Friday, 17 April 2015

I Don’t Need No Marshall


I agree with Slash that “there’s no lying with an acoustic guitar,” but I’m not quite convinced that all the songs on Guitar World’s 25 Greatest Acoustic Songs in Hard Rock share an ‘elemental simplicity.”

Stairway To Heaven doesn’t strike me as simple.  Sparse, maybe – at the beginning – but not cowboy chord, sing-around-the-campfire simple.  Anyway, it doesn’t stay very acoustic for long.

The same could be said for More Than A Feeling, or Pinball Wizard, or Feel Like Making Love.  I mean, in the last case, do you even remember the acoustic guitar, or do you just think about the rhythmic, power chord hook in the chorus?

Dust In The Wind, Wanted Dead or Alive – ok, got it.  These are great songs built around an acoustic guitar.  But many of the songs listed – while being fantastic tunes – don’t really jump out at you as being acoustic guitar songs.  Rather, they are hard rock songs that happen to have acoustic guitar in them.

Speaking of hard rock, while Extreme might have been a hard rock band, More Than Words, as terrific as it is, sure isn’t a hard rock song.

By the way, are we sure Eddie Van Halen even owned and acoustic guitar?

No comments:

Post a Comment