Confessions of a Fanboy

I tried learning guitar in college, never got very far with it. I’m sure if I’d tried longer than 20 minutes I could have learned to do something with it. I probably could have learned how to play a Muddy Waters tune if I’d dedicated and applied myself. I could have learned to play the notes — provided Muddy didn’t covet F chords — and even learned to play them in time, but I couldn’t have brought the song to life. Anyone can learn notes on a page. Angus Young once said anyone who can clap their hands and count to four can play the guitar. Muddy Waters did more than play the guitar.

This is my true objection to American Idol. I’m not such a sourpuss puritan that I can’t stomach the idea that a television network would air a glitzy talent show. What angers me is watching contestants mimic their heroes while singing someone else’s song. That’s not just contrived, that’s contrived squared. Hearing Kelly Clarkson impersonate Whitney Houston while singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” might seem interesting to you, but it gives me the shits. I’ve never wondered what it might sound like if Justin Timberlake covered Bon Jovi, so that dope Blake doing his beatbox to “You Give Love a Bad Name” was one of the most awful things I’ve ever heard. Of course, “You Give Love a Bad Name” is awful in its own rite but that’s not really the point. The point is too much derivation, not enough originality.

Noel Gallagher has been dismissed as a ripoff artist. Maybe he has liberally borrowed from others and wearing his influences on his sleeves, but there is an undeniably Noel Gallagher quality to his songs. Stevie Ray Vaughan listened to a lot of Hendrix, Albert Collins, Albert King, and Otis Rush. You can hear that in his music, but you’ll never mistake him for anyone else when you hear that big, beautiful, soulful, Texas voice and those ferocious guitar solos. His sound got so big it has now been diluted by a generation of Stevie Ray Vaughan-abees, copying his licks and impersonating his voice. Influenced is good, derivative is bad; that’s the difference.

How does one spot authenticity in a sea of impostors? Some of that is rather like Justice Potter Stewart and the definition of pornography — I know it when I see it. What’s most amazing about that intensity is how effortlessly it seems to come to them. One aspect of authenticity is effort, or the lack of audible artifacts thereof. I can tell pretty quickly when I’m listening to a blues artist or an artist who wants to play or sing the blues, a distinction that makes all the difference in the world. Robert Johnson sounded like he had hellhounds on his trail, not like he was trying to sound like he was being chased by the devil. Some artists are open channels and the blues flows through them, others sound like they’ve got great record collections and know all the right people and all the right songs.

Time often sorts these things out, acting as an austere arbiter of greatness. There’s an immediate push to saturate the airwaves with whatever sound catches on with the masses at any given movement. It becomes difficult to determine the good from the bad, the original from the fake after awhile. A tipping point is reached, the feeding frenzy turns to cannibalism, and the sound of the moment passes until “the next big thing” emerges. Years down the road the good lives on and the bad is buried in cutout bins and nostalgia circuits. It’s no coincidence the best tend to be part of the first wave, the pioneers of the given movement. We remember Nirvana and The Byrds, forgetting Candlebox and The Turtles.

The gulf between channeling the blues and playing the blues is almost as wide as the chasm between good music and bad. Borrowing, copying, and mimicking can produce pleasant music, but can it yield something vital or essential? That question and the thoughts that preceded it have been running through my mind for ages, but I’ve never found the right forum or the right way to express them. Listening to Gina Sicilia’s Allow Me To Confess seems to have been the key to unraveling these thoughts and getting them down on paper. I’m looking forward to turning my attention back to her album now that I’ve cleared my head of these lingering cobwebs.

Filed under: Tags: Bloggin' the Blues, Charlie Musselwhite, Fanboy Manifesto, Muddy Waters, Nirvana, Oasis, The Byrds