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

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 tinkering 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 differences 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).

Load more