Stars
Some guitar teachers will tell you there’s a right way and a wrong way to play the guitar. But Davis Guggenheim’s rousing new documentary, It Might Get Loud, reminds us that that’s not true at all.
You can saw at it with a bow, as Jimmy Page did in “Dazed and Confused.” (For that matter, you can jam screwdrivers into the bridge and hammer at the strings with your fists, as Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo are wont to do.)
You can run it through a galaxy of effects pedals — the Wah-Wah, the Superfuzz, the Big Muff, the Echohead — and towers of amps and racks. That’s the sort of thing that enables U2’s the Edge to turn simple chords into sounds that are shimmering, shape-shifting, alive.
You can cut it open and customize it, take it apart, and put it together again. You can slice out new soundholes or add supplementary pick-ups and knobs and switches. You can even, as Jack White hired one luthier to do, install a secret compartment in which to hide a harmonica microphone, to yank out and scream into whenever the spirit moves you.
White stars, with Page and the Edge, in It Might Get Loud, a film that might approvingly be called “guitar porn.” Its soundtrack coruscates with power chords and scorching solos; its hi-def close-ups lingers lovingly on lacquered wood and polished chrome.
A guitar, after all, is “like a piece of sculpture,” as Page rhapsodizes — and also, not for nothing, “like a woman.” But it’s not just eye candy. As the Edge points out, every element of a guitar’s construction “is there in the sound.” He would know, having built an electric guitar from scratch — scrounging the materials, sculpting the wood, winding the wire for the coiled pick-ups — at age 14.
“There’s something really iconic, almost supernatural about this instrument,” says Thaddeus Hogarth, a Berklee guitar-department professor who writes a blog, “The Quest for Tone,” about his ceaseless exploration of the guitar’s sonic palette. “The sounds you can get from it, the quality of the kinds of tones you can get. There are some great piano players out there — but they can’t get feedback.”
As I write this, untold numbers of fingers are clickity-clacking on the multi-colored buttons of Guitar Hero and Rock Band controllers. For every song powered through in those games, there’s a guitar somewhere that’s not getting played. As former Phoenix staffer James Parker writes in the Atlantic, for all we know such simulacra could slowly be “sounding the last trump for rock and roll as we know it.”
But the guitar is not dead yet. And it’s a transcendent affection for this instrument, one so simple yet so complex, that led Guggenheim — who directed Al Gore’s global-warming jeremiad An Inconvenient Truth and Barack Obama’s convention bio-pic and prime-time campaign infomercial — to convene three of rock’s most iconic guitarists on a Hollywood soundstage.
It’s difficult to think of three more disparate personalities and guitar styles than those of Messrs. Page, Edge, and White. Each is about 15 years older than the next. Page is the classicist, steeped in blues and English folk, the dab-hand session man, the riffmaster, the archetypal guitar god. The Edge, weaned on punk and new wave, is a rhythmic and tonal alchemist, intent on breaking boundaries, besotted with the endless transformative possibilities afforded by technology. White is a wild primitive, happy to wrestle sound and fury from cheap or homemade instruments, bleeding (literally) all over the strings.
“Chemistry is mostly about opposing energies,” says Guggenheim. And that’s precisely what he was after when he picked these three men: “Edge, with all his technology, versus Jack, who is so anti-technology. Jimmy, with his sexuality and moodiness, versus Edge, who is so direct and austere.”
Guggenheim says he was “terrified” that these three distinct personalities would come attached to three distinct egos. But you can sense the mutual respect the men have for one another — even as, at the same time, you can see the three of them subtly sizing one another up.
Guggenheim concedes that “for the first two hours, the conversation was actually boring. I’m thinking to myself, ‘This is going to suck.’ ” Then, he says, “Jimmy picked up his Les Paul and played ‘Whole Lotta Love,’ and it was like a throwdown. Basically saying: ‘Here’s what I do. Let’s stop talking, boys, and get on with it.’ After that, I knew we had a movie.”
Although talking shop and trading solos form the centerpiece of the film, Guggenheim does a fine job of weaving a narrative out of the three men’s life stories.
We travel with Page back to Headley Grange, the English country house where he recorded “Stairway to Heaven” with Led Zeppelin, and see black-and-white archival footage from the ’50s of a fresh-faced “James Page” strumming a skiffle song on local TV. (Afterward, he tells the host of his intention to pursue a career in “biological research.”)
But the best moments come from watching the three interact. White and the Edge seem to have a genuine rapport, and both gape in fan-boy awe as Page unleashes that timeless “Whole Lotta Love” riff before their eyes.
Page, for his part, is curious and inquisitive, watching intently as White — whose own playing owes much to Page’s ’70s pyrotechnics — walks them through a White Stripes song. And he gamely joins in on U2’s “I Will Follow,” even if he seems a bit nonplussed by the Edge’s unique phrasing and self-invented chords: “You sure about that?”
That bonhomie wasn’t necessarily a given. “U2 came up as a band in direct opposition to bands like Led Zeppelin,” says Guggenheim. “They wanted nothing of it — the endless guitar solos, the sexuality. U2 was political, punk, straightforward. That’s what’s so great about rock and roll: each generation has to come and destroy and reinvent the music before it. Look at Jack and the White Stripes and Dead Weather. He’s the anti-U2!”
Yet whether it’s Page’s Les Paul Sunburst or the Edge’s angular Gibson Explorer or White’s J.B. Hutto Montgomery Airline, one thing with six strings unites them. That doesn’t mean you can sound like your guitar hero simply by dropping a few thousand dollars at the local music shop. “People go out and buy it [equipment] thinking they can get the same sound,” says Hogarth. “It just doesn’t happen.” With the best guitarists, he adds, the phenomenon is “otherworldly, almost like their soul coming through the instrument.”
Yes, there’s something ineffable — some might say preternatural — about the bond between a guitarist and his guitar. In the film, the Edge describes first picking up that Gibson Explorer, gauging it, considering its heft in his hands. He knew right away: “This guitar had possibilities. There were songs in this guitar.”
Hogarth describes a common affliction among Berklee shredders: “gear-acquisition syndrome.” But we see White going in the opposite direction, treasuring shitty plastic guitars, instruments with warped necks and ever-slackening strings. In his mind, a guitar should be wrestled with, a player should “pick a fight with it and win.”
Indeed, at the beginning of the film, we see White, in seconds flat, fashion a one-string guitar with a plank of wood, some nails, a coke bottle, and an electric pick-up. As a cow looks on, bemused, White peels off a quavering blues lick. “Who says you need to buy a guitar?”
Or a video game, for that matter.
“This movie is the anti–Guitar Hero,” says Guggenheim. “Guitar Hero is about getting the highest score, about hitting ‘chords’ at exactly the right moment. These guitarists, Jimmy, Jack, and Edge, became great by not conforming, not doing it the way they were taught, and expressing themselves, especially if it was the wrong note at the wrong time. That’s what made them unique and visionary.”
Hogarth, at least, is encouraged that so many are flocking to a video game that’s notionally based on his favorite instrument. “I think a lot of the kids who are playing it are playing it because they want to be guitarists. But now that it’s proven that the electric guitar can generate this kind of amazing interest, I think it would be great if some music education were incorporated into the game, even if it’s just minimally — a rhythm, or a note, or maybe have the guitar be a bit more representative.”
Meanwhile, It Might Get Loud appears at a poignant moment, with the passing two weeks ago of Les Paul, who pretty much single-handedly ensured the electric guitar’s centrality to pop music in the second half of the 20th century. “The way Paul took his guitars apart and modified everything, that’s what this movie is about,” says Guggenheim. “The kid who must destroy something to find himself and a way to express his voice.”
And anyone who doubts the power of the guitar’s “voice” to transcend genres and generations need only watch Page, the Edge, and White trading solos on one another’s songs. It’s a visceral thrill, for the viewer and — you can tell — the player.
“These are men who use words as a second language,” says Guggenheim. “The guitar and its huge vibrations speak for them the most. When I watch the movie, I look at their eyes as the others play. It’s an unspoken respect and fondness and awe that moves me.”
Lately, living in a tiny studio apartment and not wanting to annoy my wife with my cloddish guitar playing, I’ve been making do by putting on headphones and playing a Guitar Hero knockoff game on my iPhone. After this movie, I went home and restrung my Alvarez. For a while, it did get loud.