Summit Wellness: Gratitude - "Gooey Guttural Goodness"
By Summit FM Contributor Matt Anthony
I felt like we were breaking some sort of law. My grade-school classmate, Chris, and I were slithering through the upstairs hallways of his parents’ house. Destination: The room of Chris’s older brother, Andy. Underneath the turntable sat a stack of equalizers and power amps, and next to them the largest set of speakers I had ever seen.
After angering my father by bringing two used Beatles albums into the house after a garage-sale score, my music worldview was about to be drastically changed even more: on that cool Autumn afternoon, I was introduced to The Who.
They call them seminal moments. You know what I’m talking about. The first time someone paid you to shovel their sidewalk. The first time you engaged in fisticuffs with another kid. The first time your lips pressed on someone else’s.
Mine included the first time I was introduced to distortion.
And there it was, laid out in front of me, courtesy of those enormous speakers. The 4-chord blast at the beginning of ‘I Can’t Explain’. The fuzzy cacophony of ‘My Generation’. The chest-rattling rumble of John Entwistle’s bass during ‘The Real Me’. Sure, The Beatles were great. But this. This was life-altering. This was raw and angry. This broke the boundaries of decency.
I mean, listen to Pete Townshend while standing in front of those Ampeg amps, coaxing that feedback symphony out of them, like a snake charmer with his pungi, dancing with it and serenading it, until he rockets us back into reality with three riffs of relief.
This was better than that first bite of a sausage pie from The Pizza Oven: this was salvation.
History differs in chronicling the genesis of this phenomenon. Some say it was Lightning Hopkins’s fault when he committed the mortal sin of turning up his amp. Some say it was Les Paul’s competitive response to Leo Fender’s invention. (or Fender’s answer to Paul’s intricate fretboard wizardry!) And some say it was just a plain old accident. (Hell, in ‘The Ongoing History of New Music,’ Alan Cross devoted a whole episode to ‘distortion’!)
That Fall day in Canton, Ohio, in that bedroom with the gigantic monitors, would cement my addictive lust for fuzz, growl, and sustain.
No, I’m not a one-trick pony. I’m grateful for all the different styles and genres of music. Everything from Barry Manilow to Pantera. Dolly Parton to XTC. Willie to Waylon to The Waitresses. I’ve been moved by the majesty of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, the film noir patina of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and the hypnotic stylings of Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
Ever heard the choir during Divine Liturgy at St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Mogadore? Life-affirming.
Sure, I can be transfixed by Ralph Mooney sitting in front of a pedal steel guitar. The same way that I can be brought to tears by Karen Carpenter during the Holidays. And Wes Montgomery? Fuhgeddaboudit.
But I knew what buttered my toast. The voluptuous vixen in my life was, and always will be, the over-driven audio signal path.
The Jensen coaxial speakers in my ’71 Olds Cutlass are probably still warm from the workout that the Boston debut inflicted on them back in 1976. I can only surmise the torture they experienced during Zen Arcade on ‘repeat’. And, oh my, those poor Koss headphones, the ones that sat on my cantaloupe-crate of vinyl in the attic. The misery they must have endured on that 100th playing of Never Mind the Bollocks.
But while I’m thankful for the complete works of distortion art, I’m grateful as well for the magical moments. The magical seminal moments. Brian May’s righteous chord on top of Freddie’s piano roll at the 4:53 mark during ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. The introductory body-slam salutation from Alice in Chains on Dirt. The luscious grind-core strumming from Adam Jones at 9:20 on “Pneuma’ from Fear Inoculum. And, no, my gratitude does not exist in a vacuum. Check out Momma’s version of “Rockstar’ from inside the mask room of Chicago’s Fantasy Costumes: at the end of the song, almost thirty seconds of glorious, sumptuous, dessert-like sustain!
(Did I mention Jim Chenot and I standing next to a stack of speakers at Nautica, just as Dave Davies unleashed amplified absolution on us at the start of the Kinks show? That chord caved my chest in.)
This day, I light copious amounts of incense to whatever celestial being promulgated the forces of nature to render me helpless to a force bigger than myself, bending my will and my ears to the satisfying, soul-cleansing wonder of the overdriven tube. The saturated reverberation of two drumsticks shattering a Remo drum head. The singular tsunami of noise as one’s hair is being blown back by a wall of delectable sound.