Electric Guitar

The mass adulation of a few leading guitar players in the 1960s was a measure of the size of audience for the music and the market for the instruments. It also marked a return to an older tradition in the popular culture of the guitar, when the solitary bluesman was the center of attention.

Several English musicians, including Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, had spearheaded a blues revival in the early 1960s. This invigorated both blues and pop music and also created a new wave of guitar heroes who reflected some of the characteristics of the blues musicians who inspired them: outlaws and outcasts who travelled from place to place living on their wits and enjoying the rewards of their virtuosity on the guitar. The bluesman was a special person, either gifted or damned by the Gods, whose freedom and powers (especially over women) were highly valued in the popular culture of the 1960s. Jimi Hendrix was the greatest of all the guitar heroes; his unequalled virtuosity on the instrument was only matched by the excesses of his lifestyle which were also embodied in his songs.

The steady advance of the technology of electric guitars was centered on two main goals: increasing the volume and finding ever more electronic effects. In the 1960s amplifiers were made larger and more efficient and the separate amplifier unit and speaker boxes replaced the old amplifiers which had electronics and speakers in the same box. The banks of Marshall 4X12 speaker units became the backdrop for the typical rock 'n' roll performance. More complicated devices were used to manipulate electronic feedback and create new sounds. Guitar players could surround themselves with effects boxes, such as "fuzz" and "wah wah," that were operated by foot switches. The sound of psychedelic music of the 1960s was essentially the sound of controlled feedback from the electric guitar.

The increasing popularity of other methods of manipulating electronic sounds in the 1970s, such as the Moog synthesizer and electric organ, threatened to end the dominance of the electric guitar in popular music. But there were several sub genres of rock 'n' roll that were still completely dominated by its sound: heavy metal which made a cult of loudness and made futuristic guitars the center of theatrical stage shows; and punk which returned to the basic guitar sound of early rock 'n' roll. Punk musicians made a virtue out of amateurism in their rejection of the commercialization of pop music and the elevation of guitar virtuosos. They encouraged everybody to pick up a guitar and advised the aspiring musician that only a few chords needed to be mastered before forming a band. On the other hand, advocates of heavy metal wanted to be transported to an imaginary world of outlandish stage shows, outrageous costumes and unusual guitar shapes. Both groups of musicians used exactly the same equipment, but to different ends.

Although each decade after the 1960s produced an "alternative" music to rock 'n' roll, the electric guitar's ubiquitous presence in popular music was not challenged. Disco (1970s) and rap (1980s) still relied on the supple rhythm lines of the electric bass. The guitar based rock band continued to dominate both professional and amateur music in the 1990s, ensuring that the instrument will prosper into the twenty-first century.

St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, 2002 Gale Group.