"1609- Galileo determines that the earth revolves around the sun. Guitar players determine that the earth revolves around them." October 1999, Guitar World

My experience after nearly seven years of stinging fingers and broken strings has been that playing the electric guitar has more to do with giving other people the impression that you can play well, whether you can or not, than the pursuit of any kind of authentic technical excellence. (If in the process of working to give people the impression that you play well, you actually start to play well, this is certainly a plus, but not necessary). There are two ways of going about this: the first lies in sounding exactly like a beloved, admired guitar player from the past or recreating the guitar tone from a song that is already accepted as excellent such as "Hound Dog," or "Sunshine of your Love"; if you sound just like Scotty Moore (Elvis' guitar player) or Eric Clapton and can play their solos note-for-note and bend-for-bend, everyone will agree that you left burns on the fretboard, that it doesn't get any better than these guys so why try. This is the principal reason that there is a column in both Guitar World and Guitar One which shows you exactly the amplifiers and guitars and even the patch cords of a famous player's setuphis cabinets, his pre-amp, his amp head, even his stompboxes or effects pedals and how they are all arrangedso as to show you how you could conceivably recreate his sound exactly. This is not even an ad, it's a feature, a reason why people buy the magazines.

In accordance with this reverential mentality, you would be more likely to buy a Telecaster having seen Fender's "Musical Telepathy" ad, which pictures Keith Richards glaring, Muddy Waters howling, and Joe Strummer snarling, than you would a guitar advertised by the man who has played on the most Canadian television shows. It is this desire for a respected tradition and historical significance, the same desire behind passing a pocket-watch down from generation to generation or putting a sign on the door of your store that reads "Since 1915," to which Washburn's "500 year old tone" ad caters. The ad shows a grainy, black-and-white photograph of a group of lumberjacks clad in wool trousers and logging caps standing on a giant downed tree, the implication being that it is from such a noble, established tree that one's Washburn was manufactured. The truth is that few famous people have ever played a Washburn and so they advertise their product by showing the felled tree from which the guitar was made (my experience has been that your parents might buy you a Washburn or some other guitar of comparable quality and value when you first start playing to see if you'll practice for your lessons or decide you'd rather play the saxophone or go mountain biking or take apart radios insteadmy first guitar was a borrowed Gamma and I have never since seen another one).

The second and much more difficult way to convince everyone that you can play lies in doing something on the guitar that no one has ever even conceived of. This is what Charlie Christian did when he first played electric lead with Benny Goodman's band in the 1930's and made everyone's jaw drop or what Eddie Van Halen did with his two-hand tapping technique and whammy bar acrobatics or Jimi Hendrix did whenever he picked up a guitar. Clearly these players had all absorbed a good deal of influences (Charlie listened to horn players, Eddie to Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, Jimi to Ike Turner and T-Bone Walker, among others) but they managed to channel them into something that became their own recognizable sound. There is something very American about thisan acknowledgement of, and deference toward, prominent figures of the past, combined with a spirit of breaking new groundbecause on Earth we have discovered everything, there remain no blank patches in our maps crying out to be filled in, and so guitar playing becomes a kind of frontier to survey in itselfyou can't go out and find a new place but you can try and pick sixteenth notes at 300 beats per minute. Interestingly, though, all the players who at one time blew everyone away and did something no one had thought of before have now become the standard figures in the annals of guitar history, the yardsticks against which new accomplishments are measured, whose licks you spend hours learning before you can start writing your own.

It follows that about half the ads you find in guitar magazines are along the lines of: "Buy a Strat because Hendrix played a Strat," or "because Stevie Ray (Vaughn) played a Strat," or "Buy this guitar and look like Pete Townshend jumping into the air with it in front of a wall of Marshall cabinets"; this is why I bought my Ferrari red Gibson SG. The other half are more along the lines of a Silvertone electric guitar ad, which declares, "Times are a changin": This is not your grandpa's guitar' and depicts a blond, goateed young man who looks like he's just come back from working on his hotrod in the garage, holding a purple guitar with a tremolo bar (every guitar player's second favorite appendage, as the saying goes), slouching next to a blond girl wearing tight cut-off jeans, her right arm loosely draped over his shouler. Grandpa is sitting outside the garage wearing a ten-gallon hat with an ivory brooch on the hat band to match the one he is wearing on his right ring finger, a purple tie-dye t-shirt, and beige clogs, finger picking a lemon-yellow Fender Stratocaster. Of course you do not want such a guitar. Silvertone also produced an ad with the very same picture, only with Grandpa cut out of it, which reads, "All you need is talent, good looks, and a Silvertone guitar; well, even 2 out of 3 ain't bad." He is clearly holding a Silvertone guitar, but which of the other two he lacks is unclear.

A guitar magazine is a bit like a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. There are close-ups of pickups, fret boards, bridges, tone knobs, and tuning pegs. The guitars are polished and show off their curves. You would like to put your hands all over them. On maybe every other page of most guitar magazines, you see an incredibly attractive girl in a bikini, sitting on an amp, or holding a guitar against her chest, or looking at a guy playing guitar (the girls are never playing guitars themselves) in the way you dream that girls will look at you when you have spent enough hours practicing alone in your room. Because playing electric guitar has always had a good deal to do with attracting girlsthis, besides being homesick and bored at summer camp, is why the author of this article began playingand showing them that you are, in fact, a great guy to be around. Or at least being sociable, as a band is a great way to make friends and thus guitars take the place of trading cards, baseball bats and mitts or fishing poles.

Because the world of guitar magazines is nearly the same world as that depicted in magazines about fast cars, superheroes, monster trucks, weightlifting, handguns, or anything else that you might get to know in depth when you are fourteen and discuss excitedly with your friends. It was not until I started playing guitar that I understood why anyone might be interested in looking at one picture after another of Ferrari sports carswith guitars, there is the same obsessive fascination with different models and their specifics and the same inevitable focus on one perfect, sparkling, unattainable instrument.

Opening a guitar magazine is like watching an action movie: you are bombarded with pictures of racecars telling you to "HotRod your combo"(a combo is a combination of a head or amplifier, and a cabinet, which is the speaker itself). Or of people biting their guitars, tearing the strings off the necks, lighting them on fire, smashing them to splinters. Guitars take the place of armaments in many ads. We read about the newest guitars from "Washburn's new ballistic arsenal." An ad for the Dunlop Cry Baby wah-wah pedal asks, "Why bend a note when you can break its tiny little neck?" and another describes the pedal as "Built like a tank Ð combat ready." In a recent issue of Guitar World, Zakk Wyld, who played with Ozzy Osbourne and now fronts the Black Label Society, and Dimebag Darrell, the lead guitarist from Pantera, are dressed in military fatigues, their faces covered with green and brown camouflage paint, carrying machine guns in place of guitars.

Many of the guitar players who frequently appear in the magazines, Kerry King from Slayer, for example, are monsters: guys with Iron Cross tattoos, shaved heads, pronged beards, muscle shirts, and arms like hams, who, if you saw them on the street, you would never imagine they played guitar. In America, to some degree, playing most musical instruments is characterized as a pastime for sissies and eggheadsit is really only one step away from writing poetry!one that, for many young, upcoming guitar-slingers, conjures up images of minuets danced by people wearing frilly dresses and tailcoats in novels written by girls. Admittedly, Slayer's lyrics are about such topics as Dr. Mengele and disembowelment and listening to their records is somewhat like listening to a running disposal stuck on a fork, but when it comes down to it, even the musicians in Slayer have spent half their lives practicing diminished-seventh arpeggios, sweep picking, and chromatic scales. Slayer's music isn't any good, but they can really play.

There is a contrast here, albeit it a slightly ambiguous one, between playing guitar fast and loud in a bandthis is the pursuit of hip, hot rod guitarists and putting on a collared shirt to play "Greensleeves" in a recital along with a bunch of other dorks who can't play their instruments. But this brings up several significant contradictions inherent in the electric guitar world: it is not cool to practice (this is a solitary, antisocial pursuit) but cool to play fast (which requires practice); not cool to look like a girl, but cool to have long hair; not cool to be old but cool to have played for a long time; not cool to write rhymed lines of verse but cool to write lyrics for songs; not cool to express oneself meaningfully but cool to sing (or growl, at least).

"Eruption," Eddie Van Halen's incendiary 2-minute guitar solo from Van Halen's self-titled 1978 album has become a kind of sacred track. In the grand scheme of things, the two-hand tapping technique which Eddie Van Halen (referred to in some circles as Eddie V.H.) perfects on this track, has very few practical applications. But it has become something that every guitar player spends hours in his room practicing. The technique consists of sounding notes by tapping strings on the fretboard using the index or middle finger of your right hand to create a rapid succession of hammer-on's and pull-off's and sounds like unbelievably fast, electrified yodeling. The great thing about two-hand tapping is that you can you learn to do it without ever having learned a single chord or major scale or even how to read music, but it's something that is endlessly impressive to anyone who listens to you play, assuming they do not play guitar themselves.

A story by way of illustration. Every summer while I was in high school, I attended Guitar Week at Berkelee College of Music. One night, at the Rock Jam, a kid with an Ibanez electric guitar, the kind that Steve Vai plays that has a grip cut of the body so you can carry it like a suitcase, ascended the stage. His group was going to jam on a Dokken song but he waved his hand and said, "First I'd like to play a little introductionyou may recognize it," as though he were asking if we'd ever heard of his school, Harvard University? and he launched into the worst rendition of "Eruption" any of us in the audience had ever heard: he stuck his tongue out, bungled the whammy bar dives, missed the pinch harmonics, jumbled the notes in the tremolo part. Finally, he failed to nail the tapping part, which all of us had spent perhaps a trillion hours practicing but would not have even contemplated playing in public unless we knew we could play it right. Everybody in the room cringed and turned away, because there is something unspoken about "Eruption," I think--the point is that nobody can play it, except Eddie, who already played it perfectly on the recording. Though it is what everyone is most impressed by, the tapping section is really the only part that anybody can play because the rest of the solo is impossibly difficult. (Note: for your information, the March 2003 issue of Guitar World features a brand-new, note-for-note transcription of the entire "Eruption" solo plus a harmonic and technical analysis.)