I could play some chords and really had to make a decision about what I wanted to do. Did I want to learn standards or did I want to play rock?
LR - I feel like for the guitar players coming up now, rock and roll is sort of the most common way to learn to play the guitar, but back then was it more standards oriented or do you think it was a more serious instrumental study at the time?
WK - Everything was about learning standards. All of the teachers I had were for the most part professional guitar players. There was a thriving working community of musicians working in Detroit in the 50s and 60s; You know, the auto industry worked 24/7 and young people could get a job there and after work they wanted to go out to a club and they wanted to meet girls and get laid and get drunk, and so if you wanted to work as a professional you had to know all the tunes. I didn’t want to do that, I wanted to rock.
LR - Yeah.
WK - I regret it now. (Big laughter) But so I started. The idea of being in a band. This was a time in America when in Detroit, a family could survive on one wage, and you know, buy 2 cars, go on a summer vacation, pay for medicine and clothes, pay for your house and get an electric guitar on credit from Sears.
LR - Yeah.
WK - Which is what my mother did. She bought me a guitar from Sears, it was a beautiful little black Silvertone solid body Les Paul style with 2 pickups and I was happenin’, I was in effect, I was a guitar player ... I’m just trying to give you the capsule synopsis here. Find kids in the neighborhood who also had electric guitars and start a band, start playing for your friend’s dances, playing for school dances, private parties and then really start to learn how to play, learn how songs were constructed and I did that until I was probably 14 years old. I met this other kid, Fred Smith, who wanted to play guitar so I showed him everything I knew and we ultimately ended up starting a band called the MC5.
LR – So there’s this sort of old rock and roll thing and as in the mid 60s it graduates into I don’t know if we’d call it a classic rock now or psychedelic rock too; so you guys are sort of right there in that time, do you feel you were inventing that language musically technically or were you pulling pieces from jazz or other things or how was that happening?
WK - Well, once I could play a bit, and I could play the contemporary songs of the day - the British first wave, all the instrumental bands of the 50s and 60s, you know the Ventures and I’d started the MC5 - I knew that it was going to be important to have my own sound. In those days, originality was really championed. And I was exposed to the free jazz movement, the music of Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and all of a sudden I was able to
make a connection between everything I was trying to do on the guitar and where the next step was. The free jazz guys showed me where the future was. You know if I took my best Chuck Berry solo and then went one further I’d be going into that free range of a new sonic dimension, playing beyond the beat, beyond the key like my free jazz idols were; Not that I had the technical facility that they had but this is my journey. And so that became the mission of the MC5, to push rock into a new sonic dimension, a high energy balls-to-the-wall total commitment total visceral physical energy.
LR - That’s amazing. That’s so cool. So I’m interested too, at that time the cultural perspective on guitar, I guess for guitar players and non-guitar players, was there a view of the guitar as a vehicle for this sort of progressive expression.
WK - Not so much. No, I think it was still looked at as kind of a fringe activity.
LR – Ah, okay.
WK - I think it may still be that way, you know (laughter) “But when are you gonna get a real job?!” (laughter) Which I find a uniquely American attitude. In Europe, people consider music part of their life, part of their culture, an important part. In America it’s kind of like off to the side somewhere.
LR - Mm-hmm. Yeah. People love listening to music but making music is sort of a fringe activity.
WK - Yeah, like why would you do that? And actually I kind of agree with them now, it’s so fucking hard.
LR - (Laughing) yeah, totally. Okay, well then, in sort of the same trajectory, in the last few years ... I’ve sort of been obsessed with proto-punk and how early rock and roll and then classic rock became rock and roll and all these different trajectories and roads and so I’m interested to know with you and MC5, I mean, you’re obviously making this blues informed music formally, and you’re adding in, like you were saying, this free jazz music energy but then also sort of what was to become punk was starting to show up too and so I’m interested in the guitar language of rock and roll and punk or what you think about that sort of line and that transition.
WK - Well, here’s how I see it . Up through the 60s in our sphere, in the MC5 sphere, we championed being a good musician – you know my heroes were Jeff Beck and Pete Townsend. These guys were moving the guitar forward. What happened was that the music industry, the record industry grew exponentially every year to the point where there was so much money changing hands that a real class system emerged and the people at the high end of it – the rock stars – became divorced from the streets, divorced from regular people. They lived in another world, you know, they had 6 tractor trailers, and everybody in the band had their own tour bus, they had their private jets and they stayed at the 4 Seasons and what does that have to do with rock? Not much. And the punks weren’t buying it. These kids who grew up on the lower east side of NY, and working class kids on the dole in England and disenfranchised youth in LA and
all around the world, they couldn’t identify with it. But they could identify with getting together with your friends and banging on your guitar and making up a song to talk about how pissed off you are. Punk Rock.
LR - Totally.
WK - I get the idea of punk as, you know, the distinction between one generation and the next, you know, Beethoven was a punk, Albert Ayler was a punk, MC5 were punks, but there was kind of also I think a step backward in that musicianship wasn’t the most important thing anymore. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing or not but for someone who tries to play as well as I can, I think it’s important to do what you do well and it wasn’t really a consideration in the early era of punk and it kind of left me cold. I said, “but they’re just playing those same simple 2 or 3 chords that we all started off on, they’re not movin it forward” but there was another thing happening there and I appreciate it.
LR - Right. So there you guys were sort of marrying rebellion and street level thinking with a musicality and trying to marry those languages together and .....????
WK - Yes, I think what set the MC5 apart from our contemporaries was we had a direct connection to our fans. The things we represented and the things we talked about and the feelings we had were directly connected to the things they were concerned about and the things they were angry about and feelings they had and so you know, when people were out in the audience at an MC5 gig and we threw up the power symbol or the V, you know and they threw it back at us, it was a direct connection there and it wasn’t about, hey I’ve really studied the blues, you know.
LR - Yeah, yeah sure. Obviously the MC5 was legendary and ground breaking musically and artistically, but we really get the sense that even since then you seem to have traveled all these different roads as a musician and participated in what was going on currently in music up to the present time. And now you are scoring film and TV, so we thought you were a really unique person to ask about the idea of what you’ve seen change with the guitar specifically. I feel the guitar has had a really iconic and symbolic cultural force over time and I’m curious if you’ve seen that change over the years or if you can talk about how it has changed over the years leading up to where we are now.
WK - Well, it certainly has evolved. Some of it kind of goes nowhere ... like when fusion emerged, I appreciate the speed and the accomplishment of Al Di Meola and some of those guys; that’s really proficient, those guys can really play. (laugh) but it seemed to be disconnected from the hips, you know there was no sex drive in it. My wife calls it math music.
LR - They lost the rock and roll.
WK - They lost the roll. They might rock but they don’t roll. It was healthy that the guitar grew especially in the jazz world from that clean Gibson sound, Jim Hall and Barney Kessel and Mundel Lowe and all the original giants and all of a sudden more contemporary players are comin up, Larry Carlton and guys like that and I thought he was terrific but the rock guitar didn’t
really start moving into now and into the future until Tom Morello emerged. Tom comes from that heavy metal, at heart he’s a heavy metal guy, but he was so in touch with hip hop that he found ways to make his guitar do things that guitars didn’t usually do and I think he was really creative and opening the whole thing up for guitarists to show them what the possibilities were; that it wasn’t about necessarily playing lydian mode, that there might be more to it. And not only is he my friend, I identify with his musical revolutionary approach. Of course I identify with his political position but we’re talking about the guitar and music here. I thought he was and is a revolutionary force in the guitar. Then a funny thing happened. Heavy metal music got stronger and stronger and today I listen to Sirius XM and liquid metal and I hear shit that’s, and I don’t throw this word around, it’s awesome. Awesome! Some of these bands, I mean these guys must rehearse for thousands of hours to play like that. I mean the tempos change and they play at blistering speed and I’m just so impressed. What’s that one band? Aversions Crown. Oh man. The song is called Earth Sterilizer. Killed me. Killed me! I mean the drummers are insane. It STARTS at a crescendo. It starts where other bands ... They play some of the new metal shit and they play something like Ozzie and it all sounds weak in comparison. The new shit is so awesome. I’m so excited about what these guys are doing with the electric guitar.
LR - That’s so cool. And do you feel like those guys are connecting to the role as we were mentioning before?
WK - Yeah. LR- Yeah, cool.
WK - Yeah, I hear the rhythm in it and listen, it’s very focused on about 10 year old boys, you know, it’s speaking to them. It’s all out, total commitment, no reservations and then when boys get to about 12 or 13 and start thinking about girls, they’re done with that. (laughing) But when you’re 10 and you need something that says “This is me. I’m not my parents. I’m not school. I’m not the Boy Scouts. I’m none of that stuff. I’m metal!” (laughter) It’s great. Very healthy.
LR - So like even here it feels like the guitar still continues to have an element of individuality and transcendence in it.
WK - I think so, yeah, I agree with you. And I see it for the foreseeable future. We consume music in a different way today and there’s a whole world of EDM and producers and DJs and that’s all positive good stuff and I don’t think you can replace someone getting up with a 6 string instrument and plugging it in and putting a lot of hours in figuring how to make some sound come out of it that’s compelling and emotionally powerful. I think that’s going to be around awhile.
LR - Yeah. That’s cool. Well that leads us to the last few questions here. Where are you at with the guitar these days, what’s interesting and inspiring you or challenging you or sounds or whatever for your personal guitar journey?
WK - Well, I’m still trying to find where to go, you know it may sound simplistic but it’s almost like okay, I’m on this note, what’s the next note? I only have 12 to pick from, you know, what’s that interval that’s going to give me the thing that I need? I don’t think that I’ll ever arrive at the place, I think it’s about the search. I’m still steady searching. I’m still trying to find a way to harmonize things that say something different, you know, to frame it in an emotional context that means something to the listener and I don’t think that playing the guitar or playing music is tied to the young. I think it’s targeted to the young a lot because of the marketplace.
LR - Yeah, I agree. I never really agreed with the “die young” rock thing. WK - Yeah, yeah. That’s another one of those lies that we tell in Hollywood.
SLR- Yeah, totally. Cool, well my very last question, you have your non-profit jail guitar doors and I was just curious - just talking about guitars it seems like a very powerful idea that you seem to be having this experience of the guitar being rehabilitative for people and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that or any stories or why guitar....?
WK - Sure, sure. What we do is simple. We find people that work in prisons that are willing to use music as a tool for positive change and we provide them with guitars, acoustic guitars mostly. You know, you can play a melody on it, you can play chords on it, you can be rolling pretty easy. There’s a lot of people in prison and a lot of them can already play the guitar. The trouble is, no guitars!
LR - Right.
WK - In America’s rush to mass incarceration, almost all rehabilitative programming was eliminated. So what we’re trying to do is mitigate that situation by finding people that are willing to let us bring a load of guitars into a prison. Then we task the people that live in the prison with using the guitar as a tool for positive change. We challenge them that if they accept these guitars then they have accepted the challenge to begin the hard work of rehabilitation and what I have found in my experience both as a prisoner and as someone who providing instruments as prisoners is that music is a way for us to process our problems. You can sit down with a guitar and be in a bad mood and in 30 minutes you’ve worked it out. It’s a way to express yourself that’s non-confrontational and in the best sense, writing a song is transformational. I tell guys every time I go in, write a song to your wife, write a song to your son, write a song to yourself about how you got here. And when people have to put it down on paper and try to tell their story, it changes them, they start to see themselves differently. I’m not encouraging people to go into the music business. (laughter) you know, that’s all fucked up. (more laughter). But I am encouraging people to go into music and play music because you like the sound of music, because you like playing with your friends, because you like doing it by yourself. And we’ve seen a load of guitars change the atmosphere in a prison yard where people have something to focus on besides gang affiliation, racism, bitterness, defeat. All of a sudden they can be a guitar player, they can be a singer, they can be a songwriter and I think these are important things that put us in touch with our own humanity. You know, if two musicians want to play together, they have to talk to each other and when they talk to each other they start to see maybe they have
more in common than they have differences. Music is a very powerful force for bringing people together.