I ran into a really unpleasant person yesterday at a gig in Dundee who seems to think the world is divided into 'lead' guitar players, and 'rhythm' guitar players. I'm generally nice to everyone, but the unreal level of ignorance he wanted to inflict on my band was so extreme that I was appalled. Horrified. And I fired back. And that, ladies and gents, never happens. Until Yesterday.
Here's the deal. If you're a musician in a band and you play the guitar, you can't get away with being one or the other, you've got to be both. And where most people get lost is that they forget that our most important job is supporting the groove of the tunes. That means you need to play rhythm. And as everyone in my band knows, we're all in the rhythm section. It's the engine room, what gets people dancing. It's what you get paid for. Being able to blow a solo over changes isn't music if that's all you can do. It's self-indulgence, period, the end.
So, while he may break the guitar world into two camps, lead and rhythm, I break the world down differently- into musicians and instrument owners. Just because you own an instrument doesn't mean you're a musician. Anyone can learn to play the guitar fast, that's just muscle memory. But to be able to engage in a meaningful musical conversation on stage with other musicians and hold an audience's attention? That takes a musician.
Gimme musicians to play with any day of the week.
You, sir, are uninformed, misguided and offensive to those of us that work hard at our craft.
