{"id":4979,"date":"2009-07-03T11:07:46","date_gmt":"2009-07-03T16:07:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4979"},"modified":"2009-07-03T11:25:41","modified_gmt":"2009-07-03T16:25:41","slug":"hot-but-underutilized-gear-friday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4979","title":{"rendered":"Hot-But-Underutilized Gear Friday"},"content":{"rendered":"

This isn’t exactly news; it’s almost three years old in fact.\u00a0 But I just heard about it the other day, as a couple of guys from Kansas (who knew they were still together?) talked about it on the KQ Morning Show; Billie Joe Armstrong has an endorsement deal with Gibson for the reissued Les Paul Junior<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Well, the big news in signature guitars last week\u00a0[in 2006]\u00a0was Gibson\u2019s announcement of their new Billie Joe Armstrong Signature Les Paul Junior \u2013 an apparently accurate reproduction of the Green Day front-man\u2019s original 1956 LP Junior affectionately known as \u201cFloyd.\u201d (Hehe, you can\u2019t make this stuff up!)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, I have nothing against Green Day; truth be told, I like some of their stuff.\u00a0 Dookie <\/em>is a great rock ‘n roll record; Nimrod <\/em>was that plus all sorts of signs that the band wasn’t just a bunch of nutslap punks without a brain; American Idiot <\/em>proved that they were <\/em>smart-ish nutslap punks with delusions of intellectual grandeur but who gave us the everlasting gift of the\u00a0most indelible mental map of the 2000’s liberal, via the spectacle of a bunch of pot-addled barflies yammering about how stupid everyone between the Sierra Madre and the Hudson were; watching bass player Mike Dirndt trying to explain his higher state of awareness through his chiba-monkey’s stammer was one of the better bits of found comedy back in 2006, in those days before Minnesota Progressive Project<\/em>.\u00a0 Politics aside, they have an undeniable way with a hook.<\/p>\n

But one thing they’re not – with the arguable exception of drummer Frank “Tre Cool” Wright – is really, really great musicians.<\/p>\n

Billie Joe Armstrong is a serviceable guitar player at best.\u00a0 There’s nothing wrong with that; in a power trio (a guitar\/bass\/drums band, like Green Day), holding down the rhythm is the most important part of the job.\u00a0 Not only is not everyone an Eddie Van Halen or a Steve Vai or a Richard Thompson – it wouldn’t be a good thing if everyone were.\u00a0 There’ve been many excellent guitar players who don’t set the fretboard on fire with solo pyrotechnics; Tom Petty, Joey Ramone,\u00a0Joe Grushecky, John Lennon, Tom Fogerty,\u00a0Neil Finn, Colin Hay, Paul Stanley, Chrissy Hynde, Joe Strummer – all were perfectly capable guitar players who held down an important place in their various bands, playing rhythm.\u00a0 All of them are perfectly respectable guitarists.\u00a0 None of them are renowned as great guitarists, <\/em>although all of them are good musicians<\/em> in the same way a second violinist in a string quartet might not get the virtuoso solo nod, but still has to hold down a vital part in the ensemble.<\/p>\n

But it used to be that getting a guitar named after you took years of diligent practice and a level of technical accomplishment well above the merely capable.\u00a0 Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Pete Townsend – they <\/em>got guitars named after them.<\/p>\n

As to the Les Paul Junior?\u00a0 It’s a single-pickup solid-body single-cutaway; the necks always struck me as hopelessly thick and clunky, and the inflexibility of the one-pickup electronics – one volulme pot, one tone pot, and that’s it – always drove me nuts (although I suppose if you were playing through a modeling amp, like a LineSix, it wouldn’t be such a problem).\u00a0 Punk rockers loved ’em; Paul Westerberg (a much better guitar player than Armstrong_) played ’em, among many others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This isn’t exactly news; it’s almost three years old in fact.\u00a0 But I just heard about it the other day, as a couple of guys from Kansas (who knew they were still together?) talked about it on the KQ Morning Show; Billie Joe Armstrong has an endorsement deal with Gibson for the reissued Les Paul […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hot-gear-friday","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4979\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}