Rock's Guitar Gods

Rock's Guitar Gods Avatars of the Sixties
Author(s): DEENA WEINSTEIN

Source: Archiv fr Musikwissenschaft, 70. Jahrg., H. 2. (2013), pp. 139-154
Published by: Franz Steiner Verlag
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Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft AfMw Band 70 2013 Heft 2
Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart
Rock's Guitar Gods - Avatars of the Sixties
by
DEENA WEINSTEIN
Sharing in the romantic ideology of the 1960s, the "guitar god" (the virtuoso lead rock guitar
by Clapton, Townshend, and Hendrix, emerged as a result of technologythe electrification
and high-powered amplificationwhich made the instrument a competitor to the singer and
the creation of a mystique of musical prowess fused with effects of emotional authenticity
ism. As a romantic hero, the guitar god presents a case that contests egalitarianism and pro
of power based on personal distinction and exceptionalism in skill and dramatic perform
by a complex commercial support system. The guitar virtuosi of the sixties provided a mod
generations of lead guitarists in rock bands and an inspiration to fans who buy their gui
accompany their heroes on air guitar and Guitar Hero. The guitar god both challenges and
sixties youth culture.
Guitar gods. Guitar heroes. Guitar virtuosi. These are not simply descrip
they betray a cult of the guitarist in rock. Not the rhythm guitarist, but the
soloing lead guitarists, who are usually the most accomplished musicians in r
and are expected to evince artistry. Guitar gods are absent from genres that
least in nameromantic ideology and artistry, especially punk. They are ubi
blues-rock and the genres it sired, from psychedelia, through hard rock, heav
all of their offspring. In those genres, the lead guitarist is the prime focus o
Guitar gods were born of the sixties and could not have appeared as cultural
then. This figure is also a phenomenon of that much storied decade, integra
ing romantic ideas. Guitar gods represent a strand of romanticism that is of
by or altogether absent from accounts of the culture of the sixties, teaching
latter is polysmie and cannot be understood adequately in terms of any sin
or grand narrative. How did the guitar god come to be? What are the compon
icon? What does the guitar god tell us about sixties culture and its legacy th
through the present?
140 Deena Weinstein
Technology
One of the conditions that made guitar gods possible, though not inevitable, was a
complex of guitar-related technological innovations. The electrification of the guitar
precedes rock's origins, having come into its own during the 1940s, especially in styles
of music that had been marginalized by the mainstream mediablues and country. Due
to its volume level, one of the electric guitar's main impacts during that decade was to
allow small combos to replace big bands. With a guitar and amplifier, groups of four to
six musicians could somewhat inexpensively take to the road.
The development of many major and ancillary features of electric guitars was cre
ated in interaction with guitar players. For instance, it was guitarist Les Paul who "took
the pickup of an electrified phonograph and jammed it into the strings of a guitar to
amplify the sound of the strings."1 In the early stages of rock 'n' roll, guitars vied with
saxophones and pianos as the key instrument of the emerging genre. (It was rock 'n'
roll's hillbilly element, represented especially by Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins, that
gave the electric guitar its victory.) Once the guitar was electrified, it no longer needed
its resonating box. Inventive entrepreneur Leo Fender created the solid body electric
guitar as a mass produced item. Among other things, the more compact form of solid
body instruments enabled guitarists to move about on stage more easily. Yes, Chuck
Berry managed a great deal of movement with his hollow-bodied Gibson ES-355 and
Buddy Holly mainly stood still playing his Fender Stratocaster. Nonetheless, the Stra
tocaster model and its solid-body brethren made possible the dramatic moves of the
guitar heroes of the following decades.
The solid-body guitar, although built on a slab of wood, lent itself to a host of fin
ishes that no longer evoked its original material. Fender's first model, the Telecaster,
displayed the wood grain, but the next one, the Stratocaster, obscured it with finishes
that had metallic or plastic looks, resembling automobiles or children's toys. Still today,
at stores like Guitar Center, one can find guitars with colors called "chrome red," "me
tallic red," and "candy-apple red." The electrified sound also permitted an alteration in
the solid-body's shape from the traditional curved box. Some of the designs were made
to enhance dramatic impact, such as Gibson's Flying V. Others expanded the range of
sound, especially the radical cutaways which allowed playing frets at the neck's base.
The high register of sound produced there became a trope of guitar gods.
The original amplification devices were increased in number and modified to enable
a broader range of sound. For Fender, "adding more pickups was a concession to the
musicians who liked the different tones coming from each pickup position: brighter
and more metallic at the bridge and warmer and heavier toward the neck. Two pickups
gave more versatility and a broader range of tones to choose from."2 Other additions
included the tremolo and a wide assortment of effects pedals, such as those creating
1 Andr Millard, "Inventing the Electric Guitar," in: The Electric Guitar: A History of an American
Icon, ed. Andr Millard (Baltimore, 2004), p. 47.
2 Millard, "Solid body Electric Guitars," The Electric Guitar, p. 95.
Rock's Guitar Gods - Avatars of the Sixties 141
distortion or enabling sustained tones. Each of these adaptations allo

to customize his equipment and thus individualize his sound.
Amplifiers were in wide use by the time rock 'n' roll emerged in
not yet powerful enough to bring the lead guitarist to decisive pro
1960s, Jim Marshall began producing amplifiers capable of a far lou
sound. His black-clad cabinets have become icons of volume. They
not only for their sonic purpose, but also as props; some bands have
that are devoid of electrical equipment and simply function as visua
The major innovators and manufacturers of electric guitars and g
fiers interacted intensively with musicians in the 1960s. At firs
made amplifier cabinets, which he sold at his drum shop. As drumm
along their bands' guitarists, Marshall realized that his manufacture
amplifiers as reliably as and with the modifications these guitarists
Eventually he and his staff began to make them in house. The "16-y
and Blackmore were in the shop regularly talking to Jim about wh
their amps."3 Clapton and Hendrix were good customers too. Towns
Marshall: "I need something bigger and louder... I was demandin
machine gun, and Jim Marshall was going to build it for me, and t
to go out and blow people away, all around the world."4 Volum
opment of the sixties, and it isn't only Spinal Tap that is still p
Duncan provides an interpretation: "But mainly rock 'n' roll lik
meant passion, loud meant the pent anger of the age, and loud rock
an acting out of that anger and so some sort of return to the sense
rational, the technological."5 Fender, too, had musicians on his guit
valued their input. The innovations allowed guitarists to tinker and
own. Attempts by manufacturers to build effects into the instrum
musicians who wanted the freedom to select and sequence them, so
their own inimitable sound with some combination of flanger, chor
reverb.
Hendrix was not merely a player; he was deeply involved in the t

for his unique sound. He "experimented with controlled feedba
fuzztone, wah-wah pedals, and whammy bars. He incorporated these
niques such as echo, backward overdubbing, panning, use of equ
phase shifting to shape the sound of his guitar."6 He even arranged
learn about the amps at Marshall's. Hendrix's heroic status comes
innovations.
3 Rich Maloof, Jim Marshall: The Father of Loud (San Francisco, 2004), p. 39.
4 Ibid.
5 Robert Duncan, The Noise: Notes From a Rock 'n 'Roll Era (New York, 1984), p. 46.
6 Susan Schmidt-Horning, "Recording," The Electric Guitar, pp. 118-19.
142 Deena Weinstein
Ideology
Rock music erupted within the last great wave of romanticism in the Westthe formation
of the "youth culture" of the sixties. Georg Simmel7 argued that as a cultural expres
sion of a social phenomenon, romanticism represented a compensatory reaction against
the impersonality and abstraction of modern metropolitan existence that privileged the
intellect over the emotions and objective functioning over subjective integrity. Roman
ticism, according to Simmel, only appears within the modern urban context, bringing
forward anything that modern society marginalizes: nonrational experience, individual
and group distinctiveness, and Dionysian excess over and rebellion against disciplinary
social forms. For Simmel, the apotheosis of romanticism is to plunge into the formless
stream of life-experience and to refuse to submit to any form that channels, contains,
or trims it. Short of that limit, the romantic impulse is concentrated on the vindication
of group or personal individuality, which is known and affirmed through intuition and
inspiration rather than abstract reason.
Since its appearance at the turn of the nineteenth century, romanticism has been
primarily associated socially with "youth." That term does not refer to a universal (bio
logical) age group but to a historically and socially specific category of adolescents who
experience a prolonged transition from childhood dependency to adult responsibility.
Structurally, youth is an effect of the need for a highly specialized industrial society
to train people to perform its functions and to submit to its disciplines. The period of
extended education opens up for the adolescents who, herded together in schools, claim
a space of relative freedom shadowed by the destiny of eventual induction into the disci
plines of the occupational system. The tension between present freedom and impending
discipline generates the panoply of self-assertive expressions, enthusiasms, acts and arts
of personal and group rebellion, and idiosyncrasies that define romanticism.8
As the modern period proceeded in time, with its intensive industrial and urban de
velopment, the proliferation of specialties, and a rising standard of living, the number
and proportion of adolescents who experienced youth steadily increased. What began
as the angst, dandyism, and heroic posturing of haut-bourgeois adolescents in the first
half of the nineteenth century spread in the twentieth to the broad middle classes and
then to the working class. The prosperity of the United States after World War II and the
European "economic miracle" opened up a mass youth market at the same time that it
created the conditions for romantic reaction on an unprecedented scale. Enter the sixties
"youth culture," of which rock music was an essential component.
7 Georg Simmel, "Individual and Society in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Views of Life"
(1917) and "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1908), in: The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. & ed.
Kurt Wolff (New York, 1950).
8 See Deena Weinstein, "Rock: Youth and Its Music," Popular Music and Society IX (1983); id.,
"Expendable Youth: The Rise and Fall of Youth Culture," in: Adolescents and their Music: If It's Too
Loud, You 're Too Old, ed. Jonathon Epstein (Flamden, CT, 1994); id., "Alternative Youth: The Ironies of
Recapturing Youth Culture," Young: Nordic Journal of Youth Research 3 (February 1995).
Rock was born in a historical conjuncture in which affluent youth

conformist organizational culture of the fifties in the context of e
mentsespecially the civil rights movementand protest against t
the attendant military draft in the United States. An American inv
to England and later continental Europe, where it took on new feat
became globalized. The two major sources of the romantic ideolo
rock as a discursive and artistic practice were American populis
avant-garde, both of which, though they had widely different intelle
reached the same conclusion that art should be an expression of aut
The roots of romantic populism in rock are musical rather th
logical. The romantic reaction among American youth in the 1950s
1960s took the form of a resort to "prestige from below" through
musical styles associated with racial and economic groups that h
by corporate modernization. Black blues, white "folk" and rural mu
degree jazz, were seen as authentic expressions of life in contrast to
trived mainstream pop music. At first, predominantly white middle
their lower-class masters, but soon seized authenticity for them
produce their own music, a tendency that eventually led to the cen
to authenticity in the creative individual.
A similar process occurred at about the same time in England. Th
only in part the prestige from below of marginalized groups and th
it was also the contestational high culture of the European avan
of transmission of avant-garde ideals to British youth was the
schoolsunmatched in number anywhere else in the worldthat be
and refuges for young people who were intelligent but had difficu
mainstream organizational society. As Frith and Home note, in Eng
idea of rock authenticity came from a straightforward Romantic id
For the 1960s art school beat musicians, true expression was define
geois and showbiz convention, and 'rock' was differentiated from 'p
of passion, commerce and complexity."9 The roster of British rock
with art-school students, including sixties guitar gods Eric Clapton
Jimmy Page, and Syd Barrett. They and many others absorbed what
"art-school tradition," which championed "individual creativity, gen
personal adventurism in the arts."10 The American low road and the
to the same place for middle-class youth: a valorization of distincti
emotion, originality, and nonconformityall the marks of the mo
modernity.
The story of the romantic sources of rock sketched above elides many nuances and
tensionsthe conflict between group and individual conceptions of authenticity, the
9 Simon Frith and Howard Home, Art into Pop (London, 1988), p. 148.
10 Paul Stump, The Music s All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock (London, 1997), p. 10.
144 Deena Weinstein
irony of an anti-commercial impulse

and the deployment of technology
accurate in its outlines. After all th
promisingly devoted to his own mu
as the quintessence of romantic aut
bands, the guitarist became the em
Commercial Context
Beyond the technological innovations and Zeitgeist of the sixties, guitar gods appeared
in a commercial context. The post-war affluence and attendant baby boom in the U.S.
and the U.K. created a significant youth market, for which rock was emblematic. By
the 1960s, the older music industry, using those on its periphery and outsiders, had
adapted to this new market like a horde of pickpockets in a crowd of Christmas shop
pers. New kinds of mediators arose then too. Managers like Albert Grossman (Dylan),
Brian Epstein (the Beatles), and Andrew Oldham (the Rolling Stones) were sympathetic
to the romantic ideology. The changes in recording technology demanded and called
forth producers who were in tune with and wanted to cater to the artists. By the end of
1960s, specialized rock venues existed in the U.S. (from the start, the U.K. had the art
college circuit). Several festivals, notably the Monterey International Pop Festival in
1967 and Woodstock in 1969, elevated Jimi Hendrix to superstar status, and along with
him, enhanced the guitarist's role.
The rock press shared the romantic ideology, although it was more interested in
political progressivism. The blues-basis of sixties rock, referencing African-American
musicians (or in Hendrix's case, presenting one) allowed guitar gods to receive a posi
tive press. Starting with Led Zeppelin's massive popularity and especially in the mid
1970s when punk began to flourish, the mainstream rock press became antagonistic to
the "masturbatory," "boring" guitar solo. In contrast, media catering to forms of rock
that valorized the guitar godespecially hard rock and heavy metalcontinued to give
guitarists very positive coverage.
Dramatic Performance
Despite being celebrated for their musictheir soundlead guitarists are also required
to give a dramatic visual performance. This allows them to rival the band's singer for the
spotlight (those who do their own singing tend to be less visually dramatic than those
who play with flamboyant vocalists). Performance also reinforces the romantic myth of
the guitar hero. The dramatic guitar performance has its roots in three key sixties play
ers: Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, and Jimi Hendrix. Clapton's look of concentration
and emotionality are one pole of the axis, the other end of which is the over-the-top
showmanship of Townshend and Hendrix.
Townshend of The Who is well-known for his arm-twirling wind

that show stopping act in which he smashes his guitar in a frenzied
claimed that his signature stunt was inspired by the aesthetic theor
College tutor, Gustav Metzger: "Metzger advocated what he call
works of art, for example, the 'action painting' he created by spray
of nylon. As Metzger explained them, such works were meant to ev
prospects opened up at Hiroshima."11
Playing guitar in Little Richard's backup band in the early 19
"learned how to woo a white audience at the feet of a master.. .who
example the value of flamboyant showmanship."12 In Britain durin
"Hendrix went Townshend one better: he ended his performanc
his guitar a burnt offering, kneeling over it with mock reverence, p
on the instrument, setting it aflameand then, in a frenzy of feig
ing the instrument up."13 After wowing the Brits, Hendrix brough
States. At the Monterey Pop Festival, after playing the guitar behin
backward somersault and riding the guitar like a horse, he finally sp
fluid, and set it on fire. "And at the end of his set, when he sent his
the bonfire did not seem gratuitous. It seemed rather a gesture of
burnt offering to the unknown pagan gods who had blessed this ha
and granted one man-child a moment of rare bliss."14 Not everyone
Robert Christgau called Hendrix a "psychedelic Uncle Tom."15
The focus of the guitarist's performance is a display of intense em
ing with looks of exertion and concentration. The repertoire of exp
has by now become ritualized and mannered, understood, although
conscious level, by the audience. Shows of exertion and concentratio
playing is difficult. Looks underscore the virtuosity, which is the a
routine. The signature gesture of visual emotionalityback arch
thrown back, mouth agapeis the defining expression of the gu
as photographed in magazines. A rock photographer, whose pictures
been published in innumerable magazines, told me that this look is
his subjects have a term for it: the "guitar face." The guitar face lo
pleasure; one might call it, without exaggeration, orgasmic.
The romantic ideology, in which the lead guitarist is embedded, d
ity. Like the singer, he must demonstrate that this is his music, tha
express what he is feeling. Because the singer's instrument, his voic
emotion is directly conveyed. Indeed, some have argued that it is not
11 James Miller, Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll 1947-1977 (N
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., p. 268.
15 Fred Goodman, The Mansion on The Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-On
Collision of Rock and Commerce (New York, 1997), p. 76.
146 Deena Weinstein
of a song's lyrics but the human em

sential meaning of a song.16 In cont
impersonal tool. He thus needs to re
his instrument is his passion. This
his orgasmic look.
The guitarist's dramatic performan
rejected the counterculture and its
rock metonym, the guitar god. (Th
tallization of punk in the mid-19
punk initiator Johnny Ramone's so
Billy Zoom to deconstruct its fam
mannequin, whose only moving par
was unchanging, set into an eerie
"It's kinda my trademark...origin
guitarists that made all those funn
guys that.. .acted like they were hu
they weren't."17
Guitar gods are worshipped, hence
"Clapton is God," graced various wa
with John Mayall in 1965 and cou
guitarists' fans emulate them during
strict Weberian sense of the term,
air guitar is an example of imitatin
rites. The air-guitarists' body move
their miming. Typically their facia
centrated expressions seen on stage
slack-jawed. Air-guitarists are sti
on stage in numerous air-guitar con
Hero Worship
It seems that all of the guitar grea

gods or heroes. Interviews always
most admire. They readily, with re
Despite the crucial element of indiv
cessity that they trace their own gi
16 Simon Frith, "Why do Songs have W

(New York, 1988),
17 David Staudacher, "Back and Beyond:
Process (Summer 2000), p. 38.
Hero worship is an integral element of romanticism and was m

Thomas Carlyle in the nineteenth century. Intrigued by the role
history, Carlyle used his idea of the individual with transcenden
ing force of personality to criticize the emerging industrial soci
gray passion for moneythe "cash nexus." For Carlyle, hero wor
formed the basis of a living tradition in contrast to modernity's
and dead repetition.
Metal guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen, for example, eagerly discus
"From the moment I saw Jimi Hendrix I wanted to play." When th
that he did not play in Hendrix's style, Malmsteen admitted the in
inspirational nature: "But he was cool." Far more than Hendrix, M
the nineteenth-century violinist Paganini, in some sense a true f
god: "Since the very first day I heard Nicolo Paganini he has bee
I've lived for this guy." The appeal was flamboyant virtuosity
Paganini, as he did Hendrix, via television: "I was watching te
I saw this Russian violinist playing Paganini. Man, he really r
my eyes and ears. I put a boom box in front of the TV and recor
bought Paganini's Four Caprices. From then on I've never been
Peter Green (dubbed the "Green God") replaced Clapton in John
ers in the 1960s and then went on to be an important member o
Mac. He said: "I was inspired by Eric Clapton when he was i
Eric played a line of thirds that impressed me, and I thought I'd
in some way."19 Even the mega-heroes have heroes of their own
Lee Hooker and Albert King.20 Most famous is Eric Clapton's
Johnson.
What Johnson represented to art school students like Clapton... was, to star
plexity of affect conveyed by guttural vocals, kinetic countermelodies, and a
lessly choppy that, on a recording like 'Walkin' Blues,' the singer and his
raw urgency rarely matched by later bands playing with amplified instrumen
artistry, a song like 'Walkin' Blues' was also a perfect expression of (among ot
love; desolation and abandonment; and the untrammeled freedom of a youn
'lonesome home.' For a generation bored by the complacency and comfort of
songs held out the image of another worldone that was liberated; fearful; t
Clapton's and others' reverence for Johnson is not only based on

and performer. The legend of how he acquired his guitar virtuos
traction. Briefly, the story recounts how a mediocre guitarist go
and sells his soul to the devil in return for otherworldly guitar
of the tale is that it shows that the talent to play brilliantly is n
18 Deena Dasein, "Yngwie Malmsteen: Still Mixing Fire and Ice," C.A.M.M
19 Andy Ellis, "Jumping at Shadows," Guitar Player 34 (November 2000)
20 Sheila Whiteley, "Progressive Rock and Psychedelic Coding in the Work o
Music 9 (1990), p. 40.
21 Miller, Flowers in the Dustbin, p. 190.
148 Deena Weinstein
three tried and true methods: practi

to truth, however, is questionable. It
Johnson; it concerned Tommy John
tends that it was Robert Palmer "wh
Johnson's crossroads story to Robert
so much better known and Palmer th
on crossroads mythologies, states:
Unfortunately, Palmer and the other Europ
unfamiliar with the teacher at the crossroad
Goethe's Mephistopheles in Faust, and the
gift of learning. In
th particular, they took
tormented and tortured soul doomed to su
black man at the crossroads does not accor
time in which Robert and Tommy Johnson
In the African-American folk tales, th

gifts and strength to those whom th
recasting of the legend, of course, f
ogy that defines the rock guitarist.
Technological Prowess and In
Lead guitarists' heroes are, as they re

their choice of guitar brand. In his s
who claim musical allegiance to Eri
use of a Fender Stratocaster with a M
God.'"23 Interviews and profiles of g
guitar type. For example, an intervie
"Slash's ears eventually led him to th
Paul and a Marshall."24
Guitar gods are not only players; th
or not they are paid shills. They are
ers' profit. The sales of guitars far o
worship a specific god and genuflect
signature model. But neophytes are a
guitar-focused media oblige. Consider
22 Catherine Yronwode, "The Crossroads

Devil," (1995), http://www.luckymojo.com
23 Leslie C. Gay Jr., "Acting up, Talking
Technology," Ethnomusicology 42 (1998),
24 Lisa Sharken, "Slash & Burn," Guitar
I used my Slash Marshall head and one 4x12 cabinetthe same rig I always pl
heads onstage and two 4x12s to switch from clean to dirty sounds, but only o
time. The head for the clean sound is set up with Groove Tubes KT88s, and the
Bass 9, Middle 3, Treble 514", Output Master 10, Lead Master 0, and Input Gai
Fussing with equipment to create their individualized sound is a

the lead guitarist's role. Millard goes so far as to state that the guit
1960s "changed musical practice from production to consumption, th
piece of sound had become as important as creating it."26 The photo
above told me that the crucial element in his images of guitarists w
clarity in the picture to show the position of the knobs. He also men
letters received by a magazine when he did a photo shoot in which
simply to grab his instrument. The problem was that the player lite
his hand on the neck merely to hold it. The letter writers wanted to
a new chord.
The instruments' looks, not merely their sound, is also a crucial issue. Gorgeous
well-polished woods or bright metallic colors borrowed from hot-rod cars, some in
garish patterns, are staples for bringing out the dramatic dimension of the guitarist's
performance. For blues-rockers, like Rory Gallagher and Stevie Ray Vaughn, a well
worn look is preferred.
Post-sixties guitar mediathe innumerable books, magazines, and websitesprovide
enthusiasts with aesthetic guidance. They indicate who deserves to be in the pantheon
and what is worthy to emulate, with features like "100 Greatest Guitarists," "10 Famous
Guitar Intros," "100 Greatest Solos of All Time," "Best Solo of the Millennium," "Top
100 Guitar Solos of Ail-Time," and "The 50 Heaviest Riffs of All Time." Despite all
this encouragement to imitate, young guitarists are exhorted to "do their own thing," to
be romantic individualists. "Follow the music that you love, and work on what comes
natural to you. Don't try to shadow anybody else's style or jump on what's trendy,"
Slash advises.27
The guitar has become more than a sound-producing instrument. It is the icon of rock,
incorporated into the brand logos of rock museums, cafes, and musical equipment stores.
The whole guitar-destruction routine pioneered by Townshend and Hendrix underscores
the more-than-instrumental value of the instrument.
Cultural totem, phallic symbol, protest sign, hot rodthe guitar has always been rock's central figure.
Like the Old Testament sacrifice of the slaughtered lamb, smashing a guitar is really an act of faith and
loveor at least a crime of passion. Far from killing the instrument's honor, smashing adds to its glory
and instills a layer of political and cultural meaning to the act of playing.28
25 Ibid.
26 Millard, "Conclusion," The Electric Guitar, p. 213.
27 Sharken, "Slash & Burn," p. 72.
28 James Rotondi, "Is Rock Guitar Dead...or Does it Just Smell Funny?" Guitar Player 31 (September
1997).
150 Deena Weinstein
In all the world religions, creation an

Just as would-be guitar gods are ob
cessful lead guitarists make a fetish o
to one particular instrument, once th
cally vintage models. "Oh, I have ab
interviewer. "I'm a collector of guita
this respect, Green is typical. At auc
is steep and getting higher. The pref
investment. During the 1960s, major
ates. Fender, for example, was taken
lowered the quality of the guitars. C
innovation of the companies and eve
Another seemingly irrational pract
to have a guitar constantly in their
mates, watching TV alone or seated o
silently fingering their instrument.
tory, but it has the practical effect o
chords and runs into the nervous sy
guitarists want to have their guitar at
at their bedsides, at home, or on the
but there is also a practical explana
the romantic ideology, to write his o
of music to be an inspiration, not so
It is the antithesis of those 9 to 5 cu
the 1950s, churning out pop songs da
inspiration comes at its own whim.
Malmsteen states: "As a composer
moment kind of guy, like anywhere,
solos that I do each and every night
performer I'm composing every nigh
unlike writing classical music. Rock d
only because many self-taught music
of tablature notation, the full sound
cannot be readily captured on paper. C
then recorded, rather than first bein
Beethoven to create a magnificent sy
29 Ellis, "Jumping at Shadows," p. 86.

30 Dasein, "Yngwie Malmsteen," p. 8.
Masculinity
Where are all the guitar goddesses, the guitar heroines, the guitar virtuosas? "Just think
about it: how many women have actually been innovative, technically accomplished
lead guitarists?" John Strohm asks. "None! There aren't any."31 The pantheon of rock
guitar greats is a male club with a no-girls-allowed sign prominently displayed. It isn't
that women cannot play. But you can count the number of good female lead guitarists
on your fingers and have enough left to play an E7th chord: Heart's Nancy Wilson,
Nashville Pussy's Ruyter Suys, and only a few others. It is almost like that awful joke
about female preachers being like talking dogs: it isn't that they do it well, but that they
do it at all. In the United States, according to Music Trades Magazine, "women buy just
7 percent of all the electric guitars."32
Why are lead guitarists almost exclusively men? The masculinity built into that role
has several explanations. At the most basic level, it is because rock itself is masculinist.
Coates notes that "rock was mtonymie for authenticity and pop for artifice, authentic
rock became masculine and artificial pop became feminine. In the gender hierarchy of
rock culture, the masculine represented higher status and values and thus reinforced
traditional gender hegemony."33
Clawson analyzed the makeup of the bands appearing in Rolling Stone's "Top 100
Albums from 1967-1987." Only 6.6 percent of bands had female instrumentalists of
any type. Clawson accounts for the paucity of women instrumentalists in rock bands
by noting that "[t]he band is the elemental unit in rock as an ensemble music. It is the
critical institutional locus of learning and initiation; and significantly, the early band is,
both socially and culturally, a formation of masculine adolescence."34 She found that
in her sample of Boston bands, women first began to play a rock instrument at age 19,
males at age 13.35
A complex of explanations for the masculinism in the lead guitarist's role relates
directly to the electric guitar itself and its place in the band. The instrument is seen to
embody masculine traits. John Strohm, for example, states: "The amplified electric guitar
was perceived as an instrument of great power, and this was the main reason that its play
ing in public was restricted to males. Electric guitars were seen as a man's preserve."36
The term "lead guitar" aptly describes this position, because it is the dominant role in
the band. Western society may not be as patriarchal as it once was, but dominating roles
are still seen to be the province of men. "Women are the support players in life... I think
31 John Strohm, "Women Guitarists: Gender Issues in Alternative Rock," The Electric Guitar, p. 182.
32 David Segal, "The Great Divide: Fretting Over the Lack of Guitar Divas," Chicago Tribune (Sep
tember 15, 2004), p. 7.
33 Norma Coates, "(R)evolution now? Rock and the Political Potential of Gender," Sexing the Groove:
Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley (London, 2000), p. 52.
34 Mary Ann Clawson, "Masculinity and Skill Acquisition in the Adolescent Rock Band," Popular
Music 18 (1999), p. 103.
35 Ibid., p. 106.
36 Strohm, "Women Guitarists: Gender Issues in Alternative Rock," p. 186.
152 Deena Weinstein
we nurture, we support," Heart's Nan

but that feels more like an ego pos
who have attempted to perform as a
embedded in the myth and role, eve
guitarist (ne Katherine Thomas, a J
in People magazine38 and has releas
stage show
is based on the conceit that she is the reincarnation of Beethoven, and that Ludwignot Claptonis
God. With cursing tantrums and demands for adoration she played a game with her mostly male audience,
slandering their masculinity and abusing them verbally. She found eager takers for symbolic humiliation
on stage. Her gig was a mild and inexpensive form of hiring a dominatrix.39
The guitar is also seen as a phallic symbol. Segal states: "The paradigmatic rock pose
belongs to Chuck Berry: legs apart, instrument pointed straight at the crowd. Symbols
don't get more phallic."40 Some models of the guitar are more "masculine" than others.
Andr Millard contends that the Flying V is understood to be "the ultimate expression
of the electric guitar's phallic imagery."41 In a discussion of guitar heroes, Millard and
McSwain state: "In the world of rock 'n' roll the guitar was an inescapable symbol of
masculinity, and the dynamics of the performance were filled with sexually significant
actions and meanings."42 Hendrix's performance emphasized sexual symbolism, espe
cially his "physical interaction with his guitar rubbing it against his crotch, bumping and
grinding on it."43 Feminist theorist Camille Paglia proffers a psychological explanation
for the guitarist's masculine mystique:
For an adolescent boy, your guitar speaks for you, it says what you can't say in real life, it's the pain
you can't express, it's rage, hormones pumping. Women can be strangers and all of a sudden have an
intimate conversation. Boys can't do that. The guitar for a boy speaks to an aggressive sexual impulse
and suppressed emotionality, the things that boys can't share, even with other members of the band. It's
a combination of rage and reserve and ego.44
Conclusion
In his critical study of the politics of the sixties, David Burner notes: "A period with any
life and energy, of course, is going to breed conflicts, which in turn sharpen and further
invigorate ideas."45 As a time of significant social and cultural change, the sixties were
37 Segal, "The Great Divide," p.7.

38 "The Great Kat, Who Dumped Mozart for Metal Mania," People 29 (April 4, 1988).
39 Deena Dasein, "Great Kat at the Avalon," C.A.M.M. 3 (July 15, 1992), .8.
40 Segal, "The Great Divide," p. 7.
41 Millard, "Playing with Power," The Electric Guitar, p. 127.
42 Millard with Rebecca McSwain, "The Guitar Hero," The Electric Guitar, p. 157.
43 Millard, "Playing with Power," The Electric Guitar, p. 160.
44 Segal, "The Great Divide," p. 7.
45 David Burner, Making Peace with the 60s (Princeton, 1996), p. 75.
rife with conflict within and between multifarious tendencies, not only
which achieved hegemony and the complex of which never attained re
synthesis. A familiar received narrative of the sixties presents it as a cu
dominated by political progressivism, protest against the establishmen
of participatory democracy, social justice, personal authenticity, comm
of ecstatic experience, and a return to simplicityall of which coexist i
under the sign of romanticism.
The figure of the guitar god shares in some of those themes, esp
placed on authenticity and ecstatic experience, but it contests some of
ing hero-worship against democracy, individualism against communalis
logical dependency against simplicity. The pursuit of personal authent
experience mark the guitar god as clearly within the romantic paradig
the received narrative, but the other elements lead in a different, stil
tion that resonates with major tendencies in the sixties beyond politic
and the counter-culture. Although political progressivism, egalitariani
advancing the causes of marginalized groups, and a participatory and c
were undeniably integral to the sixties, so was hero-worshiping. Ju
larger-than-life figures that paraded across the mediascape, consider,
Martin Luther King, Jr., Muhammad Ali, Bobby Fisher, and the Beatle
Although the idea of going "back to nature" surely played a role in
it is arguable that a fascination with technology was the dominant ten
the decadethe birth-control pill that sparked the "sexual revolution,
of television and the image culture, the man on the moon, and, of cou
culture's "conscious-expanding" drugs. Equality and the assertion o
ginalized groups were certainly popular ideals in the sixties, but patria
were entrenched in mainstream and counterculture alike during the d
only came into its own in the 1970s. The figure of the guitar god
components into a distinctive strand of romanticism that combines pe
ity and emotional sublimity and expressiveness with hero-worship, br
the nineteenth-century figure of the virtuoso and the embrace of indu
continuing the early twentieth-century futurist ideal of the fusion of
with an accent on the first term.
Since the emergence of the guitar god as an avatar of the sixties, that figure has been
challenged in music by the far more democratic ideals of punk rock, yet its corethe
marriage of flesh and technology in a personalized synthesishas arguably become a
dominant cultural tendency. And the sixties guitar gods still haunt contemporary culture,
as ghosts, as their acolytes, and for a few, as their aging selves. Websites devoted to
the gods proliferate, magazines publish lists of the greatest virtuosi, air guitar contests
abound, and a best-selling video game is Guitar Hero.
154 Deena Weinstein
In part, of course, guitar gods ar

that. In postmodern culture, nothing
called forth from the "standing rese
is not entirely deadbe another wav
incarnation of the heroic virtuoso w
is an artifact of ideology, and yet it
through material and ideational cultu
music that is itself a metonym for an
Anschrift der Autorin: DePaul University, D

Chicago, IL 60614, USA

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Rock's Guitar Gods Avatars of the Sixties

Author(s): DEENA WEINSTEIN

Rock's Guitar Gods - Avatars of the Sixties

distortion or enabling sustained tones. Each of these adaptations allo

Hendrix was not merely a player; he was deeply involved in the t

Rock was born in a historical conjuncture in which affluent youth

irony of an anti-commercial impulse

Townshend of The Who is well-known for his arm-twirling wind

of a song's lyrics but the human em

It seems that all of the guitar grea

16 Simon Frith, "Why do Songs have W

Hero worship is an integral element of romanticism and was m

Clapton's and others' reverence for Johnson is not only based on

three tried and true methods: practi

In the African-American folk tales, th

Technological Prowess and In

Lead guitarists' heroes are, as they re

22 Catherine Yronwode, "The Crossroads

Fussing with equipment to create their individualized sound is a

In all the world religions, creation an

29 Ellis, "Jumping at Shadows," p. 86.

we nurture, we support," Heart's Nan

37 Segal, "The Great Divide," p.7.

In part, of course, guitar gods ar

Anschrift der Autorin: DePaul University, D

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