Blog Response #9: Eddie and Me and Mullets

Cool stuff, this week’s article. I like the idea of a multi-genre research paper. Again, as I alluded to in my last post, that’s the kind of stuff that I grew up doing in my primary, secondary, and higher education. I like it.

Let’s suppose, for instance, that I was doing a report on one of my life’s passions, guitar-playing. (This’ll be fun.)

It started out innocuously enough, of course. My first guitar teacher was a really nice guy--so much so, in fact, that he'd auditioned to be Donny Osmond's guitarist. Too bad he never taught me this one:



...or, on second thought, it's probably better that he didn't teach me that...

But no discussion of guitar-playing would be complete, of course, without mention of Eddie Van Halen, of whom my first teacher was a devotee. Here's one of Eddie's most interesting moments, playing a Steinberger TransTrem guitar, which allows the whole guitar to be transposed up or down and remain in tune. Thus, because of his equipment, I can NEVER play this song, because one of these guitars costs thousands and thousands of dollars--if you can find one, because they're not made anymore.



The interesting thing is that, after learning to play that crazy stuff (well, I could never play it very WELL), I kinda had to unlearn that in order to get some real emotion going. (And, seeing as how I was, in many regards, every bit the angst-ridden teenager of yore...) Consider this band, Unbroken, a hardcore band from the San Diego area, whose concert (not this particular concert) once almost cost me my life (you can see why) (ah, the foibles of youth.) In another one of their songs, "Razor," they actually subvert the whole punk genre and throw in some Morrissey riffs. This one's a bit more illustrative, though.



I still want to have a Les Paul Custom, thanks to that band. Black Les Paul Customs just look BAD.

Another band that broke that mold was Texas is the Reason, one of the best band names ever:



Those guys were big proponents that the Kennedy Assassination was a conspiracy theory--on their concert sweatshirts, they printed diagrams of the so-called "magic bullet theory," proving (in their minds, at least) that the accepted version of Kennedy's death is physically impossible.

Lately, though, I've been getting back to my roots--which, in my case, means Brian May. Brian May was the guitarist for Queen, and his solos still rank among some of the most melodic in rock. His unique tone was created by his fingers (duh) and his "Red Special," a homemade guitar that used, among other things, pieces of an old fireplace, a knitting needle, and motorcycle parts. (Of course, it didn't hurt that Freddie Mercury was one of the greatest vocalists of all time--and, by, all time, I mean since Adam ate a transgressive lunch.)



See, my teachers always wanted me to play the blues, and I understand why, since the blues formed the basis of all our modern pop music. However, I prefer Rush:



...which, of course, features a riff based on basic pentatonic scale movement. So, in a way, it IS the blues. Ha! I win!

While I realize that I haven't done much in this post aside from show a bunch of pirated videos (although, they're being used for educational purposes, so that makes it okay, right?), I can easily see how someone could fill in the blanks between these videos and make a convincing argument about something. Thus, I'm fine with the idea of the multimodal personal report. I think it'd be fun. I mean, I certainly had fun with all of these clips...

...wait, we need another mullet...and good guitar...