Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[wombat]

My suspension of disbelief just went "twang."

Don't you hate it when that happens?

[AugustWest]

I like Fripp.

And Tubular Bells, in small doses.

[Limmo]

Robert Fripp is amazing.  And if you get a chance to see Yngwie Malmsteen live, do.  It is pure comedy gold.

[slink]

I don't really have any problem with the whole underground/suspension of disbelief thing. I just dont' have the time to give a shit. I mean, I read Goats and am prefectly happy for Diable and Oliver to be chatting away with Toothgnip and Neal and Bob. I mean... come on...

Fripp, I used to have time for. Back in the old days of Crimson. Out of Crimson I'd say the best guitarrist would be Belew, who has gone on to do a few more interesting things since those early days.
Ugh, Malmsteen indeed. I just feel he's all technicality. My top three guitarrists ever would be, Malmsteen for technicality, Hendrix for feel, and Zappa for the combination of the two. I don't really have much respect for a guy who plays technically and doesn't seem to care about the feel of the music, and that's not to say that I am a shit guitarrist in denial!

[Limmo]

A friend of mine took me to see the last G3 show at the Greek Theatre.  Yngwie was the opener. Now the average guitar player would only need one Marshall stack.  A stack with two cabinets and two Marshall heads per stack would be pushing it, right?  Yngwie had five of them.  His roadies were forced to wear shirts that read Yngwie Who? on the front and Yngwie fuck*ng Malmsteen, That's Who! on the back.

He launched into his set, and notes just filled the air.  If you're a fan of notes, by all means go see G3, there are a great many of them to be found there.  I wanted there to be a ticker in the corner of the video screen so we could see how many notes we were experiencing.

Have I mentioned what Yngwie looks like now?  And that sometimes he would flip his guitar around his neck, and then rub it on his ass in a sexy pantomime?  

Anyway, he was up there going brikitarickitarickitarickita with his Strat, and then the band would leave the stage while Yngwie continued to go brikitarickitarickitarickita and then the band came back and each member took a solo and then the band left again and a classical music piece came on the PA over which Yngwie contined to go brikitarickitarickitarickita at which point my friend leaned over to me and said "Is this a Mach piece?" and I spit beer out of my mouth involuntarily.

By the end I was howling things like "This song is called SEVEN OCEANS OF MAGMA!!!" and the people around me - who were really digging on all the notes - started to get pissed off.  Then it mercifully ended.  Steve Vai then came out and played a set that was tasteful by comparison, despite stunts like this.  We spent Satriani's set in the beer garden, but we could still hear all the notes.  Then the encore: "Rocking in the Free World," "Little Wing" and "La Grange."  The other two guys would kind of huddle together on stage right and shake their heads while Yngwie went brikitarickitarickitarickita over Hendrix's most mellow song and then stopped in the middle of a solo to drink some beer.

Yes.  It was excellent.

( Oh, and I liked today's strip, too. )

[slink]

G3

Yea, I guess for me a large part of it is that I've never really like any of those guys. They just, I don't know, it all feels to be 'how fast can we play' and not about the music. The only guitarrist who gets lumped into that group who I have had any time for was Stevie Ray Vaughan, and then only because I thought his instrumental version of Little Wing was really good.

That said, I'd be amused to see Malmsteen live just to snigger as he hauled that gut around!

[Steve Hogan]

[Silverberg]

This strip tickled my funny bone. Suspension of disbelief be damned, comedy still comes in threes.

[Jay!]

I am fairly certain that, one of these days, Yngwie Malmsteen is going to drive a car over Dick Dale.

[agnes]

I know just the Fripp photo he's thinking of -- or at least one of them. I had this book that taught me how to play guitar back in ye olde early 90s, and inside were pictures of various guitar heroes, and one was of Fripp with his ding-dong fingers spread over like 19 frets, all: "That's right. I know you can't believe what you're seeing but this shit is FOR REALS." Really the last thing an amateur guitar player, who is struggling to even get E-minor working, wants to see.

[jough]

Ah, yes, The Guitar Handbook.

That is actually a very good book.  I remember back when I used to play guitar all day and listened to a lot of Joe Satriani and Al DiMeola that I thought Malmsteen was quite ridiculous.

Robert Fripp never really entered my radar much - I was too busy wondering what the fuck*ng fuss was about Randy Rhodes.

That Tribute album is the shizz-izzle, though.

[Chris Onstad]

Fripp with his ding-dong fingers spread over like 19 frets

Observe: The Guitar Handbook, Denyer, p 114: Robert Fripp wearing spidersilk socks and forming what is undoubtedly the world's most pretentious chord on a Les Paul.

To regain faith in humanity, check out Paul Weller's collection of Rickenbacker semi-acoustics on page 60, and the concert photo of Chuck Berry on page 11 (cold coke screamin').

[Limmo]

Almost all the shit you need to learn guitar is in The Guitar Handbook.  

Many of my favorite Robert Fripp bits are actually on other peoples' records: David Bowie's "Fashion"and ""Heroes"",  Eno's "Baby's On Fire," The Roches' "Hammond Song," and "In the Cloud Forest" from the first Summers/Fripp album.  King Crimson's Discipline album is his best overall album.  He may be a humorless prick in real life ( though I would argue you'd need a sense of humor to be the 3 in G3, which he was this summer in Europe ), but he knows how to wring emotion from a fretboard.   ( The title track to Evening Star by Fripp & Eno is amazing too. )

"Black Star" is the only Yngwie song I own ( other than a truly amazingly awful version of "Carry On Wayward Son" ), and that's plenty.  Randy Rhoads, like most of the other guitarists mentioned in this thread, had staggering chops that led to some fairly uninteresting solos and songs.  Though Jough is right, Tribute has that unaccompanied guitar solo that makes me air-guitar in spite of myself.  

My favorite guitarist is still Charlie Christian.

And so ends the Affirmative Action Guitar Heroism Thread.