The Fender Jaguar is actually a damn fine, if expensive, piece of sonic machinery. It resembles a knackered old Thames barge, and can be made to sound quite similar. This is one of those guitars that I want to lick.
At the opposite end from the Fender Jaguar’s ramshackle elegance is Cheap Trick’s ‘madcap’ guitarist, Rick Nielsen. Cheap Trick were Pop Rock, but slid into our territory by virtue of their long hair. They had a moderately successful career throughout the 70s, and happened to write two of the all-time great pop-metal songs; the heart-string-tugging-but-punch-the-air-at-the-same-time ‘I Want You To Want Me’ and the even better ‘Surrender’. Nielsen’s problem was that he was short-haired and strange-looking while the lead singer and bassist were drop-dead gorgeous. Cheap Trick album covers always featured the handsome two on the front, and Nielsen and rotund drummer Bun E Carlos on the back, so Nielsen needed a hook to grab himself a piece of the attention. First of all he came up with this:
Crikey.
Then this:
This is an accurate representation of Nielsen himself.
This too:
This is actually an electric guitar.
And finally this:
This is actually an electric guitar.
POINT OF ENTRY
5 May 1985: my 14th birthday. Downstairs in the front room, my mother and sister groggily watched me open my presents. As usual, my father was still asleep upstairs, and as usual, he hadn’t got me a present himself. But suddenly I had an idea. I padded up the stairs to my parents’ room and knelt at my father’s bedside.
‘Wake up,’ I whispered. ‘Wake up.’ Nudging didn’t work either, so I had to roll him over on to his back. One eye reluctantly flickered open and he grunted and rolled back again.
‘You know it’s my birthday today?’ I whispered into his ear.
He grunted again.
‘Well, I’ve thought of something you could give me as a present.’
No grunt this time, he just pulled up the sheet.
‘Why don’t you give me your electric guitar? It won’t cost you anything and you don’t have to wrap it and it’s not going to leave the house, is it?’
There was a very long pause.
‘Well?’ I whispered, and held my breath.
‘Oh alright. Now, please, fuck off,’ he mumbled from under the sheet.
I ran downstairs, strapped it on and stood in front of the mirror and gazed at myself for a very long time. It was lighter than the bass, and much more complicated. But it was suddenly the sexiest fucking thing in the world and it was mine, which meant that I was sexy too. I had my photograph taken with it in the garden that afternoon.
It’s a fictional chord.
GO!
When my father agreed to teach me how to play the guitar, I had assumed it would take him more than six minutes to do so. He showed me E, he showed me A, and he showed me B7.
‘Right then,’ he said.
‘Right what?’ My fingers were gracelessly locked into B7.
‘I’m off to the pub.’
‘But what’s the next chord?’
‘That’s all you need,’ he said, looking for his lighter and car keys.
‘I only need three chords? There are more chords than that, aren’t there? What about … what about C?’
‘Bollocks.’
‘Really?’
‘Just learn how to play those three and you’ll be fine. You can work out the rest yourself.’
‘Can’t you please just teach me a few more?’
‘I’ll see you later.’
‘D?’
He left, I gazed at my trembling B7, played it and dropped my plectrum.
What galls me today about this is that apart from being right, he was also being extraordinarily lazy. Had he delayed his visit to the pub by a couple of hours, I would’ve got through the painful preliminaries considerably faster than the months it actually took. But then again, his laziness gave me the opportunity to be a self-taught guitar player, which is definitely the best way. Your style is your own. Your cackhandedness is unique. You can’t blame your guitar teacher for your complete lack of technique. You can be utterly rubbish for years all by yourself. And your defence is perfect: Well, how the fuck am I supposed to know?
I don’t know why, but my father owned Russ Conway’s old bass player’s amplifier – not the speaker or anything, just the top bit, the amp. He talked about it in hushed tones like it was our own Elgin Marble, so I did too. Russ Conway. Who was he?
Later that week he wired the amp up to an old hi-fi speaker and we plugged in the guitar. The sound that came out was fuzzed-up and rancid (he’d overloaded the speaker) and all you could hear was distortion. My father apologised and moved to dismantle the contraption, but I elbowed him away and lugged it up to my room, quaking with excitement. My guitar was already Heavy Metal!
My sister still owns cassettes that I recorded of my early practice sessions. She likes to remind me of them every now and then as if they’re some sort of lost treasure waiting for reappraisal. There’s hours of the stuff: no singing, just monster riffs out of time and barking root chords that go on for ever. These tapes feature my first attempts at writing a song. It was called ‘Go!’. It’s enthusiastic.
Paul and I were now an official band, despite the fact that we’d never actually met, let alone played our instruments together. The tone of our conversations shifted to accommodate this new professionalism as we arranged our first physical meeting. This summit was a logistical headache as we lived miles apart; the journey would involve generosity from one of my parents, and since my mother had stopped driving altogether after a dicey moment in high winds on the M27, it was all about trying to bribe my father.
I was obviously the star of our group – having no singer certainly helped my cause – and as my father drove me down to Paul’s house for the weekend, I gazed out of the car window, a supremely confident master of the art of axemanship, off to the country for a few days of rehearsals of original material that I’d written out in my new Complete Guitar Player Music Writing Book. I was also feeling quite cocky since my father had recently told me how bar chords worked. It turned out they were agony and took ages.
‘Are my fingers supposed to hurt as much as this?’ I asked him.
‘The pain is good for you.’
The Bavisters lived in a big house near the coast and Paul was waiting for me in the drive as we arrived. He was tall and ungainly and covered in spots. We were very awkward with one another and filled the gaps in our