THEY WERE GODS THEN
When Rock Stars Wielded Axes and the Guitar Solo Ruled the World
Before we called them legends, we called them Guitar Gods.
And we meant it.
I grew up in a time when a proper Rock God had long hair, wore leather or spandex, and carried an instrument so badass we didn't even call it a guitar.
It was an axe.
Think about that for a minute.
You play a piano.
You play the drums.
But an axe?
An axe is something you wield.
Image: Neal Schon. Source: People.com
And these guys wielded the hell out of them.
There was something almost mythological about the great rock guitarist when I was growing up. He stood under the lights with his guitar slung low, hair hanging everywhere, amplifiers stacked behind him like a wall, and thousands of people waiting for him to do something that seemed impossible.
Then the singer stepped aside.
The spotlight moved.
One foot went up on the monitor, because apparently the full power of a guitar solo could not be achieved with both feet on the ground.
And the first note screamed through the arena.
Church was now in session.
WE SHOWED UP FOR CHURCH
Image: Eddie Van Halen. Source: People.com
And oh, did we show up.
We girls screamed.
We yelled.
We worshipped.
Articles of clothing occasionally became airborne.
Look, I'm not here to explain the physics of how someone's underwear got from Row 32 onto a stage. I'm simply reporting historical conditions.
Those men had us wrapped around their little fingers.
Long hair. Leather. Sweat. Tight pants that probably violated several local ordinances.
And an axe.
Image: Rudolf Schenker and Matthias Jabs. Source: GuitarPlayer.com
We were done for.
But here's the thing. The guys were worshipping them too.
They wanted to be them.
They wanted the guitar. They wanted the hair. They wanted the Marshall stack. They wanted to learn the solo. They wanted to stand with one foot on the monitor and make an arena full of people lose their minds.
Image: Marshall concert stack. Source: Marshall.com
So everybody was looking at the same stage thinking:
I WANT THAT.
Some of us wanted the guitarist.
Some wanted to be the guitarist.
And some of us, apparently, were interested in both.
More on that in a minute.
Because this wasn't merely fandom.
This was a culture.
Bedroom walls became shrines. Concerts became pilgrimages. Ticket stubs were sacred artifacts. If somebody managed to catch a guitar pick thrown from the stage, they guarded that thing like a fragment of the True Cross.
We had come to church.
And when that solo hit?
We had been baptized.
THEN THE GUITAR GOD SPOKE
There was a ritual to the guitar solo.
Image: James Hetfield. Source: GuitarWorld.com
Everybody knew it.
The song would reach that moment and the guitarist would step forward.
Sometimes the lights changed. Sometimes the rest of the band dropped back. Sometimes the singer simply got the hell out of the way.
Because the Guitar God had something to say.
And apparently it was going to take several minutes.
Sometimes many several minutes.
There were guitar solos that wandered away from the song, established their own municipality, elected a mayor and eventually returned.
And we loved it.
Because the solo wasn't an interruption.
The solo was the event.
The greatest players could make the instrument sound like something alive. It could scream. Cry. Growl. Whisper. Beg. Rage.
And eventually I started recognizing them.
Brian May didn't sound like Eddie Van Halen.
Image: Brian May. Source: Getty Images
Eddie didn't sound like David Gilmour.
Image: David Gilmour. Source: Guitar.com
Gilmour didn't sound like Carlos Santana.
Image: Carlos Santana. Source: Wikipedia
Santana didn't sound like Prince.
Image: Prince. Source: ArtPhotoLimited.com
The axe had a voice.
Sometimes it didn't need a human voice at all.
WAIT. YOU DON'T EVEN NEED A SINGER?
Eddie Van Halen's “Eruption” appeared on Van Halen's 1978 debut and became a landmark showcase for his playing, especially the two-handed tapping he helped bring into mainstream rock consciousness.
Listen to it.
There's no story being sung to you.
There doesn't need to be.
Eddie is talking.
With a guitar.
And then there was Joe Satriani.
Oh, Joe.
In 1987, Surfing with the Alien arrived, an instrumental rock album with Satriani handling guitar as well as bass, keyboards and other parts on the recording. The title track helped introduce him to a worldwide audience.
And that song is crazy.
There's no vocalist explaining what the hell is happening.
Apparently we're surfing through space with an alien.
Fine.
I'M IN.
The guitar tells you everything you need to know.
And somewhere along the way, Young Angel developed a perfectly reasonable career goal:
When I grow up, I want to be Joe Satriani.
Not play like Joe Satriani.
No.
Apparently I had skipped over several logistical concerns and gone directly to:
I would like to BE Joe Satriani.
BUT I WASN'T SUPPOSED TO BE THE GUITARIST
Here's the part nobody knew.
I wanted an axe.
Badly.
I could scream with the girls. Absolutely.
Have you seen these men?
But I was also watching their hands.
I wanted to know how they made that sound.
I wanted to know what happened when you bent a string, cranked an amplifier and somehow made electricity sound like an emotion.
The problem was, I didn't exactly fit the image people had in their heads.
I was a Black girl listening to metal who wanted to pull out an electric guitar and play rock.
That wasn't particularly back in the day.
At least it didn't feel cool to me.
So I hid.
I played in the shadows.
Nobody knew.
Not even my family.
And I remember the first rock licks I managed to pull out of that guitar.
The rhythm chords from “The Zoo” by Scorpions.
Of course they were.
Apparently I wasn't going to ease into this thing.
“The Zoo” came from Scorpions' 1980 album Animal Magnetism, with Rudolf Schenker and Matthias Jabs supplying the guitar attack that helped define the track.
And suddenly something happened that I still remember.
The sound I had spent all that time listening to wasn't coming from a record anymore.
It was coming from me.
Oh.
OH.
I wanted more.
And today?
I have guitars.
Yes.
Guitars. With an “s.”
Apparently the baptism took.
THE PANTHEON
Now, don't start throwing things because I haven't mentioned your Guitar God yet.
Don't come for me!
This is not a ranking.
It isn't even remotely everybody.
We're going to visit many of these people individually as Rock ’n’ Roll Angel continues, because some of them deserve entire conversations.
Today we're just walking through the cathedral and looking at some of the stained-glass windows.
Jimi Hendrix — the ancestor. His legend was already waiting for my generation when we arrived.
Image: Jimi Hendrix. Source: Guitar.com
Jimmy Page — riffs, swagger, Les Paul hanging low. If somebody had designed the Guitar God archetype in a laboratory, I'm not sure they could have done much better.
Image: Jimmy Page. Source: Guitar.com
Carlos Santana — a reminder that sometimes you don't need fifty notes. One note, held the right way, can have a soul.
Brian May — unmistakable tone, that Red Special, and the ability to make one guitar sound like an entire universe had shown up for rehearsal.
David Gilmour — proof that speed wasn't the only path to divinity. Sometimes one perfectly placed note could hurt.
Eddie Van Halen — the man who made an awful lot of people stare at their guitars and wonder whether theirs had arrived with missing features.
Randy Rhoads — classical precision crashing headfirst into heavy metal.
Image: Randy Rhoads. Source: Vintage Guitar® magazine
Nancy Wilson — axe in hand, providing some rather important evidence to girls like me that the altar did not actually belong exclusively to men.
Image: Nancy Wilson. Source: PremiumGuitar.com
Stevie Ray Vaughan — blues coming through an amplifier like a force of nature.
Image: Stevie Ray Vaughan. Source: DMagazine.com
Slash — top hat. Hair. Les Paul. A few opening notes. You knew.
Image: Slash. Source: GuitarWorld.com
Prince — almost unfair. Singer. Songwriter. Producer. Performer. Dancer. Fashion icon. Sex symbol. Whatever Prince felt like being before breakfast.
And then he'd pick up the guitar.
Oh.
OH.
We need to have an entirely different conversation about you, sir.
And we will.
Joe Satriani — forget the vocalist.
The axe will be handling lead vocals this evening.
THEY MADE GUITARISTS
That's something I understand differently now.
The Guitar Gods weren't simply entertaining us.
They were creating more guitarists.
All over the place, kids watched them and thought:
I want to do that.
They bought guitars.
They learned chords.
They sat in bedrooms trying to figure out solos note by note.
They practiced until their fingers hurt.
Some formed bands.
Some became professionals.
Some played for a while and moved on.
Some became sixty-year-olds who somehow still have multiple guitars in the house.
No names, please.
And yes, plenty of us became extraordinary practitioners of the ancient art of air guitar, which required absolutely no musical ability but demanded tremendous commitment.
The instrument was imaginary.
The performance was not.
SOMETHING CHANGED
There are astonishing guitar players today.
Of course there are.
The instrument didn't disappear. Virtuosity didn't disappear. In fact, the internet has made it possible to watch musicians from around the world do things with guitars that would probably have caused several teenagers I knew to simply give up and take up accounting.
But that's not quite what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the cultural position the Guitar God once occupied.
Image: Rik Emmett. Source: Magzter.com
There was a period when a musician could become one of the most recognizable people in a band primarily because of what happened when they put six strings in their hands.
We knew their names.
We recognized their guitars.
We argued about them.
We bought magazines about them.
We bought tickets to see them.
And sometimes we waited through the entire song for that one moment when everybody else stepped back.
Because we knew what was coming.
The Guitar God was about to speak.
THEY WERE GODS THEN
Maybe we knew they were human.
Somewhere underneath the hair and leather and spandex, surely we understood that.
Didn't matter.
The lights went down.
The amplifiers came alive.
Smoke rolled across the stage.
Somebody walked into the spotlight carrying an axe.
And fifty thousand people raised their hands.
We screamed.
We yelled.
We worshipped.
Somewhere, a teenage boy decided he needed a guitar.
Somewhere, a girl threw her bra.
And somewhere else, a Black girl who didn't think anybody would understand quietly picked up an electric guitar and tried to play the rhythm chords from “The Zoo.”
She didn't know where it would lead.
She just knew she wanted to make that sound.
Before we called them legends, we called them Guitar Gods.
And we meant it.
We showed up for church.
And when the solo came...
we were baptized.
Sources & Further Listening
Scorpions' official discography confirms Animal Magnetism and its 1980 release, along with Rudolf Schenker and Matthias Jabs on guitar.
Joe Satriani's official discography documents the 1987 release and personnel for Surfing with the Alien.
Guitar Player discusses Satriani's recollection that “Surfing with the Alien” introduced him to a worldwide audience.
Guitar Player and Guitar World revisit Eddie Van Halen's “Eruption,” his tapping technique, and the piece's impact on rock guitar.
Thanks for taking this trip back with me.
Who was your Guitar God? Was there a solo that made you stop everything and listen? Maybe you screamed from the audience, played air guitar in your bedroom, or picked up an axe of your own.
Tell me in the comments. I want to know who baptized you. 🎸
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Until next time...
Keep the memories alive. Keep the stories coming. And whatever you do... turn it up.
— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)
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