Many are the innovations that rock musicians have contributed to the art of the guitar - unquestionably more than have been rendered by any other genre. It is no stretch to claim that rock guitarists should be considered consummate stylists, their distinctive aural trademarks exceeding even those of their jazz counterparts.
Consider the many tools and tricks that have sprung up in the lead guitarist’s repertoire over the decades of rock’s tenure. The Hammer-On. The Pull-Off. The Pinch Harmonic. The Dive Bomb.
The Scrape.
Consider these many tortured contortions, most of which have Les Paul whirling in his grave, and it’s no reach to concede - Rock is to guitar technique as the Ministry of Silly Walks is to human locomotion.
To be sure, the Hammer-On, the Pinch Harmonic, the Pull-Off, The Unison Bend, The Dive Bomb all have one thing in common: they preserve actual musical tones, though they choke the tonal integrity out of them until they scream for mercy.
The Scrape is the exception. When you hear a scrape, you’re hearing a very deliberate sonic event, a carefully cultivated and executed act - but there’s nothing within it that might be described, even charitably, as a “note”.
Consider now the motivation that drives all of this improvisational invention. It’s difficult at best to view these sonic moves as musical in any way: when Pete Townshend or Eddie Van Halen let fly with a scrape, they aren’t really contributing to the musical substance of the performance; they are, rather, digressing from music into social communication of altogether different sort, as with the strange man who opens his raincoat in the subway, the cannonball antics of pre-adolescents on diving boards, or the booger-flicking of young children at Thanksgiving Dinner.
That social communication can be focused on any of a range of messages or emotions the guitarist wished to express. Here are a few:
· Social Dominance Gesture: The guitarist seeks to quash any notion that anyone else on stage is superior in skill, theatricality or idiom to himself;
· Boredom: The guitarist finds himself less than challenged by whatever song is in flight, and is broadcasting his disaffection;
· Attention-Seeking: The guitarist is in the middle of a solo, yet someone in the audience is looking at the lead singer;
· Desperation: The guitarist is playing improvisationally, is out of ideas, and has no clue where to go next.
Whatever disdain we muster for such antics must nonetheless, in the case of the scrape, acknowledge its pedigree: it was invented by no less a talent than Bo Diddley, who served it up in the intro of his tune “Road Runner”. That it has been deployed so artlessly in the intervening years is surely no reflection on Diddley’s innovation.
Then again, there are occasions when scrapes are quite artful. Consider, for instance, Gary Richrath in REO Speedwagon’s monster megahit “Keep On Loving You”, one of the greatest power ballads of all time: the lead break arrives after the chorus, and he plays a high E, which he lets linger for a mind-boggling measure-and-a-half before wandering down to a C, which he lets linger for an entire measure – and then he does the slowest scrape in the history of the guitar pick, taking an entire four beats to get from one end of the guitar neck to the other. You wouldn’t think it was possible to put a scrape of any kind in a song that slow and maudlin, but Richrath rightly concludes of course you can, if you make the scrape itself slow and maudlin.
Then there’s Trevor Rabin, one of the most skilled players in rock history – evidenced by his lengthy tenure in Yes, one of the most skilled bands in rock history. In “It Can Happen”, a chirpy tune off the group’s game-changing 90125, which has Rabin power-chording and scraping to high heaven, not just to articulate a fresh Eighties aural landscape for what had become a particularly morose classic rock exercise, but to differentiate himself from his predecessor, Steve Howe, who just barely managed to embrace the concept of distortion.
But the true God of Scrape is Tom Scholz, wunderkind of Boston, the scrapiest band in all of rock. Scholz used the Scrape with utter abandon, seizing it from rock grammar and trademarking it as his own. We hear it right up front in “More Than a Feeling”, the band’s HELLO MY NAME IS sticker from their debut album. And we note that, unlike, say, Townshend or Van Halen, Scholz takes his scrapes completely seriously, actually dubbing them one upon the other and giving them painstaking signal processing – stereo panning, delay, reverb, chorusing – giving them all the loving care he gave Brad Delp’s voice, at the mixing board.
We can now reverse our earlier pontification in light of this achievement, acknowledging the artistic potential and intrinsic beauty of the Scrape on the basis of Scholz’s attentions. And we can do so by cataloguing his successful deployments in the classic rock era.
Here, then, are Boston’s scrapes in that era:
“More Than a Feeling” (0:41, 1:51, 3:42)
“Peace of Mind” (1:27, 1:54, 2:48, 3:09, 3:36)
“Foreplay/Long Time” (5:31, 6:19)
“Rock and Roll Band” (2:37, 2:54)
“Hitch a Ride” (2:56, 3:21)
“Something About You” (0:46, 2:20)
“Don’t Look Back” (0:54, 2:00, 4:36, 5:14)
“A Man I’ll Never Be” (2:52, 4:45)
“Party” (2:02, 2:39, 3:32)
“Don’t Be Afraid” (1:44, 2:25)
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