by Ian Port
Motown’s success changed this. By 1966, the black artists of this black-owned company dominated the once-white charts in America—and not just one singer or style, but a rotating roster of Detroit stars, all pursuing their own funky excellence. Unlike in earlier eras, in which new sounds were quickly copied (and watered down) by white imitators, Motown’s success couldn’t truly be co-opted, because what produced it was not an individual or a small group. Rather it was as near as a label could be to a factory, a production apparatus that dictated everything from tempos and arrangements to its stars’ diction and comportment. It was a system of being that had become an empire. Not every Motown release was a hit, and not every song was a classic, but in these years, African-American music, played entirely by African-Americans, was conquering the white mainstream to an extent never before seen. And Leo Fender’s electric bass, in the hands of the brilliant James Jamerson, formed the rumbling core of it.
• • •
ALL THROUGH 1966, along with Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson had been working on something else: not an album, but a single song that would meld his ambitions as a classically trained composer with the strictures and possibilities of a pop single. Carol Kaye was called in for the second session on this work—the second of what would be twelve altogether, in her memory (others would report as many as seventeen), across five studios. By this point, Wilson was writing lines specifically for her: emphasizing a heavy beat, letting her bass meander through unusual melodies that tied the notes of every other instrument together. He had a specific sound he wanted out of the Fender Precision Bass: slightly metallic, but so loud and deep as to be oddly comforting.
After their twelve or so sessions, Carol got a pretty good sense of what the lead melody sounded like, which was unusual for a Beach Boys composition. Usually, the session players had no idea until they heard it on the radio. Carol generally hesitated to make judgments about the fragments of Wilson songs she heard while recording, but having agonized over this one, she thought it could be a masterpiece.
Her bass came in with a high-pitched figure: a crisp, throaty blurt from the Fender that repeated a minor-key plaint as it glided down the neck, drums clattering along with each retreating step. Over it floated Carl Wilson’s voice, stratospherically high, achingly sweet: “I—I love the colorful clothes she wears /And the way the sunlight plays upon her hair.” And in a moment the song zoomed into carnivalesque psychedelia, shaking, spinning, a sci-fi Electro-Theremin whirring up high as the collective harmonies sang about “good vibrations,” circling around, seeming to rise a little farther up each time. Carol’s sunset bass riff returned for the next verse, and Wilson chose to cut off two words completing a lyrical rhyme so that she could be heard more clearly as the bass launched into the following chorus. The Fender’s huge low end supported everything in the song: it was the bus ferrying around this troupe of California freaks; it was helping to make Brian Wilson’s marijuana circus heartfelt and elated but grounded, rather than untethered and nauseating.
The song moved at a ridiculous pace—two verses, two choruses, and a bridgelike section arrived in just over two minutes, all neatly colliding thanks to the splicing of magnetic tape. Then the whole thing fell down into a shocking near-silence. There came a breathy organ and a massive, soothing throb from Carol’s Fender before the leap into one final chorus and a vocal-focused coda.
Three minutes and thirty-five seconds. Dozens of instruments, including Electro-Theremin, violin, harpsichord, and jaw harp. The tune had been produced at a staggering cost, estimated by Brian Wilson at $16,000, making it the most expensive pop song ever recorded at the time. But Wilson’s “pocket symphony,” as his publicist called it, went to no. 1. In fact, “Good Vibrations” was the Beach Boys’ most successful song ever, hitting the top of the charts in both the US and the UK, becoming the group’s third no. 1 at home and its first million-selling single. Future years would see the reevaluation of Pet Sounds and a near-universal consensus that it is, in fact, a masterpiece. But “Good Vibrations” was greeted immediately upon arrival as a magnificent work, almost certainly the pinnacle of the Beach Boys’ recording career, and a perfect encapsulation of what the group did so well.
The artistic and commercial success of “Good Vibrations” illustrated the essential role that the Fender electric bass had come to play in popular music by the mid-1960s. Leo Fender had upgraded the low end from the awkward, underpowered, often-unheard doghouse to a light, portable instrument that stuck out over everything in the most ambitious compositions yet recorded. The Fender bass was not a background instrument; it was worthy of a lead role in the Beach Boys and the brilliant works of Motown, and its players had finally grabbed one.
A lead role had been something unimaginable for the bass just a decade earlier. The men and women who played acoustic bass had often been anonymous, ostracized with their quiet instruments in the back of ever-louder groups. The adoption of the Fender bass did not make its players public stars. But it pushed music in a direction that allowed their instrument, their linking of rhythm and melody, to become perhaps the most important single component of a pop song after the vocals. The bass groove would soon grow into the vital core of music. In future years, through the evolution of funk, disco, and hip-hop, the electric bass subsumed nearly every other sound in music except the drums with which it conspired. There would be hits without great singers (or any singer), hits without guitar solos (or any guitar). But in the wake of Carol Kaye and James Jamerson, there were fewer and fewer hits—at least in forward-looking styles of music—without the groove of an electric bass.
40.
“HERE WAS THE REAL THING”
LONDON, FALL 1966
Eric Clapton’s new band, Cream, was booked to play at Regent Street Polytechnic on October 1, 1966. The band had formed surreptitiously, with Clapton still publicly pledged to John Mayall but seeking a trio of a his own—a simple group, with bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker, that would give them all room to explore on their instruments, that would play a style of rock still blues based but more psychedelic and experimental. Cream was heralded from its first announcement in Melody Maker as a supergroup, but even supergroups need to find their footing, and Cream’s hunt was still under way on the fall evening when Clapton, Bruce, and Baker were lounging in their dressing room at Regent Street Polytechnic, preparing to go onstage.
A familiar face walked in. It was Chas Chandler, the bassist of the Animals, whom all of Cream knew well. A friend of the band. He’d come that night not as a fellow musician, however, but as a manager.
Accompanying Chandler was a person none of them had seen before: a thin black American wearing outrageous clothes, with a cloud of Afro surrounding a dreamy face and huge brown eyes. He seemed distant—not in a cold way, as Clapton could, but pleasantly aloof. This figure wandered silently over to the dressing room mirror and began toying with his hair, poufing it out with a comb to maximum diameter.
Chandler, meanwhile, chatted amiably. He asked his friends in Cream if this newcomer could go onstage with them and jam at the show, just for a few songs. It was a common practice for friendly musicians to venture up during one another’s sets, but no one had yet asked to jam onstage with Cream. Who, after all, would dare try to outmatch God and his chosen archangels? The result was almost certain embarrassment.
Chandler insisted, however, that his unprepossessing companion was an accomplished guitarist. He pestered Clapton and his lads to allow this newcomer a moment onstage, just a short one. Hesitantly, the members of Cream agreed. Sure, they’d let this unknown American jam with them—live, in public, at a major gig of theirs. Sure. God had a funny feeling about it.
• • •
JACK BRUCE TOLD Jimi Hendrix that he could plug into the massive Marshall bass amp. Jimi unpacked his Stratocaster and got ready. The lights in the auditorium at Regent Street Polytechnic went down. Someone probably muttered a few words of introduction—the sudden arrival of a fourth musician onstage
, especially one who looked like Jimi Hendrix, could hardly go unremarked upon—and then Jimi called the song: “Killing Floor,” an old blues tune made famous by Howlin’ Wolf. Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker didn’t know it. Eric Clapton did—mostly the slower version recorded by Albert King—and thought it was particularly tough, with a rhythm hard to get right at any tempo. Live recordings from this time suggest what happened next.
Jimi unfurled one descending, fluid lick on his Stratocaster: a flash of notes to stretch out those fingers, showing just a glimpse of his ability.
Then the American newcomer took off, shooting up the neck to splatter out a bright phrase, falling back down to the lower registers, pumping a chord to set the tempo, and launching into the song proper as the members of Cream lumbered to life behind him. This was not Albert King’s “Killing Floor,” or Howlin’ Wolf’s, but a jet blast, absurdly fast, beyond 130 beats per minute. But Hendrix’s chording still clutched the subtleties of Wolf’s original call-and-response rhythm, kept it all together through the verses, those spidery hands accenting the beat here, adding a little trill or a commenting phrase there, playing lead and rhythm at the same time, gliding around the whole guitar neck and talking through the instrument in two or three different voices as if doing so was the easiest thing in the world.
On the other side of the stage, Eric Clapton’s hands fell off the neck and body of his Gibson Les Paul. His jaw followed them toward the floor. Clapton realized immediately that he’d made a serious miscalculation. He’d been expecting this newcomer to hold back, as he thought was customary, but Jimi, given his largest audience yet in this foreign country, was throwing out everything he had. What Clapton had imagined would be a friendly jam was suddenly, he realized, a cutting contest. He was God, and this American was coming with everything to take his throne.
Over on his side of the stage, Jimi had no effects, no fuzz, no wah-wah—but then, he’d had none with Curtis Knight or Little Richard, either. With just his guitar plugged into Bruce’s amp, Hendrix fired into a solo, long fingers ripping sounds out of the Stratocaster that no one in the hall had ever heard before: tremolo dive-bombs, yawning string bends, electric slashes of the pickup selector switch. Jimi had now hijacked the Cream concert, and he began to reveal the full extent of his powers, the flamboyant exhibition that would become the talk of everyone who saw it over the next two years: he played the Strat behind his head, he played the Strat with his teeth, he fell to the floor at the climax of a solo, he did the splits, he flicked his tongue. It was outrageous, but also frighteningly skillful. Some would get distracted by Jimi’s theatrics, overlook his skills and dismiss him as a mere showman. But to many observers, Hendrix exhibited a degree of expressiveness and personality, a combination of pure guitar athleticism and deep-running soulfulness, that had never been seen before.
Clapton knew immediately that there was nothing he could add to this. He’d never been a showman, and even in terms of pure ability, he’d met his match. By the time Jimi slashed out his first solo, Clapton had shuffled backstage into the dark, to watch in semiprivate as this unknown American committed deicide. Chas Chandler hurried back to assess the lordly damage his client had wrought. “Eric was standing [there], trying to light a cigarette, and his hands were shaking,” Chandler recalled. “And he just says, ‘Is he really that good?’ ”
It was a rhetorical question. Clapton knew the audience had been “completely gobsmacked” by Jimi’s impromptu performance. Word quickly got around in the press that God had been unseated, that there was a new power on the scene. “They loved it, and I loved it, too, but I remember thinking that here was a force to be reckoned with,” Clapton recalled. “It scared me, because he was clearly going to be a huge star, and just as [Cream] were finding our own speed, here was the real thing.”
By “the real thing,” of course, Clapton meant that Jimi was an American black man—a musician who could play the blues with a credibility and authenticity unattainable for a white Englishman. Jimi hadn’t been born in the South, but he’d learned his craft there; he’d made the pilgrimage to Chess Records in Chicago to meet Muddy Waters; he’d played with Ike Turner and copped licks directly from B. B. King. He embodied a tradition that Clapton could only study. To anyone who knew the history, Jimi Hendrix represented the legacy of the black American guitarist-geniuses who’d come before him: players like Charlie Christian, T-Bone Walker, Lonnie Johnson, Son House, Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, B. B. King, Albert King, Freddy King, Otis Rush, Buddy Guy. These were the players who’d first elevated the electric guitar into the most humane and compelling instrumental voice of the twentieth century, the artists whose music enabled everything the London and San Francisco hippies were gushing over in 1966 and ’67. But when they were doing it in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, most of the outside world couldn’t have cared less. Symbolically, Jimi Hendrix was now carrying their torch, claiming credit where credit was long overdue. His mere presence in blues-besotted London reminded the scene’s fans and players (at least the cannier ones) that this music was borrowed from a far less fortunate race and generation, and his arrival gave them the chance to atone for this unfairness and claim allegiance to a convenient embodiment of “the real thing.”
But of course, no one was born knowing how to play guitar like Jimi Hendrix, and to think of him as a world-shattering guitarist by divine right—as many did—was to ignore the true scope of his achievement. Perhaps more than any other person in London, Eric Clapton could understand the intensity of the commitment that had gotten Jimi here, the innumerable hours of practice, the years of dehumanizing poverty. He’d lived something like it. And blues guitar was also not the only experience they shared. Both men had mastered their music in spite of early lives in which a mother’s love and attention was largely or completely withheld. Clapton thus found a deep commonality with Jimi, even as he watched this newcomer’s race and biography bestow a credibility he could never attain.
After October 1, 1966, Clapton was no longer the unquestionable leader of the London scene, no longer the sole deity of English guitar worshippers. There was a period of tension between Eric and Jimi, a sort of sniffing out, a testing of the poses of rivalry and friendship over several encounters. Yet by being immediately, publicly bested by Jimi, and then getting to know him, Clapton found a companion and equal, another person who felt the same ambitions and yearnings he did, and who shared a similar past. As he spent time with Jimi, Clapton realized that this wildly talented American was just as wracked by insecurity as he was, just as subject to the destructive (and joyful) whims of partying and decadence. After he discovered a kinship with Jimi, the angry boy from Ripley saw some of his old loneliness abate.
There was another symbolic rift between these two men besides white and black, English and American—a division missed by few of their close followers, and one that would have great consequence for the future of their instrument. In the flurry of enthusiasm that followed Hendrix’s arrival in London in the fall of 1966, anyone paying close attention would have noted that this flamboyant newcomer had overthrown Clapton and his all-powerful Gibson Les Paul with, of all things, a Fender Stratocaster—a guitar seen at that time and place as a meager and old-fashioned tool.
41.
“THE GUITARS NOWADAYS PLAY JUST AS GOOD”
ENGLAND AND THE UNITED STATES, 1966–1968
In the early 1960s, the curvy shapes and bright colors of Fender guitars had rendered competing Gibson models conservative and stodgy. Half a decade later, the resurgence of the Les Paul Model’s natural wood finishes made those swooshy Fenders seem equally out of date, redolent of a bygone age of Formica and tail fins. Some of this was purely the rotations of fashion, but there’d been a major shift in the culture after 1965, a growing disillusionment with authority, government, and the beneficence of the modernist drive. The civil rights movement and the Vietnam War now called persistent attention to injustices and hypocrisies a
t the core of American society. Music responded by getting louder, more serious, even angry. Self-satisfaction was out—more afflicted sounds were called for, and the high output of Gibson’s dual-coil, humbucking pickups pushed amplifiers into thick, aggrieved distortion, while the guitar’s heavy body and glued-in neck produced a crying, mournful sustain. There’d been inklings of these sounds before John Mayall’s Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton, but the album convinced players on both sides of the Atlantic that the sonic qualities of this guitar matched especially well their distressed and tumultuous historical moment.
The Fender Stratocaster, meanwhile, was what Buddy Holly and Ike Turner had played, what the surf rockers had used—a workaday instrument out of step with the times. “They were so unfashionable, Stratocasters,” Eric Clapton recalled. “As far as the new blues-rock hotshots were concerned, it was a guitar for skinny, bespectacled nerds,” wrote rock historian Charles Shaar Murray. The Strat carried the baggage of association with a previous rock ’n’ roll era, and sonically, it seemed unable to issue the tormented sounds of the new blues rock. Those skinny little single-coil pickups and that bolt-on neck got a clear, spanking, upbeat tone, too weak to drive amps into torrents of distortion.
Then came Jimi Hendrix, and the right-handed white Stratocaster he brought to England. Hendrix had tried (and would try) practically every guitar on the market, but he was adamant about which model he preferred. “I use a Fender Stratocaster,” Jimi later told the Los Angeles Free Press.
Everyone’s screaming about the seven-year-old Telecaster, and the 13-year-old Gibson, and the 92-year-old Les Paul [guitar]. They’ve gone into an age bag right now, but it’s nothing but a fad. The guitars now[a]days play just as good. . . . The Stratocaster is the best all around guitar for the stuff we’re doing. You can get the very bright trebles and the deep bass sound. I tried [a] Telecaster and it only has two sounds, good and bad, and a very weak tone variation. A Guild guitar is very delicate but it has one of the best sounds. I tried one of the new Gibsons, but I literally couldn’t play it at all, so I’ll stick with Fender.