Happy Birthday, Bruce Watson

Sometimes it’s the footnotes in music history that are the most fun.

Today is Bruce Watson’s 48th birthday.

“Bruce who?”

Look, people – aren’t you the same folks who asked “Tony who?” when I celebrated Tony Butler’s birthday last month?  C’mon.  Do I have to do all the work here?

Bruce Watson, people.  The second guitarist of Scotland’s greatest rock band, Big Country.

Unless you’re a huge Scottish-rock buff, you probably have only the vaguest idea of who Watson is, much less why he mattered (or, for that matter, that none of the members of Big Country, the most Scottish band in rock, where actually born in Scotland; Watson hails originally from Timmins, Ontario).  And he’s only tenuously in the business anymore; word has it he works as a materials tester in a shipyard.

But he certainly mattered.

Going back to the dawn of the rock and roll era, the dominant style on the electric guitar was one variety or another of amped-up blues or folk style; from Jim Burton’s country-blues twang to Jimmy Page’s nordic-blues stomp to George Harrison’s pop reading to Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic blues noodling to Eric Clapton’s clean, surgical…um, blues.  Most of the major guitarists, and styles of guitarists, were one kind of take-off or another on the blues, from Eddie Van Halen’s explosive, technocratic virtuosity to Ted Nugent’s obnoxious flailing to Lindsay Buckingham’s Harrison-on-Quaalude vibe to…

…well, fill in your favorite.  And of course there were exceptions.  But that’s what they were – outliers from the norm.

Somewhere in the seventies – maybe going back as far as Lou Reed – a new approach started burbling up, using the electric guitar less as a prime, driving motif as in the blues, and more as atmosphere; it relied (on its surface) less on sheer technical chops and power, and more on sound, interaction, and sound processing.  While blues guitar was “classical”, the newer style was…impressionistic?

I’ll leave the similes to the professionals.

But somewhere in there, about the time I was first picking up the instrument, guitarists like Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine (of Television) started turning guitar parts into dense, complexly-interwoven textures more than driving themes, solos and rhythm tracks.  The Edge (of U2) and Pete Burchill (of Simple Minds) made their stomp-boxes – the delay, chorus, flange, distortion and other special effects lines – perhaps the focus of their styles, rather than decoration on the virtuosity of their finger work.

And Adamson and Watson wound the two together as tightly as any couple of guitarists ever have.

Where electric guitarists had traditionally strummed or picked their rhythm parts – or, like Pete Townsend or Malcolm Young, bashed them out with primal aggression – Adamson and Watson patiently built simple patterns, one-and-two-string figures that complemented and wove in and out through each other.  They layered them using ingenious, but low-key, special effects – using the “E-Bow” electronic tone device to simulate Scots fiddles, pushing and equalizing their amps to imitate bagpipes.  And that was just the recognizable stuff; Adamson and Watson tweaked their guitar/effect/amp chains to coax sounds that didn’t sound like anything, but felt like something – like dread, winter, anger, longing…

…oh, how do you explain tone?  You don’t.  You just play it, and hope it comes across. And it did for me, surely; when Big Country’s The Crossing came out during my sophomore year of college, I spent days curled up in my dorm, trying to figure out what those guys were doing.

So happy birthday, Bruce Watson.  And thanks – not only for the years of inspiration, but for all the puzzles I’m still working on.