Very briefly, to finish my thoughts about last night's Judas Priest concert, I mentioned a had a couple of minor complaints. Thinking about it today, I don't know why I said "a couple" because I really only have one, and it isn't a complaint but simply an observation. Here it is :
A big part of original Judas Priest music was always the twin guitar soloing of KK Downing and Glenn Tipton. They would trade off on many solos, with one guy starting and the other finishing, like a call and response. Tipton and Downing became so renowned for their shared solos that, on some JP albums in the 1980s, it got to the point where the band listed who played which section of each solo.
i.e. "Glenn, first lead break", "Main solo : KK, first section, Glenn, second section".
That's how great these two lead guitarists were, that their solos were listed by name in the credits, so the fans would know who played which part. I could usually tell without reading the liner notes, because I had seen JP live so many times and I knew each man's style. Glenn was precise and melodic, but with the feel of the great lead guitarists of history. KK was explosive and orgasmic. His biggest influence was Jimi, and when he would take an entire solo for himself, as he did on the JP show stopper "Sinner", you felt as if you were being launched on the Space Shuttle. Such moments were jaw dropping. KK and Glenn are two of the greatest lead guitarists who ever lived. And what made them so great was their solos conveyed a feeling, a sense of being taken somewhere. For one thing, both Glenn and KK were melodic players. They could play very fast, but it was never about that. Judas Priest solos were about building and expanding the emotion in the song, driven by the vocal line, and taking that emotion to a climax that, as I've said, was like a nuclear meltdown in the musical sense. The two guys had the combination of feel and technique that was highly developed in the best guitar players of the 1970s and 80s, and that resulted in many great players who sounded individual.
That is the key to what I will mention next.
The new JP lead guitarist Richie Faulkner is very good, excellent even, for what has become the new style of lead playing in the modern era - flurries of notes, played very fast and with a much more compressed sound than used by 80s players, a technical trick using pre-amplified line gear (pedals, etc.) which is utilised to accommodate the lightning fast alternate picking that all the hard rock and metal guitarists have learned to do, ever since Yngwie Malmsteen came along. I won't get into the technical aspects of using all of that stuff to make it sound like you are shredding, but what I will say is that this style of playing detracts from the Art Of The Guitar Solo, if for no other reason than so many thousands of notes are played that none of them mean very much. As a result, nothing is "being said" in the solo. Nothing is conveyed and you don't get the same feeling of being "taken somewhere".
This trend happened because guitar soloing became akin to an athletic event, and then came Youtube and all of the instructional videos on "how to shred", and the end result was that you had a whole generation of guitar players who sounded more or less the same. They all had the compressed pedalboard sound, they all used sweep picking techniques, they all had shrill high notes without much body to them.
And what happened was that the Art Of Guitar Soloing was lost.
The feeling was lost, because technique took over the driver's seat.
You can't just go "tweedle-dee-dee" on your guitar. You have to say something.
And you will never be able to say anything if all you do is focus on technique.
If you only focus on technique, you will go "tweedle-dee-dee" when you solo. ////
So that's my one minor complaint about last night's Judas Priest concert, which was great in every other way, and which was phenomenal overall as reported last night.
Richie Faulkner is a great metal guitar player, capable of not only nailing the intricacies of JP's riffs and juxtaposed middle sections, but of adding new energy to them. He brings new life to the songs, now that the Two Legends, Glenn and KK, have gone.
But as talented as he is, he comes from a generation of guitarists who grew up on technique, and "group learning" via metal guitar lessons and formats, and unfortunately this generation failed to produce individual sounding players.
Are they proficient? Hell yeah. That's part of the reason why the show was so awesome last night.
But the guitar solos were played so fast that they didn't really register emotionally. And in old JP concerts, the solos were where your head would explode.
Again, just a minor complaint, because the new guys were so Ultra On Top of every other aspect of the music.
But the Guitar Solo is an important thing for rock and roll music.
I can whistle or hum all of the best guitar solos note for note.
I know them all because of the emotional effect they had on me, and they are imprinted in my soul.
I watched a wonderful movie called "It's A Great Feeling" with Dennis Morgan, Jack Carson and Doris Day, but tonight you will have to IMDB it for yourself. I got too carried away talking about Guitar Solos.
That is all I know for tonight. I got a bit carried away in writing about The Solo, and I mean no affront to Mr. Faulkner, who is from a different generation, and of that generation he is one of the finest players I've heard.
But we see, going back to the beginning, what the Solo really meant. The was an art to it.
And now we must emphasize it's importance in our emotional makeup, as it has contributed so much to our lives.
See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxxo :):)
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