What You Sound Like Is Immaterial

In 1966 Eric Clapton recorded with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers and music has steadily gone downhill ever since. In the book, The Birth of Loud, the author talks about how Clapton’s insistence on playing his Vox amp at full tilt during the session is what drove zillions of half-witted guitarists to “want his sound” and buy Les Paul guitars. Wrong. The recording tech’s ability to blend the guitar and sonic mess Clapton created into a coherent recording is what misled a generation of wannabe guitar heroes into breaking their backs with overweight Les Paul guitars and driving themselves deaf trying to “get that sound” in the real world. 

That Blues Breakers sound was the result of a coherent group of musicians playing together to create a piece of work that was a musical composition; even though that composition was artificial as hell. Every sucker who ever attended the sonic disasters that all Clapton concerts were from then on (with the possible exception of the Unplugged MTV concert) would confirm that Clapton no more resembled the musician on that recording than I resemble Lebron James. As for the Blues Breaker recording, I’m sure Clapton’s guitar mess bled into every mic in the room, but through a variety of Gus Dudgeon's clever acoustic and mixing tricks Mayall and the Blues Breakers got a decent recording in spite of Clapton’s ego. That’s my take, anyway. After making that record, Eric threw one of his trademark tantrums and moved on, leaving rock history with a mangled story to argue over. Several years of awful Cream concerts marketed by three brilliantly engineered and produced Tom Dowd records (including two miracle live records that almost made the group sound competent in concert) created a couple of generations of tone-deaf, functionally deaf, brain-dead guitar wannabe-heroes. Even someone as clueless as Ginger Baker could figure it out, “The incredible volume was one of the things that destroyed the band. Playing loud had nothing to do with music.”

For the next 50-some years, guitar players have been messing around with guitars, pickups, amplifiers, and techniques trying to create some sort of sound that either identifies them as individuals or covers them in the reflective glory of copying someone else fairly well. Been there, done that. What an audience is looking for is not a single instrument's "tone," but a well-constructed, balanced and interesting performance from a group (even if the "group" is an acoustic musician and his/her voice) and a song worth remembering. Except in a few instances, nobody would cross the street to hear the average guitarist fumble with their instrument, but most of us would dedicate some of our precious vanishing time to hear a great song.

In the end, Eric’s tone was about as important to the song as was the “tone” of every other instrument in the recording; especially the dubbed-in horn section. The song, the arrangement, and the mix are what make this tune worth listening to and that is the message that appears to be getting further lost in the weeds as time goes on. Pop “music” has become more of a visual performance “art” than a musical performance and audiences reflect that weirdness. “Musicians” spend more time on their dance steps and posing than their instruments or arrangements. At the club level, musicians are being taught to perform as a random bunch of individuals with self-interest overwhelming anything resembling music. Even jazz musicians in clubs as tiny as coffee shops “need” amplification because they are incapable of listening to each other and too egotistical to imagine that someone else might be the most important thing in a particular tune. And music dies a painful, sad death at the hands of electronics.