Creativity in the Age of the Appropriate

Anything or anyone who starts a conversation with ‘I really like …’ is leading up to a ‘ … but’ moment.

It’s a common framing device. At best it’s offered to provide balance and show you have an awareness of both sides of an argument or situation. At worst is a set-up so you can put the boot in - like sailing under a false flag.

You know the sort of thing.

‘They’re really nice, but …’

‘Of course, your Mum / Dad / brother / sister / cousin / friend is great, but ….’

‘I love your new song / album / book / painting / movie, but … ’

That.

So I’m aware that in starting out by using the same framing device essentially creates a hostage to fortune: anything I say will come across as me saying I really like something / someone in order to then say what it is I don’t like about it / them.

Just as I’m aware that pointing out my awareness of this hostage to fortune will come across as me saying I know that this looks me doing that putting the boot in thing I’ve just mentioned, but I’m not … honest!

However, for what it’s worth, I actually do mean it when I say I genuinely like Dan and Mick and That Pedal Show.

If you’ve read Origin(al) Stories or listened to Broken Oars Podcast you’ll know that I have views on lots of things. These views have been arrived at after long engagement with multiple disciplines and practices and are ongoing and subject to change. They include views on music, which for me means playing the guitar. That’s my primary instrument. That I play doesn’t bring me into contact with guitar culture: it means that I am part of guitar culture. Just as anyone who does anything automatically engages with the history and culture and future of the thing they’re doing, so do I, whether they think about it or not. As it happens, I think and feel very deeply about a great many things, including what I do and how on the guitar. I can see the instrument as a tool to create and express music, and I can also appreciate it as an entity in itself. Outwith of songs, arrangements, performances and production approaches, Northumbria was an extended exercise in learning to play again, doing so by not playing standardised guitar licks but using the guitar to express deep emotions and personal and social realities. Songs For Separation was an exploration of classic song formats, aligning performances, melodic, note and rhythmic choices to emotional realities. The forthcoming Test Pieces album makes explicit the connection between exploration of a musical line with the exploration of a climbing line - in terms of verticality, as an expression of personal vision, and as performance installation - as all the pieces were recorded in the places that inspired their composition.

All of which is okay. Anything we do is everything we do; and commitment to a practice is good, whether it’s scales or breathwork.

But (and there’s the but), for all of the thoughtful, engaged ideas about history and culture and practice, I am still a guitarist - which means I’m just as capable as the next guitarist of getting nerdy about kit.

This is a good thing.

You should be deeply suspicious of anyone who isn’t interested in what they use to do what they do. If your surgeon doesn’t know the difference between a #10 scalpel and a #20, get off the table and run.

Seriously.

But the kit shouldn’t get in the way of the practice.

It shouldn’t become fetishised above the practice.

As a rower, if you get in a boat with me and start to screw about with the set-up of your seat before you start to fix your terrible technique, I will lose all respect for you as a rower and a human being pretty much there and then.

Why?

Because.

Because anything a decent boatman has previously set up, you should be able to row. Stop messing around with the spacers on the gate. Learn to put a finish on your stroke instead. Stop complaining that you can’t sit at bow because the boat is ‘too narrow’ for your hips. The boat isn’t too narrow. You’re two stone overweight.

But if as a rower I know that I’m technically good enough and have enough experience to be able to row well in any boat that I’m in, I also know that I’m technically good enough and have enough experience to know the difference when Pete Holmes has set up my seat, adjusted the TD and set the pitch angle specifically for me.

It’s the same with musical instruments.

I view a guitar as a tool to get me up and down the river, but I’m still a guitarist. To be able to say with equal authority that what you row in / play doesn’t matter, it’s how you row / play that matters and what you row in / play matters is a weirdly disjunctive place to live in, but it is tenable. I know that in the context of the average listener listening to a song, no-one, and I mean no-one, can tell whether a digital modeller or a handmade piece of vintage gear that costs as much as a small house was used but … I’ll still nod to the idea that the vintage / handmade / analogue / expensive (because it always is) stuff is somehow better.

Because.

Because I’m human, so I covet what others also covet. Monkeys are the same about groundnuts and bananas.

But I can occupy that space because I know, like rowing a boat, that playing music is a feel sport - and that in a steepening curve from about the midpoint of any practice up to the elite level, any practitioner worth their salt uses the equipment that helps them find the feel they’re looking for. I rowed at Henley Royal in a Sims. I think it was first laid down before Britain invented the Dreadnought. Back then, Vespoli were pioneering hull technology that meant the faster you went the less hull there was in the water - which, as any fule kno, means less drag. They were classed as high skill shells - fast, but twitchy unless you really knew what you were doing. Technically, the Sims belonged to a different generation. The Vespoli would be the choice for those who believe in the power of received wisdom. It would be the choice for the guitarist who believes that a Martin is better than a Yahama, or a Gibson is better than a PRS.

I’d take the Sims over the Vespoli any day of the week and twice on Sundays, however.

(In fact, we usually took it out three times on Sundays, and three times on Saturdays, but then that saying wasn’t invented by rowers.)

And it was for the same reasons we reach as guitarists for a specific instrument, or a specific signal chain, or a specific sound.

The first part of it was that we got to Henley in the Sims. Everything we had to do to get there, that boat did with us. Every training outing, every piece, every derigging and loading on the trailer, every rerigging at the race site, every carry down to the water, every race, every journey home, win, lose or draw. Like the character of an instrument being in who played it and where, and when, and why, and how often, and in every ding and nick, we rowed the Sims because it became molded to our character as rowers as well as our journey as oarsmen. There weren’t eight rowers in our boat. There weren’t nine (at Agecroft, a cox is part of your crew). There were ten. The boat was part of our crew.

That boat was our go-to guitar.

And that’s the second part of it. The Sims probably wasn’t as ‘good’ a boat as the Vespoli. And some, boat snobs, would argue that was no Empacher. But it was ours. We learned our first chords on it. We did our first bad crappy gigs with it. And each time we raised the level, it went with us. That’s all you can ask from a piece of kit - that it sees you, and raises you.

In the end, that boat took us all the way to Wembley.

Metaphorically.

Because the second part of that is feel. The outputs - miles, times, sessions, races, wins, losses - would have been the same in a Vespoli. But we were used to how the Sims felt. It felt like an Agecroft boat. Partly because of the above. Partly because of the cognitive and emotional attachments we built up by it being part of our journey. But also because technically it could accomodate the way we rowed. Fast, hard, dynamic catches. Explosive weight transfer to the pin. Hard, flat draw. Let the puddle leave the blade. Don’t grab the finish.

What I’ve just said about shoving a boat backwards down a river is, very much, using the same language musicians use about instruments. Whether it’s a violinist who knows what they’re looking for talking about the differences between a Stradivarius and a Guaneri, or a pianist who knows what they’re looking for talking about the differences between a Steinway and Bosendorf or a guitarist (who knows what they’re looking for) talking about the differences in latency response between a Boogie MK IV and a Boss Katana … we’re looking for something that feels right to us.

That isn’t in a brand name or a spec sheet, and it’s not something that you’ll get if you’ve just started your practice. It’s something that you won’t ‘get’ until you’ve done, like a rower, thousands of miles and repetitions across every boat class and manufacturer, in all weathers, at every rate. You can pretend to it, and you can quote what you’ve learned on message boards and in forums as established truths about makers and topwoods and sides and bracing patterns and history and mythology (I’m talking about guitars now. Or am I?) until you’re blue in the face, but really, mileage does make medals. Until you know, you’re faking it, and when you know, well, that’s when you start talking in terms of feel / response / latency / transients / overtones / fundamentals … and we talk in those terms to explain to someone else what we’re feeling because we’re trying to explain something that we can’t, when it gets down to it, really explain.

We just know it when we feel it.

Everything you can hear in the music I’ve released is not the product of what’s seen as technically ‘right’ or ‘correct’ or appropriate.

Yes, there is some understanding there of writing, arranging, playing, performing, editing, signal chains, and production. Of course there is. There are choices made. Very, very conscious ones. But in each instances the choices made are made to get me to a sound I feel and a feel I feel rather than what history and culture tells me is the ‘right’ sound or ‘right’ part for this particular bit. If you go and listen to the guitars on Songs for Separation, for example, it all sounds like a guitar - that’s what guitars sound like, after all, when you get down to it. To a guitarist getting granular, you can split hairs until there are no hairs left to split. To the people who actually might buy your record or listen to your music, it all sounds like a guitar. What they are responding to and what defines whether they like it or not is whether they like it or not. Most of the guitar sounds on Songs for Separation and Northumbria were achieved by turning things and moving things and trying things until the right sound emerged, not by setting things up the ‘right’ way - the way Jimi did it, or the way Eddie did it, or the way Youtube tells you you’re supposed to. The guitar sounds on Test Pieces will not be on anyone’s list of how you’re supposed to do it. They’re were all recorded in situ, usually outdoors, in one take - because you only get one chance to onsight Indian Face.

I’m still a guitarist, though.

Which means I love kit. While I know that the fastest way to sound better is to practise, it doesn’t stop me looking at pedals, and boxes, and guitars, or trying them out - because you know that one day, you’re going to pick something up and it’s going to be that rare thing: the guitar you can’t put down. They are out there - and however much we talk ourselves into our latest flame, we know our soulmate when we meet them.

First time, first kiss, oh, what feeling is this … electricity flows, like the very first kiss …

It’s from a Coca-Cola ad, but I saw it at a formative age and in terms of people, instruments, boats and crews, it’s true.

Mick and Dan and That Pedal Show are basically an afternoon at a music shop onscreen.

It helps that they both come across as decent human beings who absolutely love the guitar and everything that comes with it: the kit, the players, the experimentation with kit and playing, the search for sounds, the search for the right combination of wood, wires, strings, diodes and circuits that … like a boat moving through water, you just know when you feel it.

You can see it in Mick’s smile when a guest just rips something with great tone: Yes! This is why we do it!

You can see it in Dan’s energy when something comes together in the room: Wow! That’s amazing.

It’s equal parts open pure happiness and the absolute transformative joy and satisfaction that comes from doing something that at its best when it all clicks transports you to a better, more fulfilled and satisfied place.

They both know their stuff, they’re both monstrously good players, they’re great interviewers, they can set up a signal chain to absolute perfection and they seem like decent humans.

What’s not to like?

Recently, the algorithim brought me an episode from a couple of years ago, where the challenge was to set up a rig for a gig. In it, Mick talked about getting his kit ready for an upcoming blues show with Neville Martin, long-time Guitarist magazine contributor.

Mick is a monster blues player.

Neville is a monster blues player.

(Dan is a monster player too, by the way.)

At one point, Mick and Dan were looking at a piece of kit, but both of them rejected it as not being ‘appropriate’ for the gig.

And in one sense, I completely got it.

If they’re going to be playing trad Chicago Blues, or British Invasion styles, or Seventies Bad Frees and Free Company styles, there are likely to be certain expectations in the audience attached to it about the instruments, amps, sounds, and notes that need to be played. Les Pauls. Strats. Maybe a 335. Cranked valve amps. Pentatonics. Shuffle grooves. One verse / chorus of singing. Five verses / choruses of guitar solo. Perfect repros of the intro to Crossroads or Alright Now. No sudden introductions of Robert Fripp-style atonality, or Andy Summer’s style textural washes, or Eddie’s tapping. You might concievably get away with some Beck style bar-wangling, but someone at the bar afterwards will point out that actually Jeff (because yes, they were on first name terms with him) was using Esquires, Teles and Les Pauls in the mid-sixties / late-sixties / seventies.

I’ve done these gigs. No-one wants to hear your polytonal arrangement of Dancing Queen at a wedding. They want to hear Dancing Queen, like it was on the record, and they want to dance.

But …

But what brought me up short was this thought:

What we think of as the expected form now was not the expected form them. Amps weren’t supposed to be turned up until they distorted. What we think of as Eric’s classic Beano tone now, the sound that people like Mick and Dan and Neville are referencing implicitly and explicitly at their gig and in their choice of gear and amps and pedals and gain stages had the engineers in the studio running out of the control room screaming ‘no …’ at the time.

We are using technology now to replicate what was then people pushing technology to its breaking point then. When Mick, brilliantly, plays a Fuzzbox pedal now - and it’s his sixties Strat through a modern reissue / take on the circuit, into his favoured Two Rock - it’s wonderful playing, far outside of anything I can do.

But it’s replicating, safely, Hendrix quite literally riding the edge of what was technologically possible. His was the sound of circuit boards breaking down because of what he was doing to them. Go and listen to his Voodoo Child. Now go and listen to Stevie Ray’s. Stevie Ray’s is magical. Hendrix’s original, though, sounds like the end of the world - because he was going way beyond what the time said was ‘appropriate.’ He was on the edge of what was possible, which was why it was exciting and fresh and new and great. Now? We know how he did it. And unlike him we know our kit won’t explode if we try it. There’s no sense of jeopardy, or finding the new, or the next level, or more accurately, the next room in the house of guitar music in what we do when we approach it like this.

I get that in a covers gig, if we rip into Mr. Brightside, or Alright Now, or Wonderwall, people want to hear something that sounds like …And there’s room for that. But we don’t have to tune the guitar EADGBE. We don’t have to have this guitar into that amp via these pedals and our sound doesn’t have to be the sound of the guitar our grandparents first grooved to. They made the sounds that blew the ears off the world because they didn’t do what was right. They didn’t stick with what was appropriate. They went outside of the circle of firelight into the darkness and brought back the new. And the sounds we now think are cool were actually considered deeply inappropriate - sonically, socially, culturally - when they did so.

There’s a very real danger if guitarists and guitar culture carries on endlessly reproducing the sounds of fifty years ago that we’re going to end up with a musical eco-system that was once forward-looking and innovative and progressive, but is now backwards-looking and conservative and concerned not with music and musical instruments as things that express what you feel, but as recitals, like classical music, where audiences turn up to hear another run-through of mid-twentieth century music played on period-correct Stratocasters through period-correct amplifiers and reproductions of period-correct circuits; and we all nod because the right sounds are playing the right notes in the right places, and like going to Glyndebourne or hearing Mozart played by a Symphony Orchestra or x’s Hamlet vs. y’s Hamlet, we aren’t being moved to anything other than a comparison of it to other performances of the same piece we’ve seen / heard / experienced elsewhere.

And look how well those art forms are doing … propped up by diminishing public subsidies, and an ever ageing and decreasing audience of people who give a stuff about it.

That’s not music or the guitar, for me.

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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The first Origin(al) Stories Journal was a blog launched to track the nine months that went into the writing and recording of the Northumbria album. You can read about the thought processes behind that here.

Following the launch of The Landing Stage website, I’ve decided to continue with the Origin(al) Stories posts.

The Landing Stage showcases some of the things I do.

The Origin(al) Stories posts show some of the thoughts and processes and activities that go into those acts of doing.

Drawn from my personal diaries and journals, the posts might often seem unconnected, elliptical and fragmentary.

This is because they’re drawn from my personal diaries and journals, where I’m often jotting things down as a way of exploring it myself.

As such, Origin(al) Stories doesn’t offer the definitive conclusions, hacks, lists or ‘how to …’ advice beloved of Youtube gurus, bro-science and self-help manuals.

Because there’s no one road through the forest, no one route to the top of the mountain, no one path to where you want to be and what you want to do.

Origin(al) Stories only shows how I’ve found a path through to doing something - and often, the experimentation, missteps, false trails and blind alleys I’ve gone down along the way.

These explorations have as much to give us as the destination.

They are, as I noted in the original post about it, postcards from the journey. Snapshots of work in progress - which is what all lives and endeavours are.

If you’ve liked an Origin(al) Stories post, or it’s helped you with something you’re doing in some way, please share it to your socials, and give credit. All content on this website is under copyright and attributable.

If you’d like to listen to Northumbria, download it here.

If you’d like to listen to Alnwyck Jameson Badger, download it here.

If you’d like to listen to Broken Oars Podcast, download it here.

Thanks for reading. Have a great day. Tell the people you love that you love them. Be a positive force. .