ABSTRACT Tinkering has long figured prominently in the history of the electric guitar. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, two guitarists based in the burgeoning Southern California hard rock scene adapted technological tinkering to their musical endeavors. Edward Van Halen, lead guitarist for Van Halen, became the most celebrated rock guitar virtuoso of the 1980s, but was just as noted amongst guitar aficionados for his tinkering with the electric guitar, designing his own instruments out of the remains of guitars that he had dismembered in his own workshop. Greg Ginn, guitarist for Black Flag, ran his own amateur radio supply shop before forming the band, and named his noted independent record label, SST, after the solid state transistors that he used in his own tinkering. This paper explores the ways in which music-based tinkering played a part in the construction of virtuosity around the figure of Van Halen, and the definition of artistic ‘independence’ for the more confrontational Black Flag. It further posits that tinkering in popular music cuts across musical genres, and joins music to broader cultural currents around technology, such as technological enthusiasm, the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos, and the use of technology for the purposes of fortifying masculinity.

Keywords do-it-yourself, electric guitar, masculinity, popular music, technology, sound

California Noise: Tinkering with Hardcore and Heavy Metal in Southern California Steve Waksman

Tinkering has long been a part of the history of the electric guitar. Indeed, much of the work of electric guitar design, from refinements in body shape to alterations in electronics, could be loosely classified as tinkering. Par- ticularly in the early years of the instrument, during the 1930s and 1940s, many guitar designers worked in their garages or backyards, following a rather informal process of experimentation and adjustment in pursuit of results that were sometimes not clearly defined until they were achieved. Most intriguingly, guitarists themselves have often taken part in the tinker- ing process. The impulse to rearrange technological details has often coincided with a certain disposition towards sound and musicianship, combining to form a way of hearing through technology that, while not necessarily unique to the electric guitar, has been strongly shaped by the instrument and its players.1 Such impulses have often cut across musical

Social Studies of Science 34/5(October 2004) 675–702 © SSS and SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks CA, New Delhi) ISSN 0306-3127 DOI: 10.1177/0306312704047614 www.sagepublications.com 676 Social Studies of Science 34/5 categories, so that guitarists who play in markedly different styles have nonetheless exhibited similar tendencies in the way they interact with the electric guitar as a cultural and technological artifact. Writing about this phenomenon elsewhere, I have identified a ‘structure of desire focused upon the electric guitar that has little to do with music, and more to do with the ways in which the electric guitar as a material, technological object engenders (and genders) certain modes of interaction’ (Waksman, 1999: 294). The parenthetical qualifier is meant to remind us that, as in many spheres of activity, tinkering with the electric guitar has been a predom- inantly masculine endeavor, the end of which could be deemed the fortification of manhood as much as the specific technological or musical goals that are sought.2 Eddie Van Halen and Greg Ginn are two guitarists who exemplify these patterns: latter-day tinkerers whose involvement with electronics figured significantly in their larger musical careers. Those careers, in turn, have been as markedly different as the guitar styles of the two figures. Eddie Van Halen spent 20 years as lead guitarist for his namesake band, Van Halen, one of the most widely successful heavy metal bands of the later 20th century. Ginn, by contrast, spent almost 10 years as leader of Black Flag, a groundbreaking band that achieved limited commercial success but had considerable influence upon the shape of US punk rock, leading it towards a new formulation that became known as ‘hardcore’. As a guitarist, Van Halen was perhaps the most prominent and widely influen- tial player of the era, a figure considered by many guitar enthusiasts to have reconfigured the terms of electric guitar virtuosity in a hard rock setting.3 Ginn’s influence was more of an underground variety, but within that less spotlighted sphere he was acknowledged to be a major punk guitar stylist. Whereas Van Halen’s guitar style was most noted for its incredible speed and precision, Ginn was recognized as a master of calculated imprecision whose playing was full of apparently ‘wrong’ notes, the dissonance of which created a more jarring effect than that of Van Halen’s more linear approach. Different as they have been, the careers of Van Halen and Ginn both took root in Southern California, a region of the US that was a prime location for the revivification of the hard rock styles with which they were associated during the late 1970s and early 1980s. As such, the two guitarists embodied the different styles, ethics, and aspirations that defined rock music in Los Angeles and its surroundings during these years. Coincidentally or not, Southern California has also been home to a strong current of guitar-based tinkering that links Van Halen and Ginn to an earlier generation of figures such as Les Paul, Leo Fender, and Paul Bigsby.4 Within this broader history, tinkering has served a number of interrelated functions: it has been a means of exploring the ways in which technology can be put in the service of creating a certain kind of sound; it has been a way for musicians and instrument makers (two categories that often blur together) to redesign the electric guitar to more individualized specifications; and it has been a mode of self-directed activity in which Waksman: California Noise 677 musicians have sought to carve out a sphere of ‘independence’ from the broader structures that govern the music and guitar-manufacturing industries. For Eddie Van Halen, all three of these impulses have been at work, though the case of Van Halen also demonstrates the ways in which the results of tinkering can be reincorporated back into the larger industries surrounding the electric guitar, which in turn allows the standardization of the instrument to be offset by the continued appearance of innovation and individualized design. For Greg Ginn, the third of these impulses – the will towards independence – has been most prominent. Unlike Van Halen, Ginn’s tinkering efforts were not concentrated upon the guitar itself. But his engagement with amateur radio played a crucial formative role in his development of a self-managed infrastructure for the production and distribution of the music of his band, Black Flag, and the music of other like-minded bands. Taken together, the careers of Ginn and Van Halen create a sort of counterpoint regarding the history of the electric guitar, guitarists, and technology that cuts through some of the perceived differ- ences between the musical genres seen to contain them – heavy metal and hardcore punk – and yet remains shaped by those differences in the end.5

Do-It-Yourself To begin to situate the efforts of Van Halen and Ginn in broader historical and cultural currents, it will be useful to briefly explore two concepts, one from the history of technology and the other from more general usage, but with a specific relevance both to uses of technology and to popular music. The first concept is that of technological enthusiasm. As elaborated in the anthology, Possible Dreams: Enthusiasm for Technology in America (Wright, 1992), technological enthusiasm is the confluence of beliefs and activities that accompanied the growing presence of technology in everyday life in the USA starting in the 19th century. Enthusiasm for technology is what led individuals not only to use technology, but also to take pleasure in it, and to apply themselves to it as a form of recreation. Certain inventions – radio, the automobile, ‘hi-fi’ stereo, and arguably the electric guitar – did much to stimulate enthusiasm for technology at the popular level, and certain publications – especially Popular Mechanics and its rival Popular Science, and after 1967 Guitar Player magazine amongst guitarists – gave regular advice to readers on a range of technical practices, as well as constructing a supporting ideology surrounding the value of technological endeavors.6 Tied to this notion of technological enthusiasm is the second concept, that of ‘do-it-yourself’ (DIY). In popular music, and especially in hardcore punk, DIY has become a core value in some quarters, connoting resistance to the controlling and appropriative structures of the music industry. However, as historian Steven Gelber has shown, DIY as a category of activity has its roots in the spread of the suburbs that reshaped US social life beginning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. According to 678 Social Studies of Science 34/5

Gelber, DIY was driven by two simultaneous impulses: the desire to recover manual labor as the proper realm of masculine activity at a time when many men found themselves part of a growing class of white-collar workers; and the desire to carve out a distinctly masculine sphere within the increasingly isolated, feminized space of the late Victorian suburban home (Gelber, 1997: 73). Tools thus became a key element of suburban masculinity, while the house ‘was transformed from a place in which to do things to a place on which to do things’ (1997: 81). Gelber cites a 1912 article from Suburban Life magazine as likely the first published usage of the phrase ‘Do-It-Yourself’ – in an article that encouraged readers to paint their own homes rather than turning the job over to professionals – and traces the development of the term into one of the dominant features of suburban life by the post-World War II era in the USA (1997: 79). Summing up the multiple meanings inhering in DIY, Gelber notes that such activities:

were a jumble of contradictions: they were leisure that was work-like and chores that were leisurely; they produced outcomes with real economic value that might actually cost more in time and money than the product was worth; they were performed by middle-class men acting like blue- collar workers and blue-collar workers acting like middle-class home- owners. (1997: 82)

Although more recent musical variants of DIY activity and philosophy have changed some of the terms of the phenomenon, the suburban, home- centered beginnings of DIY remain a crucial and overlooked precedent that continues to inform contemporary manifestations. These two strains – technological enthusiasm and DIY – intersected in several cultural locations, most importantly for the present argument in the history of radio. In her various studies of radio, Susan Douglas has highlighted the efforts of amateur radio operators as veritable ‘explorers’ of the ether who have constituted a uniquely ‘active, committed, and partici- patory audience’ from the early years of radio to the present day (Douglas, 1987: 205).7 With the advent of the inexpensive crystal radio receiver in 1906, young men took to the airwaves by the thousands, seeking out signals from faraway locations (1987: 195–96). While amateur radio enthu- siasts may not have made the home itself the object of their endeavors in the manner described by Gelber, their activities were decidedly home- based, and were implicated in the process of fortifying masculinity within the domestic sphere. For radio amateurs, listening was regularly accom- panied by tinkering with the device of the radio itself. As Douglas notes:

In the hands of amateurs, all sorts of technological recycling and adaptive reuse took place. Discarded photography plates were wrapped with foil and became condensers. The brass spheres from an old bedstead were transformed into a spark gap, and were connected to an ordinary automobile ignition coil-cum-transmitter. Model T ignition coils were favorites. (1987: 197) Waksman: California Noise 679

The goal of such endeavors was to increase the ability of the radio set to receive signals from remote locations, yet the means to this end – techno- logical tinkering and the movement across frequencies in search of a clear signal – were just as much a part of the appeal for the amateur operators. In this regard, radio tinkering became a model for popular uses of technology that were geared towards active engagement with the techno- logical artifact rather than idle consumption. Early radio history, and the activities of amateurs in particular, also established a distinctive approach to the relationship between sound and technology. Small refinements in the technological construction of a radio set could mean a large improvement in the ability to tune into different frequencies. Amateur operators thus became attuned to the quality of sound that technological adjustments might bring. This aspect of radio- based tinkering carried into the endeavors of early electric guitarists and guitar designers, some of the most prominent of whom were amateur radio enthusiasts. Among this group were Leo Fender and Les Paul, two of the principal figures in the development of the solid-body electric guitar. According to former Fender associate Forrest White, Fender was ‘hooked on electronics’ by the time he finished high school in 1928, and had ‘an amateur “ham” radio station with the call letters W-6-DOE’ (White, 1994: 4). Fender himself credited his long experience with radio and electronics as the key reason for his willingness to experiment with the design of the electric guitar, and to foreground ‘the utility aspects of an item’ over appearance (Wheeler, 1992: 61).8 Les Paul, meanwhile, built his first crystal radio set in 1927, only two years before he put together his earliest effort at an electric guitar from pieces of his father’s phonograph set (Shaughnessy, 1993: 30). Shortly thereafter, Paul began transmitting his own broadcasts from the basement of his mother’s house, something he would continue to do (outside of her house) long after his musical career had begun (1993: 33). Involvement with radio was a key stimulus for Fender’s and Paul’s respective interests in electronics, which in turn laid the foundation for their innovations in electric guitar design, innovations that were primarily meant to clarify the sound of the instrument. Borrowing from technology scholar Wiebe Bijker, one could observe that radio provided one of the main ‘technological frames’ within which Fender and Paul formulated their guitar-based experiments. As defined by Bijker, a technological frame is composed of ‘the concepts and techniques employed by a community in its problem solving. . . . This makes a technological frame into a combination of current theories, tacit knowl- edge, engineering practice . . . specialized testing procedures, goals, and handling and using practice’ (1987: 168). The principal frame existing around the electric guitar in its early years (1930s to 1940s) was one that assumed definition out of the effort to convert an acoustic instrument into an electric one. Most guitar builders and manufacturers involved in making electric guitars held to the notion that amplified sound was still largely reliant upon the acoustic qualities of the instrument: the hollowed interior, quality of wood, shape and size of the sound holes, and other 680 Social Studies of Science 34/5 related features. Moreover, there was an idea about how a guitar should look – with a certain type of curvature in the body, and sound holes placed in a particular arrangement – that set limits upon experimentation with the amplification of the instrument’s signal. If we term this ensemble of beliefs and practices the ‘amplified acoustic’ frame, then we can note that Fender and Paul brought into the sphere of electric guitar design a competing frame drawn from their work with radio, work which allowed them to isolate the specifically electronic elements of sound production from the acoustic design of the conventional guitar.9 The solid-body electric was created according to the premise that the amplified signal produced by an electric guitar could be both strength- ened and clarified if the resonating surface of the instrument’s body was made more stable. Sound holes and hollow interiors gave way to a solid piece of wood, which in turn allowed the vibration of the guitar’s string to be amplified through the magnetic qualities of the instrument’s pickup free of extraneous vibrations caused by the sympathetic surface of the guitar.10 Elimination of sympathetic resonances and the resulting distortion of tone had been sought by other guitar manufacturers, but Paul and Fender independently reached a solution that fundamentally reshaped the instru- ment and placed new priority upon the amplified signal as such, an innovation that was indebted to their absorption of a technological frame in which tinkering with technological details was the key to achieving desired sound quality. Leo Fender and Les Paul also did much of the work for which they were most noted while in Southern California. Fender, a native Cali- fornian, began his tinkering while growing up near the Orange County suburb of Anaheim, and established his Fender guitar company in the nearby town of Fullerton. Paul was not native to the area, but relocated there during the 1940s, and continued to refine his design for a solid-body guitar as well as his techniques for multiple-track recording in the garage of his ‘small stucco bungalow house’ (Shaughnessy, 1993: 124). Southern California was truly a hub of electric guitar activity during these years, even beyond the efforts of Fender and Paul, and the possible explanations are several. Hollywood was drawing increasing numbers of professional musicians due to the mix of film, radio, and recording opportunities for work.11 Paul’s move to California was part of this larger wave of migration. Other musicians were arriving in the state as part of the general flow of new residents, as California entered a major boom period in both its population and its economy. Many came from the south-western USA, a region where the electric guitar had already found considerable favor among jazz, country, and western swing musicians; Leo Fender was in regular contact with many of this latter group. In the cases of Paul and Fender, the pattern of settlement and residential development also figured prominently. While its population expanded, Southern California became the most rapidly suburbanized region of the USA; and as such the area became home to more than its fair share of tinkerers, who took advantage of the extra space afforded by the garages that were a standard feature of single-family houses Waksman: California Noise 681 in what was also the most automobile-oriented region of the country.12 Southern California, in other words, became a locus of DIY activity of the sort detailed by Gelber, and the electric guitar flourished in this burgeon- ing terrain.

Heavy Metal and Hardcore Eddie Van Halen and his band began playing around Southern California in the mid-1970s. At the time, the city’s native rock scene was dominated by the country-tinged styles of performers such as Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles. According to Barney Hoskyns, chronicler of Southern California rock, this melodic sound ‘was the American sound of the mid seventies’, and defined the musical image of California for much of the nation (Hoskyns, 1996: 272). Van Halen was working in a markedly different vein, purveying a hard rock style that had seen its commercial peak earlier in the decade with the success of bands such as Grand Funk, Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin. Local hard rock and heavy metal units had not enjoyed a high profile even in these earlier years, although touring bands like Led Zeppelin had often used Los Angeles as a way station, and the city earned a reputation for hosting some notorious offstage debauchery. In this setting, Van Halen made its way in the manner followed by so many local bands, playing by Eddie Van Halen’s account ‘everywhere and anywhere, from backyard parties to places the size of your bathroom. . . . We used to print up flyers and stuff them into high school lockers’ (Obrecht, 1978: 28). The band’s breakthrough came at the Starwood Club in 1977, at a show booked by local music impresario Rodney Bingenheimer – who also figured prominently in the local promotion of punk and new wave – where they impressed Warner Brothers record executive Mo Ostin and producer Ted Templeman. Shortly thereafter the band recorded its first album for Warners, and its success on both a local and national scale skyrocketed upon that album’s release the following year. As the band Van Halen’s profile rose, so too did that of the band’s guitarist. Eddie Van Halen was quickly hailed as a major new presence in the world of rock guitar, winning the 1978 Guitar Player magazine reader’s poll award for Best New Talent, and winning in 1979 the first of five straight reader’s poll awards for Best Rock Guitarist (the magazine imposes a five-year limit for any single guitarist to win a given category). The first Van Halen album had spotlighted the guitarist’s technical feats as much as the band’s ability to infuse heavy rock and roll with melodic, pop-worthy hooks. ‘Eruption’, the album’s second track, was described by one writer to sound like ‘a Bach organ study. Which is a hell of a thing to hear coming out of an electric guitar through a Marshall stack’ (Considine, 1985: 47). A brief instrumental track of solo electric guitar, less than two minutes long, ‘Eruption’ found the guitarist interweaving blues-based pentatonic licks with melodic lines more ‘classical’ in nature.13 The third and final section of the piece drew the most attention, as Van Halen displayed his facility with the technique of two-handed tapping, using the index finger of his 682 Social Studies of Science 34/5 right hand to fret notes along with the more customary fingers of the left to produce a rapidly ascending succession of arpeggios within which the harmonic center was continually displaced and relocated. Punctuated by tremolo bar-induced growls, staccato picking, and delivered with a reverb- soaked, heavy crunch of distortion, ‘Eruption’ was designed to signify ‘state-of-the-art’ rock guitar, and it became the measure of a new model of hard rock virtuosity that exerted considerable influence throughout the next decade. While Van Halen the band was moving from local rock aspirants to national and international success, another wave of bands was emerging on the Southern California scene. The Los Angeles punk scene began to take shape at a time roughly contiguous with the emergence of the more noted scenes in New York and London. Long considered to have been a largely derivative offshoot of the activities in New York and London, Los Angeles and its surrounding region has more recently been acknowledged to have hosted a self-defined scene on a par with those other locations.14 Most accounts of Southern California punk emphasize two stages in its development. The first stage began around 1977, was centered around Hollywood, and was driven by an art/bohemian element who were reacting against the perceived blandness of 1970s music and the relative dearth of a live music scene in Los Angeles. X was perhaps the most celebrated band of this first punk wave in Los Angeles, though bands such as the Weirdos, the Screamers, the Urinals, and the Germs were also prominent in these formative years. The second stage emerged around 1979, and was in many ways a reaction against the first by a younger group of bands and fans who were based not in the city proper, but in the suburbs to the south. Grounds for reaction against the first wave of Southern California punk were often unclearly expressed, but seem to have had much to do with the closed, cliquish nature of the Los Angeles scene as it had developed. The newer bands and their audiences were thus trying to carve out a space for themselves in a scene where they felt somewhat marginal. Three other features of the new wave of Los Angeles punk also assumed importance. The music became coarser, faster, and in many ways more uniform than the styles favored by the earlier bands (who were still very much part of the scene). Audience behavior followed from and further prompted these stylistic shifts with the rise of an intensely physical mode of interaction that came to be called ‘slam dancing’. And the notion of DIY, long a tacit principle of punk, was further codified as one of its defining features. Phase two of Southern California punk came to be known as ‘hard- core’; and while the first wave of Los Angeles punk had largely been overshadowed by its New York and London counterparts, Southern Cali- fornia was generally acknowledged to have been the leading location in punk’s resurgence, along with Washington, DC. In California, no band marked the break between the two phases of punk development as de- cisively as Black Flag. Following a tireless regime of practicing, developing an intensive and exhausting touring strategy that took the band out of California and into areas of the USA that had rarely been exposed to live Waksman: California Noise 683 punk, and issuing a discordant, distortion-soaked, quick-fire set of songs that upped the ante on punk aggression, Black Flag helped set the terms for a significant revision of punk. Noted for their intensity onstage and on record, Black Flag were also distinctive for the particular approach to artistic ‘independence’ taken by the band, most symbolized by the record label, SST: this was headed by guitarist Greg Ginn and released all of the band’s records as well as those of other punk and independent rock bands throughout the 1980s. Through the efforts of Ginn, and of others such as Ian MacKaye of Washington, DC, hardcore came to symbolize not only a renewal of punk’s musical energy but also a move to gain control over the means of musical production, a key facet of the punk version of DIY.15 As much as hardcore was a reaction against an earlier definition of punk, it stood in even starker opposition to more commercially successful forms of rock such as heavy metal; and metal musicians and fans in turn were likely to hold derisive views of hardcore. Some sense of the terms of generic opposition, which significantly informed the work of both Eddie Van Halen and Greg Ginn, can be drawn from a 1982 article in Hit Parader magazine.16 ‘Heavy Metal vs. Hard Core’ was the title of the record review section in the October 1982 issue, in which critic Roy Trakin pitted the two genres against one another. By Trakin’s account, heavy metal – once the domain of good-humored rock ’n’ roll – had become stylistically rigid and overly serious in its intentions; and hardcore had usurped much of the energy that heavy metal once held as its own. At the center of this comparison stood Van Halen and Black Flag. On the heavy metal side, Trakin announces Van Halen to be ‘America’s answer to the absence of Led Zep[pelin]’, and goes on to declare that the band illustrates ‘precisely what’s wrong with heavy metal today’. Accusing the band of allowing cover versions to provide the bulk of the catchy hooks on their latest album, Diver Down, Trakin sums up his rapid assessment of Van Halen with the question, ‘Should the narcissistic celebration of pleas- ure be an end in itself, even if Eddie Van Halen can play his ass off? Shallow no matter how you slice it’ (Trakin, 1982: 23). On the hardcore side, Trakin posits Black Flag to be the ‘savage, demented’ underside to Van Halen’s version of ‘life in the SoCal fast lane’, as judged by the evidence of their debut long-playing record (LP), Damaged. Apart from the difference in attitude, Trakin most highlights the abilities of the bands’ respective guitarists, and claims that Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn ‘is guaranteed to blow away any HM [heavy metal] guitarist extant, and that includes you, Mr Bertinelli, er, Van Halen’ (1982: 23). Referring to Eddie Van Halen’s celebrity wife, actress Valerie Bertinelli, Trakin draws a pro- verbial line in the sand, intimating that Van Halen’s recognized status as a guitar virtuoso is too much bound to the trappings of stardom, whereas Ginn shoots straight from his rock and roll hip without such illusions of grandeur diverting his aim. Trakin’s consideration of heavy metal and hardcore offers evidence of some of the stakes involved in defining the difference between the two 684 Social Studies of Science 34/5 genres at a transitional moment in their respective histories. Whereas metal was proving to be a path to success on a mass scale, hardcore was staking out a place of opposition to the music industry at large. Whereas metal found guitarists like Van Halen expanding the limits of technical virtuosity, hardcore issued a challenge to the notion that virtuosity equalled ‘good music’. Yet one is left to wonder what Trakin would make of the fact that Van Halen built his own guitars, driven by an impulse not so far removed from that exhibited by Ginn in his work with ham radio. While the tinkering of Van Halen and Ginn was ultimately caught within the larger structures of their respective careers, there is a point at which the fascina- tion with wires and circuits exhibits a common pursuit.

Kick Ass and Scream Of course, tinkering is itself far from unified as a field of endeavor. In the growing literature on tinkering in the history of technology, a number of key differences emerge as one surveys the range of tinkering styles. One such distinction has to do with the degree of commitment to technological experimentation as such. As Sherry Turkle (1984) and Robert Post (1994), among others, have noted, tinkering often involves an inversion of the usual means–end relationship that governs technological work. Many tinkerers develop ‘a fascination with the machine itself’ that overrides any specific technical goal (Turkle, 1984: 201); others participate in tinkering in a more goal-oriented manner, out of pragmatic rather than passionate motives. Another important distinction has to do with the extent to which the technological object is modified through the tinkering process. Some tinkerers essentially create their objects from scratch, as did many radio amateurs, and in a different context, some of the drag racing enthusiasts portrayed by Robert Post. Others may assemble a device in a more prescribed fashion, through prepackaged kits such as the widely available crystal radio assembly sets or the television assembly kits that were popular in postwar Japan (Takahashi, 2000: 477). Meanwhile, a wide range of tinkerers may satisfy themselves with making adjustments of greater or lesser consequence to already assembled devices. Indeed this is probably the most common form of tinkering, one that is widely applied to auto- mobiles, stereo equipment, and a number of other items including the electric guitar. Among the figures under discussion, Les Paul and Eddie Van Halen had the strongest fascination with the electric guitar as a ‘machine’ unto itself, and were most motivated in their tinkering by a passionate involve- ment with the instrument. It was Paul and Fender, though, who most substantially revised the construction of the electric guitar with their coterminous creation of a solid-body design. As we shall see, Van Halen’s work with the electric guitar was more of the ‘mix and match’ variety. He did not fundamentally rethink the design of the instrument, but sub- stantially rearranged some of the existing features and styles of the electric Waksman: California Noise 685 guitar, creatively appropriating elements from different models and com- bining them into a roughly constructed instrument that met his specifica- tions. Greg Ginn’s tinkering, in turn, was far less concentrated upon the guitar itself. A radio tinkerer like Paul and Fender, he did not emulate the path whereby radio provided a frame for rethinking the contours of electric guitar design. Nonetheless, Ginn did make some alterations to his chosen instrument that are illuminating in light of his anti-virtuosic musical style, and the guitar that he played offered an unusual range of options even in its unmodified form. Further connecting the efforts of Van Halen and Ginn was the way that masculinity figured into their guitar-based pursuits. Different as the two guitarists are in style and ethos, both used the electric guitar in ways that reinforced the instrument’s long-standing role as a tool suited to distinctly masculine endeavors.

When Eddie Van Halen’s star began to rise, attention was drawn not only to his virtuosic guitar technique, but also to the peculiar qualities of the instrument that he played. It was an odd assemblage, painted red with white lines intersecting across its surface, and with loose routing holes and wires around the pickup. Other guitarists might have played custom-built instruments, but this guitar had a different aura – it seemed more piece- meal, more DIY. And it was disclosed in interviews that Van Halen had indeed built the guitar himself, as he’d been doing for some years. How the young guitarist came to build his own guitars is not entirely clear. He does not seem to have had any earlier involvement in electronics, before he began his tinkering with instruments. Instead, his tinkering appears to have been motivated more directly by his attachment to the guitar, and by his desire to play a guitar that had features unavailable on the commercially manufactured models of the day. During the 1970s, and still today, the dominant electric guitar models among rock guitarists were the Gibson Les Paul and the Fender Strato- caster. Playing upon one of these guitars was a measure of taste, of achievement (for by the 1970s the two guitars had become rather ex- pensive), and of preference, for the Les Paul and the Stratocaster had rather different features. Certainly the two guitars looked different, with the Les Paul’s wider, single-horn body contrasting with the more stream- lined, double-horn appearance of the Strat. More importantly for the working guitarist, they also sounded different. The sound of a solid-body electric guitar is determined primarily by the pickups. Gibson Les Paul guitars have double-coil, or humbucking, pickups, while Stratocasters have single-coil pickups. The former produces a rounder, more full tone with fewer highs and less tendency towards feedback, while the latter produces a more trebly tone that can be desirable when playing lead guitar lines meant to cut through the sound of a band. Stratocasters are also distinctive for featuring a tremolo bar attached to the bridge of the instrument, which allows the player to alter the pitch of individual notes in a manner analogous to bending the strings of the guitar with the fingers, but with the 686 Social Studies of Science 34/5 tremolo bar the direction of change tends to be downwards rather than upwards, and more radical shifts in pitch can be achieved. Eddie Van Halen’s decision to build his own guitars was in one sense grounded in a rejection of the preset features and the preordained status that playing a Les Paul or Stratocaster would have offered. Speaking in 1995, the guitarist dismissed the notion that there was a special appeal to using these long-hailed classics of electric guitar design: ‘The electric guitar has not changed a fucking bit since Leo Fender and Les Paul. I get the same sounds out of my guitars that I get out of a Les Paul or any other humbucking-style guitar’ (Guitar World, 1997: 146). Some years earlier he had characterized the Les Paul as ‘just the cliched guitar, the rock and roll guitar’, and while Edward liked the sound the guitar generated, he wasn’t happy with aspects of the design, especially the lack of a tremolo bar (Obrecht, 1980: 75). The physical properties of the Stratocaster were preferable, but Van Halen and his bandmates found the sound too thin: ‘You know, single-coil pickups. They had a real buzzy, thin sound unless I used a fuzz box, and that’s even worse’ (1980: 75). Van Halen’s solution to these perceived shortcomings was not a dramatic reconfiguration of the electric guitar, though, but a hybrid object that blended components from each of the two dominant models in an effort to combine the sound of the Les Paul with the functionality of the Stratocaster. At first, this involved the relatively simple procedure of installing a Gibson humbucker pickup onto a Stratocaster body. But Van Halen ultimately envisioned a more substantial revision of the original object. He bought a Strat-style carved wood body from the local Charvel guitar company and filled in the specifications from there. In a 1978 interview, the guitarist described his main guitar and outlined the principles that went into its construction:

It is a copy of a Fender Stratocaster. . . . I bought the body for [US]$50 and the neck for [US]$80, and put in an old Gibson patent-applied-for pickup that was rewound to my specifications. I like the one-pickup sound, and I’ve experimented with it a lot. If you put the pickup really close to the bridge, it sounds trebly; if you put it too far forward, you get a sound that isn’t good for rhythm. I like it towards the back – it gives the sound a little sharper edge and bite. . . . There is only one volume knob – that’s all there is to it. I don’t use any fancy tone knobs . . . give me one knob and that’s it. It’s simple and it sounds cool . . . Nobody taught me how to do guitar work; I learned by trial and error. I have messed up a lot of good guitars that way, but now I know what I’m doing, and I can do whatever I want to get them the way I want them. I hate store-bought, off-the-rack guitars. They don’t do what I want them to do, which is kick ass and scream. (Obrecht, 1978: 29, 58)

Van Halen’s account highlights some of the many variables that can be adjusted to alter an electric guitar’s properties. He not only uses a particu- lar pickup – an old Gibson humbucker – but has the wiring of the pickup rewound to match his preference.17 The placement of the pickup on the body of the instrument is also of key importance, as it has much to do with Waksman: California Noise 687 the tonal properties of the resulting sound. Eschewing the multiple pickup design that is standard on commercial electric guitars, Van Halen was able to place his single pickup in just the right spot relative to his desired effect. Above all, the design principles articulated here – the single pickup, the single volume knob with no accompanying tone knob – bespeak a wish to minimize rather than maximize options. Whereas ‘off-the-rack’ guitars were meant to cater to players who would approach the instrument from a potentially wide array of musical backgrounds, and would apply a wide array of styles, Van Halen sought to build a guitar that fitted his style. Tinkering with the instrument, then, allowed Van Halen to do more than construct a guitar that played in a manner he found satisfying. It also allowed him to mark out his guitar as his creation in a way that paralleled the playing style and techniques for which he was so celebrated; and to assert his independence of choice against the more fixed range of consumer options for which most guitarists settled. It is worth emphasizing in this connection that one of Eddie Van Halen’s principal motivations behind customizing his electric guitars has been a search for an individual sound. As he makes plain in his remarks given earlier, much of his experimentation – with pickup placement, with the volume knob – has been oriented towards finding the right sound, a sound that can ‘kick ass and scream’. Over his career that sound has come to be known as ‘the brown sound’; and as much as his technical achieve- ments with two-handed tapping and his use of the tremolo bar, the brown sound has stood for fans and critics, as well as for the guitarist himself, as a major marker of Van Halen’s identifiable brand of virtuosity. The brown sound is, at root, a refinement of the high-volume, distortion-laden electric guitar sound that is one of the definitive musical features of hard rock and heavy metal. Why is the sound ‘brown’? Van Halen has never fully ex- plained this point, but brown in this context would seem to connote a sort of organic quality that offsets the technological underpinnings of the sound. The guitarist once noted: ‘It’s tone. It’s wood, as opposed to cinderblock. . . . Imagine someone hitting a piece of wood as opposed to metal or cement. It develops a tone that is pleasing to the ear’ (Young, 1984: 56). Van Halen further connects the brown sound to a certain trained ability to hear an electric guitar: ‘there is a difference between being just loud and having what I call a warm, brown sound – which is a rich, toney sound. I guess a lot of people are tone deaf and can’t figure it out because they just crank it up with a lot of treble just for the sake of being loud’ (Obrecht, 1980: 93). Not that Van Halen was averse to just cranking the volume – he was known to have applied an item called a Variac autotransformer to his amplifiers to supercharge their output.18 But the brown sound is premised upon the notion that volume and distortion are not sufficient. The brown sound is Edward Van Halen’s sound, a mark of his distinctive approach to music and the ultimate goal underlying his reconstruction of electric guitar design. 688 Social Studies of Science 34/5

As such, the brown sound is an example of the personalization of ‘sound’ that Paul Theberge´ has identified as a core feature of contemporary popular music practice (Theberge,´ 1997: 191). This tendency took hold in a number of venues during the latter part of the 20th century. Susan Schmidt Horning (2004) in her contribution to the present issue shows that recording engineers worked to inflect their use of items like the microphone with forms of tacit knowledge that placed a personal stamp on the resulting sound. Indeed, recording studios have often been considered to have signature sounds; records produced at Sun studio in Memphis (TN), Motown in Detroit (IL), or RCA’s studio B in Nashville (TN), are considered to bear the trace of a unique combination of spatial detail, technological specification, and the contribution of a distinctive core of studio musicians.19 Yet with musical instruments, the personalization of sound is more strictly individualized, particularly when attached to figures like Van Halen who are already noted for their singular musical capabilities. Instruments themselves, conversely, have been significantly shaped by the efforts of individual musicians to use them against the grain of their stock design. Along with the synthesizer, the electric guitar has arguably been the instrument to most encourage such efforts. Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco’s insight about the Minimoog synthesizer can be applied as well to the electric guitar as it has been used by Van Halen and other tinkering musicians: ‘All the best instruments in some sense do not “work” as they are supposed to. It is the departures from theoretical models of instru- ments – the unexpected resonances and the like – that make an instrument particularly valued’ (Pinch & Trocco, 2002: 223). Like Les Paul, Van Halen put an unusual amount of energy into locating those unexpected resonances and modifying his instruments to best take advantage of them. The intensive emphasis upon individualization evident in Van Halen’s tinkering efforts corresponds closely to ways in which the guitarist under- stood his mastery of musical technique. Discussing the influence he wielded upon other musicians, Van Halen complained: ‘I guess they always say that imitation is the highest form of flattery. I think this is a crock of shit. . . . Like I learned a lot from Clapton, Page, Hendrix, Beck – but I don’t play like them. I innovated; I learned from them and did my own thing out of it’ (Obrecht, 1980: 99). Such conviction concerning the value of innovation and originality, and such pursuit of an almost sovereign brand of singularity, have been central to the cultural construction of the electric guitar as a masculine tool. The term ‘technophallus’ – a term I coined in association with such figures as Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page – refers to the ways in which virtuosity and technology have fused together in the sphere of electric guitar performance to enhance the aura of masculine achievement (Waksman, 1999: 188, 246–47). Tinkering has not been necessary for the musical construction of masculinity to which the electric guitar has given rise, but like the more specifically musical brand of technique it has figured prominently as a strategy whereby knowledge, skill, and expertise regarding the instrument have been construed in Waksman: California Noise 689 relatively exclusive terms. Thus do the words of feminist music writer Susan Hiwatt, written in the early 1970s, still ring with considerable truth: ‘It blew my mind the first time I heard about a woman playing an electric guitar. Partly because of the whole idea we have that women can’t understand anything about electronics . . . and also because women are supposed to be composed, gentle, play soft songs’ (Hiwatt, 1971: 143). It is in relation to such associations that Van Halen’s desire to ‘kick ass and scream’ can be understood not only as a determined wish to mark his own sonic territory but as a means of asserting manhood through the combined forms of sound and technology.

Greg Ginn took to the guitar somewhat late. By his own account, he only got into music at the age of 18 years, having earlier been drawn to electronics – particularly ham radio – and poetry. Unlike Eddie Van Halen, who undertook several years of classical piano lessons before starting to play the guitar, Ginn came to the guitar at 19 years old with no previous musical experience. At the time, he most concentrated upon playing blues, although his listening tastes included much of the heavier rock of the era (early 1970s), bands such as the MC5, Stooges, Black Oak Arkansas, Ted Nugent, and others. Describing his earliest guitar playing efforts, Ginn remembered: ‘I would play along with records but I didn’t learn the songs, I just jammed with the rhythm section. I learned technique by doing it. I would absorb stuff but I would never consciously study other people. Playing guitar was about having fun and writing songs. It was intensely personal’ (Sinker, 2001: 79). In interviews, Ginn regularly credited this manner of learning the guitar – responding to the sounds he heard on records, but not trying to reproduce the notes – for the distinctive contours of his style. The four songs of Black Flag’s first 7-inch single record in 1978 find Ginn playing fast buzzsaw-style barre chords in the manner of prototypical punk guitar- ist Johnny Ramone, but by the time the Jealous Again extended play record (EP) was released in 1980, Ginn’s guitar attack was more fully in place.20 That record’s title track features the guitarist playing off-kilter Chuck Berry-like fills that set the pace for a mid-song solo that begins in a similar Berry-derived vein but quickly shifts into less strictly tonal terrain. Ginn’s staccato picking generates a blur of indistinctly struck notes that mutates into a descending scale that follows a decidedly non-pentatonic logic. The solo ends with a sliding set of double-stops that careen down the fretboard, leading back into the verse. Eschewing the more studied virtuosity of contemporary rock guitarists like Van Halen, Ginn also departed from the self-conscious simplicity that marked so much punk and hardcore, forging a guitar style that blended the pounding rhythmic fundamentals of punk guitar with an approach to soloing that was clearly grounded in rock but made use of dissonance to a degree that bespoke a less populist aesthetic. Perhaps because he came to the guitar late, Ginn’s interest in electron- ics never intersected with his guitar playing to the degree that it did for Van Halen. Yet Ginn’s choice of guitar was in its own way as iconoclastic as was 690 Social Studies of Science 34/5

Van Halen’s work at building his own instruments. As Van Halen charac- terized his tinkering in terms of trying to escape the ‘cliched’´ presence of Les Paul and Stratocaster guitars in rock, so did Ginn play for most of his career with Black Flag a guitar that was in some ways the antithesis of those ‘classic’ guitar designs, a Dan Armstrong Ampeg model. Armstrong guitars were first issued in 1969, built from bodies constructed not from the usual wood but from see-through plastic, a substance that was used to increase the sustain of the instruments (Wheeler, 1992: 6–7). The un- naturalistic design was complemented by other unique features such as an extended 24-fret neck and, most unusual, a set of interchangeable pickups that could be removed from the body, allowing the guitarist to modify the sonoric and electronic features of the guitar with minimal effort. This feature made the Armstrong guitar into something like the electric guitar equivalent to a radio or television kit, the flexibility of design allowing guitarists to tinker with different technical options without having to disassemble the instrument. Although tinkering with the guitar was not Ginn’s main preoccupa- tion, he did make some modifications to the Armstrong, using different pickups than those provided with the instrument and rewiring the guitar in order to bypass the tone and volume controls. This latter change presents an especially intriguing parallel to Van Halen’s desire to reduce and simplify the knob controls on his self-built guitars, limiting himself to a single volume knob. Both seem to have wanted a guitar that was less valued for its variability of tonal shadings than for its ability to play loudly with maximum force. Regarding Ginn, this impulse was described by Black Flag singer Henry Rollins, who recalled about his first rehearsal with the group: They handed me a mic[rophone] and said, ‘What song do you want to play?’ . . . I said ‘Police Story’ which starts with Ginn, and that feedback. He had no volume setting on his guitar, just an on/off switch. That’s how the guy is – either asleep or all over you like a cheap suit. Whenever he turned the switch on, it’d feed back. If you hear those early Flag records, every time a song would begin you’d hear that screech because that was him turning his guitar on. (Blush, 2001: 60) Ginn never had a sound ideal as defined as Van Halen’s ‘brown sound’, but it is clear from Rollins’ account that the guitarist’s approach to sound, pushing volume and distortion to an extreme so that the spillover of feedback became an essential part of the music, was an integral counter- part to his angular and aggressive manner of playing. Rollins also provides the best description of the bodily motions that went along with Ginn’s charged playing style, noting that during the sessions for the band’s first full-length album, Damaged, ‘it was amazing to watch Ginn in the studio. He was relentless – so much energy. He would tape the headphones to his head for overdubs so they wouldn’t fly off’ (Rollins, 1994: 21). Such pronounced physicality paralleled the response of audiences to the music of Black Flag during their live performances, which were key events in the formation of the new style of audience interaction known as slam dancing. Waksman: California Noise 691

Black Flag concerts were notoriously physical affairs, and the band was routinely interrogated and scrutinized for its unwillingness to exert control over crowd behaviour.21 Yet Rollins’ portrait of Ginn in the studio, away from the audience, indicates the extent to which the physical and sonic excess that characterized the guitarist’s approach was as much a self- directed matter as a means of energizing a crowd. Ginn therefore emphas- ized in his playing, not only a sound ideal, a way of hearing, but a way of feeling sound, of maximizing its impact upon the body; an effect that for him was best achieved by the extreme use of amplification. Many commentators have observed that, in its resistance to established notions of virtuosity in rock, punk went some way towards undoing many of the hierarchies that had been upheld through the music, including hierarchies of gender. If virtuosity has long functioned as a means of fortifying musical manhood, then the rejection or redefinition of virtuosity might work to open a greater space for female participation. Much evid- ence exists that the initial phase of punk that took shape in the late 1970s did have this effect, at least to a limited degree. However, the move to hardcore that Greg Ginn and Black Flag did so much to initiate was less inclusive regarding matters of gender. The change was due not to the reassertion of technical expertise but to the aggressively masculine char- acter of the music and audience response. Many of those interviewed in Brendan Mullen and Marc Spitz’s oral history of Los Angeles punk, We Got the Neutron Bomb, recalled the extent to which hardcore ‘became more a macho testosterone overdrive thing’, which promoted a scene with less integration of men and women at shows and especially on the dance floor, where the slam dance ‘pit’ would form (Mullen & Spitz, 2001: 223). Ginn’s technologically based search for a physically intense sound was no doubt informed by the increasingly masculinized tendencies of hardcore. If he never expressly characterized manhood as a goal or a source of his endeavors, his unwillingness to exert control over the violent elements of his audience nonetheless allowed a more gender-exclusive environment to take hold. Stressing the capacity of Black Flag’s fans to think for them- selves, Ginn’s DIY ethos in this instance promoted the elevation of personal over social responsibility in a way that left discrepancies of power unresolved. As much as masculinity was at issue in the work of Ginn and Van Halen, one should not underestimate the more fundamental importance of sound as such to their endeavors. In this connection, the preoccupation with sound they exhibited perhaps finds its closest parallel in the broader sphere of tinkering and technological consumerism amongst the commun- ity of audiophile listeners portrayed by Joseph O’Connell (1992), and by Marc Perlman (2004) in the present issue. Like these guitarists, audiophile consumers base their decisions about which stereo equipment to purchase upon a certain antipathy towards mass-market equipment (O’Connell, 1992: 4). Although tinkering is not inherent to audiophilia, Perlman (2004) demonstrates the prevalence of technological ‘tweaking’ as a means of customizing one’s equipment. Like the tinkering pursued by Van Halen 692 Social Studies of Science 34/5 and, to a lesser extent, Ginn, tweaking among audiophiles is most oriented towards the optimization of sound, a goal that non-tinkering audiophiles pursue through the careful matching of well-built components. Of course there are key differences in these modes of technological engagement. Whereas audiophile consumers seek to maximize sound quality in the sphere of playback, so that they can better listen to music made by others, Van Halen and Ginn concentrate upon a sound that is ‘theirs’ in a more fundamental way, shaped as it is by their musicianship. Nonetheless, the example of audiophiles alongside that of guitar tinkerers allows us to note that the effort to achieve a desired sound through technological consump- tion and customization is an endeavor that cuts across different spheres of tinkering activity, and that is shared on some level among musicians and non-musicians.

Solid State Tinkering, in its various guises, can assume a number of distinct relation- ships to the ‘official’ sector of technological manufacturing and produc- tion. Although tinkering itself is typically carried out in informal settings, most notably the home, tinkerers have at times played a significant role in the creation of broadly successful items, and have even contributed to the formation of new technology industries. Yuzo Takahashi’s (2000) study of electronics tinkering in post-World War II Japan offers evidence of this latter course. According to Takahashi, tinkerers in the realms of both radio and television played two crucial functions in the formation of a home electronics market in Japan: they produced lower-cost products during a time when radios and television sets were priced beyond the means of ordinary citizens, and thus helped to create a broad-based consumer market for these items; and they constituted a population of technicians who ensured that people who purchased radio or television sets were able to get them repaired, which heightened consumer confidence in these goods. The innovations of Les Paul and Leo Fender had a comparable influence upon the US market. Following the advent of the solid-body design, the electric guitar market boomed dramatically, effectively creating a new sector of the musical instrument industry in a way that earlier electric guitar models had not.22 Connected by their work on the solid-body, Paul and Fender also provide a useful study in contrasts relative to their positions in the guitar industry. Even after the success of his namesake Gibson guitar, Paul maintained a course of independent tinkering and invention. He reaped financial reward from having a signature instrument, but never entered into the commercial production of instruments in his own right. Fender, by comparison, applied his entrepreneurial spirit toward creating one of the major guitar manufacturing companies of the second half of the 20th century. Tinkering for him, then, became a path towards self-incorporation in the broader business of the electric guitar. Eddie Van Halen and Greg Ginn, in turn, offer similar contrasts. Van Halen’s path was in line with that Waksman: California Noise 693 of Paul, as his tinkering endeavors eventually led to the creation of a valued signature guitar, created in alliance with an established guitar company. For Ginn, it was his radio tinkering that ultimately had the greatest economic importance, and led him toward a form of small-scale entrepre- neurship that was crucial to the broader enterprise of hardcore punk.

Eddie Van Halen cast his tinkering as a form of resistance to the pre-set options of existing electric guitar design. However, his career as an influen- tial guitar virtuoso ensured that his tinkering efforts did not remain isolated acts. Van Halen’s cut-and-paste approach to guitar construction laid the groundwork for a new aesthetic of electric guitar design that had a considerable impact upon the guitar industry in subsequent years. British guitar historian Paul Trynka, for one, has noted the influence of Van Halen’s desire to combine the best features of Gibson and Fender instru- ments: ‘In essence, Van Halen popularized the concept of the “superstrat”, building up his own design from Boogie Body, Fender and Charvel parts’ (Trynka, 1995: 104). Throughout the 1980s, a host of upstart guitar companies such as Jackson/Charvel, Aria, Kramer, and Ibanez turned this ‘superstrat’ design into the staple of their production lines, and such guitars became widely used among hard rock and heavy metal players. Kramer guitars, which featured a newly patented Floyd Rose tremolo device, became the best-selling models in the USA during the 1980s, not least due to the endorsement of Eddie Van Halen. In 1991, Van Halen pushed this process one step further by striking a deal with the Music Man company to produce a guitar carrying his signature line of approval. The Music Man Eddie Van Halen model was a modification of the ‘superstrat’ guitar style that the guitarist had been working with for years. Whereas with the Kramer company Van Halen had endorsed a guitar that was modeled after his homemade design experi- ments but produced without his direct input, with Music Man he had a considerable say over the details of the instrument. As journalist Dan Amrich noted, ‘For a tinkerer like Eddie, creating a production instrument represented the ultimate thrill’ (Guitar World, 1997: 6). It also represented a way to standardize details that he had previously had to obtain through personal effort, and to reap further financial reward. When interviewed about his new guitar, Van Halen went to great pains to assert that it was still effectively his instrument: ‘I wanted it like, if my main guitar gets ripped off and I have to go to the store and borrow one, it will be identical’ (Wheeler, 1991: 89). That Van Halen had displaced his former disdain for ‘off-the-rack’ guitars with a desire to have his own guitar take its rightful place ‘on the rack’ can be taken as a ready indication of the growth in power and prestige that he had experienced over his career. Yet the guitarist also asserted that the goal of his collaboration with Music Man was not sheer mass production; he was attracted to the company in part because they envisioned making only about a thousand instruments per year ‘instead of like other companies that make 25,000 in a month’ (Obrecht, 1991: 70). The scale of production gave Van Halen a feeling that he would 694 Social Studies of Science 34/5 be able to exert a high measure of quality control: ‘That way each guitar will be exactly the way I want it’. More importantly, though, it meant he could enter the field of mass production while still maintaining an aura of personal identification with his namesake instrument. When Edward Van Halen transferred his signature line from Music Man to Peavey in 1995, it was because the former company couldn’t produce enough guitars to keep up with consumer demand. Prospective buyers were kept on waiting lists for the Music Man Eddie Van Halen model that were anywhere from 10- to 18-months long (Guitar World, 1997: 146). Peavey were a larger company that could meet demand for the instrument while still upholding the quality; moreover, they were already involved in producing a line of Edward Van Halen 5150 amplifiers, named after the guitarist’s home recording studio. Whatever his motives for making the switch – and Van Halen insists that money was less at issue than his concern with the kids who wanted to buy a guitar that bore his name – the move to Peavey marked another step in the consolidation of the process whereby Van Halen’s combined status as virtuoso and tinkerer assumed significant commodity value for selling of electric guitars. An intriguing shift in the name of Van Halen’s signature guitars also occurred in the shift of companies, from the Music Man Eddie Van Halen to the Peavey Wolfgang. The latter guitar was named after Van Halen’s young son, who in turn was named after none other than Mozart. Christening his new guitar Wolfgang thus allowed Van Halen to connect the latest offspring of his tinkering efforts to a long tradition of high musical achievement and to a new stage in his own manhood, joining high art, mass production and masculine virility in a new if uneven synthesis.

Regarding technology, Greg Ginn’s principal passion was not for the electric guitar but for ham radio. Like Les Paul and Leo Fender, Ginn had taken to amateur radio at an early age while growing up in Hermosa Beach, a suburban community to the south of Los Angeles. According to Steven Blush (2001), Ginn began tinkering with radio parts as a young boy, and earned a number of patents for his labors, most notably for an antenna tuner (2001: 52). At 13 years old, he began to publish a magazine for amateur ham radio operators called The Novice. Around the same time, he started SST, which in its initial incarnation was known as SST Elec- tronics, a distributor of equipment for radio amateurs. The letters of the company’s name stood for ‘solid-state transmitters’, items that were in- strumental to Ginn’s radio tinkering. Ginn’s initial move towards a sort of DIY activity, then, did not arise out of some act of rebellion against the music industry, but rather followed from a long-standing pattern of suburban male engagement with technol- ogy. Moreover, it was from his role as the head of SST Electronics that Ginn became a leading figure within the suburban wing of Southern California punk. As Jeff McDonald, a member of the band Redd Kross, recalled: ‘Greg Ginn was really into getting a scene going outside of Hollywood, and he was there for anyone who needed help – he was an Waksman: California Noise 695 adult with a job, and he had money, which he made from his own electronics company’ (Mullen & Spitz, 2001: 196). At a moment when almost no bands on the scene were able to make money from touring and recording, SST Electronics provided employment for a number of local musicians, and Ginn was also able to acquire equipment which he would loan out to other aspiring groups. In this regard, Ginn’s development of SST Electronics followed a set of values similar to that described by Susan Douglas in her assessment of ham radio, values that seek ‘to cultivate the right balance in masculine culture between rugged, competitive indi- vidualism and cooperative, mutually beneficial teamwork’ (Douglas, 1999: 334). The conversion of SST Electronics to SST Records happened in 1978. Black Flag had signed a deal with established Southern California inde- pendent record label Bomp, but business problems prevented the label from releasing the band’s first single as had been planned. Ginn observed: We kept waiting and waiting for Bomp. Finally I decided to release [the single] myself, and that’s where SST Records started. From SST Elec- tronics, obviously I knew how to set up a business. But I wasn’t looking forward to putting out records myself, because I felt that I had my hands full between working my business and trying to play. So it was kind of by default: ‘I can do this, so I’ll do it’.23 Despite his initial reluctance, Ginn continued to use SST to release Black Flag’s records following that initial single, and also extended the label’s reach in subsequent years to include a wide range of other bands. Ginn and founding Black Flag bassist Chuck Dukowski managed all the label’s business affairs while hiring a range of other local musicians to assist with the work of getting out the label’s recordings. By the mid-1980s, SST was likely the leading independent record label in the USA, with a roster that included at one time or another the Minutemen, Husker¨ Du,¨ the Meat Puppets, Sonic Youth, and Dinosaur Jr, as well as many other groups that occupied a unique space in the rock music of the decade.24 Just as important as the musical output of the label was the process of releasing records followed by SST, a process marked by a refusal to form partner- ships with larger, more established labels. Mike Watt, bassist with the Minutemen, connected Ginn’s manner of operating to his earlier (and persisting) enthusiasm for amateur radio: ‘Maybe it was Greg’s experience with ham radios, but he believed that if you try, you can get things beyond your little group. He said, “Fuck it, let’s sell records, let’s go on tour. Let’s make the rowdiest music. Let’s not make mersh [commercial] records. Let’s not hide this as a secret. Let’s get out and play”’ (Blush, 2001: 53). As radio had served as a technological frame for an earlier generation of guitar designers, so did it function for Ginn as an entrepreneurial model geared towards circumventing the economy of scale that had developed around rock music during the 1970s. In his recent opus on US independent rock, Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azerrad states that what bound together groups such as Black 696 Social Studies of Science 34/5

Flag and the Minutemen, Husker¨ Du¨ and Minor Threat, the Butthole Surfers and Dinosaur Jr, was less a common musical style than a common ethos. ‘The key principle of American indie rock . . . was the punk ethos of DIY, or do-it-yourself’, claims Azerrad, who continues, ‘The equation was simple: If punk was rebellious and DIY was rebellious, then doing it yourself was punk’ (Azerrad, 2001: 6). Steven Blush, in the first book- length account of hardcore punk, similarly accords DIY a place of promin- ence in distinguishing his subject from earlier variants of punk: ‘Punk gave lip-service to “Do It Yourself” (D.I.Y.) and democratization of the Rock scene, but Hardcore transcended all commercial and corporate concerns’ (Blush, 2001: 275). In staking a claim to DIY, neither author acknowl- edges the history of the term, a gesture characteristic of the amnesia that has informed the punk appropriation of DIY as a term of resistance to dominant music industry practice. Whether the punk version of DIY truly involves the transcendence of corporate concern is debatable in itself. Yet the foregoing should make it clear that at the very least, DIY as it was practiced by Greg Ginn was by no means exclusively rooted in punk’s politics of rebellion and confrontation.25 Rather, Ginn’s pursuits were clearly grounded in a form of technological enthusiasm similar to that followed by young males throughout the 20th century, wherein radio in particular has served as a device for extending the boundaries of suburban masculinity through the medium of sound.

Building Technique

The political definition of skill, like class and gender, is always dynamic and relative. (Cockburn, 1983: 132) Writing about the history of sound reproduction, Jonathan Sterne recently noted the important interrelationship between technology and technique. According to Sterne, technique is a crucial term to any study of technol- ogy, a term that ‘connotes a connection among practice, technology, and instrumental reason, . . . Technique brings mechanics to bear upon spon- taneity’ (Sterne, 2003: 92). When technique is discussed with regard to the electric guitar, it is typically associated with the act of playing the instru- ment. Speed and precision in the playing of notes receive the greatest attention, while resourcefulness or inventiveness in achieving unusual effects occupies a parallel sphere of importance. Some combination of these qualities makes up the classification of the virtuoso guitarist, a figure of uncommon technical mastery. Yet the figure of the virtuoso, and the category of virtuosity, are defined not only by what the virtuoso can do but by what virtuosity represents. Thus does Robert Walser note in his study of heavy metal music that ‘virtuosity – ultimately derived from the Latin root vir (man) – has always been concerned with demonstrating and enacting a particular kind of power and freedom that might be called “potency”’ (Walser, 1993: 76). The masculine bias of technique is embedded in the very language used, as well as the postures and practices that have defined the electric guitar as musical instrument and cultural artifact. That this Waksman: California Noise 697 bias is not inherent in the acquisition of guitar technique but rather a function of its cultural definition does not make it any less powerful as a means of guarding the sexual boundaries of the instrument and its uses. In this context, tinkering needs to be considered an ensemble of techniques that have been applied to the electric guitar. Moreover, it is the set of techniques that most highlights the complex relationship between the status of the instrument as a music-making device and as a techno- logical item. The most skilled tinkerers are themselves virtuosi of a sort, having mastered the subtle process of making technological adjustments to achieve a desired result. With regard to the electric guitar, tinkering efforts have most often been applied to the pursuit of a particular sound. Indeed, as I have suggested elsewhere, it is useful to think of a virtuosity of sound – grounded in the sorts of sound experiments in which electric guitarists engaged through much of the 20th century, laying the groundwork for the subsequent digital ‘revolution’ in music – as a corollary to the more commonly recognized virtuosity of notes, grounded in ‘well-tempered’ approaches to musicianship (Waksman, 2003: 132). Eddie Van Halen has combined these two spheres of virtuosity to notable effect, and in the process became perhaps the most celebrated guitar virtuoso of the late 20th century. Although tinkering conferred a certain down-to-earth quality upon Van Halen’s image, it also added considerably to his mystique as a guitarist of exceptional skill, a mystique compounded by the ‘heroic’ ideals of guitar performance that reside in heavy metal. Greg Ginn belongs to a musical domain that has placed less priority upon virtuosity. Not coincidentally, perhaps, his tinkering was not so directly applied to the guitar as was Van Halen’s. Nonetheless, his involve- ment with radio clearly links him to larger patterns in the instrument’s history. Both guitarists, in turn, are connected to broader trends in the history of technology wherein technical facility has been associated with ‘masculine’ virtues of knowledge, power, and self-determination. Ruth Oldenziel has observed that the enactment of these virtues assumed a distinctive cast during the 20th century, when technical skill became a way for men to negotiate their relationship to the growing influence of consum- erism. In her study of the Fisher Body Craftsman Guild, an organization that for almost 40 years trained young men in the values and skills of engineering craft, Oldenziel claims that the guild was part of a techno- logical world ‘where men design systems and women use them; men engineer bridges and women cross them . . . in short, a world in which men are considered the active producers and women the passive consumers of technology’ (Oldenziel, 2001: 142). The construction of consumerism as a passive ‘feminized’ activity placed a burden upon men to demonstrate their active relationship to objects of consumption. From this vantage point, Van Halen’s stated resistance to ‘off the rack’ guitars can be judged in the same light as Ginn’s impulse to establish his own record label. Both acts arise from an impulse to position the male self as producer rather than consumer. That these acts also had an entrepre- neurial dimension suggests that male technical skill, even when used to 698 Social Studies of Science 34/5 stage resistance to structures of consumerism, is ultimately tied to the larger systems of production. Such insights shouldn’t allow us to efface the real differences in scale between the efforts of Van Halen and those of Ginn. They should remind us, however, that technological tinkering is a remarkably flexible activity that has had profound, and often unacknowl- edged, effects upon the uses of the electric guitar and the making of popular music.

Notes 1. How technology has affected listening is addressed in several of the papers in the current special issue, most notably in the contributions by Perlman (2004) on the culture of audiophiles and Horning (2004) on the work of audio engineers. See also Pinch & Trocco (2002) on the Moog synthesizer. For a fascinating new history of sound technologies, which places considerable emphasis upon the interplay of listening and technology, see Sterne (2003). 2. The connection between masculinity and technology has received increasing comment in recent years. See Oldenziel (1999), Horowitz (2001), Wajcman (1991), and Cockburn (1983). I have also been influenced by Susan Douglas’s (1987, 1999) analysis of masculinity and technological tinkering in the sphere of radio, which will be discussed at greater length in ensuing pages. 3. Statements to this effect have been made by many commentators on the guitarist, though perhaps the most insightful comes from scholar Robert Walser (1993), who noted that Van Halen’s emergence as guitar hero marked the culmination of a process whereby ‘the electric guitar acquired the capabilities of the premier virtuosic instruments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the power and speed of the organ, the flexibility and nuance of the violin’ (1993: 68–69). I have analyzed Van Halen’s status as noted guitar virtuoso in ‘Into the Arena: Edward Van Halen and the Cultural Contradictions of the Guitar Hero’ (Waksman, 2001), portions of which have been adapted for the present paper. 4. For a more detailed consideration of the intersecting paths of these figures, see Waksman (1999). Another figure worthy of inclusion in this grouping, though one whose work was based not in California but in Nashville, TN, is Chet Atkins, a guitarist who blended musical and technological pursuits in a manner very much akin to Les Paul. 5. My investigation of Van Halen and Ginn in the ensuing pages is drawn from a combination of published interviews and profiles in popular magazines, and secondary sources. I have not had occasion to interview either guitarist. My goal is to situate their work as tinkering guitarists within the broader terms of discourse through which their careers have been represented; and as such, the reliance on published commentary is a deliberate methodological choice. Moreover, these sources have been little used by scholars, with the notable exception of Robert Walser’s previously cited work on Van Halen. Nonetheless, there are certain questions about their respective efforts that are not fully addressed in the published record, such as when Van Halen began his tinkering, or the particular technical details of Greg Ginn’s radio tinkering. I have chosen to leave these questions for further research, to be addressed in the larger study from which this paper is drawn. 6. Two papers from Possible Dreams (Wright, 1992) are particularly useful in elaborating upon the activities and ideologies associated with technological enthusiasm. Joseph Corn’s (1992) ‘Educating the Enthusiast: Print and the Popularization of Technical Knowledge’ explores the role of publications like Popular Mechanics in the proliferation of such attitudes. Meanwhile, Susan Douglas’s (1992) ‘Audio Outlaws: Radio and Phonograph Enthusiasts’ analyzes the ways in which various stages of music-related technology have figured into the cultivation of technological enthusiasm. Both pieces Waksman: California Noise 699

lay considerable emphasis upon the male-oriented nature of enthusiasts’ activities, a point on which I will expand in the course of this discussion. 7. Douglas’s (1987) earlier work on radio, from which this consideration of amateur radio is drawn, only covers the period from 1899–1922. However, she has brought her work on radio up to date in Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (1999). See especially the chapter, ‘Why Ham Radio Matters’ (1999: 328–46), in which she details the efforts of amateur radio operators from the early 20th century up to the 1990s. 8. Fender’s earliest solid-body instrument, the Broadcaster (later renamed the Telecaster), was criticized in some quarters for its plain, workmanlike appearance. 9. In his study of Bakelite, Bijker (1987: 170) similarly argues that scientists who were too strictly included in what he calls the ‘celluloid frame’ could not resolve a key problem in the development of a plastic substance suitable for manufacturing. The chemist who successfully resolved this dilemma, Baekeland, did so in part because he was able to draw upon the resources gained from a different frame, that of electrochemical engineering. 10. The pickup is, essentially, the device that makes an electric guitar ‘electric’. It is constructed from a series of six magnetic poles – one for each string – wrapped in coils of wire. The poles receive vibration from the strings, and the wire transmits the vibration to the circuits that convert it into sound. Pickups have been the source of much experimentation in the history of the electric guitar – they figured significantly in the efforts of Eddie Van Halen, as we shall see – but there are two basic designs: a single coil pickup, which features one series of six poles; and a double coil or ‘humbucker’, which features two sets of six poles each. The distinction between the two will be explained over the course of this paper. 11. James Kraft (1996: 103) discusses the influx of musicians to Los Angeles during the 1930s, when the city became, in his words, ‘oriented toward entertainment’. The trends he discusses were further intensified after World War II. 12. For a historical account of the rise of the suburbs in the USA, and the dominant position of California as a site of suburban development in the years surrounding World War II and thereafter, see Jackson (1985), especially 246–71. 13. Robert Walser’s extended analysis of ‘Eruption’, and of the more general appropriation of classical music by heavy metal guitarists, remains the best work on the subject. See Walser (1993: 68–75). 14. The most thorough (though by no means exhaustive) published accounts of the Los Angeles scene are Mullen & Spitz (2001) and Mullen et al. (2002). Detailed consideration of Southern California punk is also featured in Azerrad (2001) and Blush (2001). The recent publication date of all these books suggests the extent to which the significance of the Southern California scene has been re-evaluated of late. 15. Hardcore’s status as punk ‘renewal’ is far from uncontested. Many critics and musicians have understood hardcore not to have renewed so much as reduced the possibilities that inhere in punk. This was especially the case after audience behavior at punk shows became quite violent, and when audiences became increasingly demanding of a ‘louder faster’ version of punk that left little room for variation or subtlety. Black Flag were caught up in these conflicts, and would become the object of much controversy as their sound shifted away from the main hardcore style in the mid-1980s. 16. One of the longest running USA publications devoted to popular music, Hit Parader had changed the focus of its format that year so that it covered hard rock and heavy metal almost exclusively. Heavy metal in 1982 was in the early phases of a commercial renascence following its peak and decline in the previous decade, and the magazine’s editors seem to have made a quick decision to jump on the bandwagon. Over the next several years, Hit Parader would be one of the most widely read USA publications devoted to heavy metal. 17. Much of the sound of a pickup depends upon the tightness and the evenness with which the wire coils are wrapped around the magnetic poles. Tighter coils allow for stronger conducting qualities, which in turn create an amplified signal of greater strength and with a better balance of tonal properties. Older pickups such as the 700 Social Studies of Science 34/5

Gibson P.A.F. alluded to in Van Halen’s description were often wound with thicker wire than is used in contemporary models, which placed limits upon the density of the coil. Having a pickup rewound can thus significantly affect the quality of the sound that it produces. In a separate interview, Van Halen also mentions that after winding his pickups, he dips them in a particular type of wax to encase them; this cuts down the vibration of the coil and thus reduces feedback (Obrecht, 1980: 82). 18. The Variac autotransformer can be used to regulate the voltage of any electrical device that operates with AC current. Van Halen used the Variac to overload his amplifier at 140 V, which would push the tubes to a point of extreme saturation and generate a tone with maximum distortion. 19. Paul Theberge’´ s (2004) paper in this special issue argues that this emphasis upon the uniqueness of a given studio’s sound was challenged by the proliferation of technologies such as electronic reverb that took a sonic effect that was situated in a specific space and converted it into something reproducible anywhere. 20. The contents of both records can be found on the CD compilation, The First Four Years (Black Flag, 1983), compiled by Ginn. 21. The issue of violence and audience behavior was the dominant theme in the press coverage of Black Flag during the band’s early years. Shows in the Los Angeles area were routinely stormed by the police in the late 1970s and early 1980s; although the evidence is rather clear that the police were waging something of a war on punk and on Black Flag during these years, it is also clear that punk audiences were incorporating violence into their styles of dancing and interacting to an unprecedented degree. When questioned, Ginn deflected any suggestion that Black Flag should try to regulate the actions of its audience by expressing concern over the power relations between band and fans: ‘We don’t want to get on stage and be authority figures. . . . We want to get up on stage and create an atmosphere where people can think for themselves. They’re not always going to do the right thing’ (Black Flag, 1987: 61). 22. If anything, the electronic synthesizer industry was even more built upon the efforts of tinkerers, as is well demonstrated by Pinch & Trocco (2002). Both of the key early architects of the synthesizer, Robert Moog and Donald Buchla, began their technological pursuits as tinkerers; and Moog’s initial factory was essentially an expansion of his own workshop. 23. Babcock, Jay (2001) ‘A 12-Step Program in Self-Reliance: How L.A.’s Hardcore Pioneers Made It Through Their Early Years,’ < www.jaybabcock.com/ blackflagweekly.html > (originally published in the L.A. Weekly). 24. For a more thorough account of SST’s output and its importance in the fostering of a unique ‘independent’ rock aesthetic in the 1980s, see the three-part history of the label by Dave Lang in the online music journal, Perfect Sound Forever. Lang suggests that SST ‘was almost like the Sun or Chess of its era: nearly every band of its day that went on to make a splash in the ’90s, or at least greatly influenced the music of the ’90s, was at one time on their label’. Lang (1998) ‘The SST Records Story, Part 3,’ Perfect Sound Forever (July), < www.furious.com/perfect/sst3.html > . 25. One might note in this regard that punk has hardly been the only province of popular music to lay claim to a DIY ethos. For instance, Timothy Taylor (2001) observes the cultivation of DIY on the fringes of the techno scene, where a preference for ‘cheap and old equipment’ is tied to a desire to make music technologies as widely available as possible (2001: 162–64). Meanwhile, Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco’s history of the Moog synthesizer (2002) is full of anecdotes about the DIY-style pursuits of the many figures who contributed to analog synthesizer design.

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Steve Waksman is Assistant Professor of Music and American Studies at Smith College. He is the author of Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience, and has published essays on the guitar and popular music in The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar and the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. Currently, he is writing a cultural history of heavy metal and punk rock, tentatively titled The Noise of Youth: Rethinking Rock through the Metal/Punk Continuum.

Address: Department of Music, Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063, USA; fax: +1 413 585 3180; email: [email protected]