Up until I was 9 years old I was only willing to recognize two categories of guitar players:
1. This guy:
and
2. Everybody who wasn’t that guy.
1982 came along and introduced me to a song entitled Stray Cat Strut. My world changed. My 2 categories of guitar players turned into 3.
1. This guy:
2. This guy, too:
3. Everybody who wasn’t those guys.
Soon enough more influences would enter the picture but Brian Setzer
was the first guitar player to come along and make me realize that no Spaceman is an island. After getting sick of tirelessly waiting for then awesome local radio station WLOL to play Stray Cat Strut I went to K-Mart and burned $7.99 of my hard earned Christmas money on Built For Speed, the LP that contained the tune. $7.99 was some serious cash for me to drop on a record but if it meant having the privilege of listening to Stray Cat Strut whenever I damn well wanted to then so be it. As fate would have it I ended up loving every single track on the album and became obsessed with the sound of the guitar and the extremely melodic, colorful riffs he was playing. There was also the guitar itself in a very small live photo of Brian on the back of the album cover: a sweet looking big phat orange Gretsch. It reminded me of something from Happy Days. And I wanted one, big time. This was all a few years before I started guitar lessons or even knew how to play so I had to settle for playing along with the record on my sister’s tennis racket. It would be another 23 years before I’d own my first Gretsch, but it happened. I came home from work one day to a new brown sunburst Electromatic lounging on the davenport, a surprise Christmas present from the wifey – how awesome is that? On a scale from 1 to 10 that’s about a 700.
Back cover of Rant N’ Rave LP. Gretsch guitar porn that I ogled for hours on end.
I digress. Back to a long time ago: The next Stray Cats record Rant Rant ‘N Rave with the Stray Cats came out the following year. I bought it with zero hesitation. Actually I think my hesitation was less than zero. It was in the negatives. Mom couldn’t drive home fast enough for me to plop that album on the turntable. Just like Built for Speed every single track on the album took up permanent residence in my brain. I loved how gritty and massive the guitar always sounded, it was like listening to a big dirty sexy orchestra. Not only was Rant filled with 100% killer tracks, but it was crammed with awesome artwork. The inner album sleeve was full of cool, colorful stuff to look at and the back of the album cover featured a nice big photo of the band with their instruments… I now had a much better view of that Happy Days guitar. I could actually smell that guitar through that photo. Like Wayne admiring the Strat in the music store window: Someday it will be mine….
The minimal guitar solo from I Won’t Stand in Your Way off of Rant ‘N Rave instantly became my favorite non-Ace Frehley guitar solo and still is today. I would listen to it over… and over… and over… and still do now whenever it pops up. Why that one? I have no idea. Why does anyone like what they like? I’ve never really been one to invest the time and patience it takes to learn other player’s guitar parts note-for-note but have attempted to learn it every couple of years only to end up frustrated and quit like a Quitty McQuitterton. It wasn’t technically difficult, it just sounded like a few things were always missing and I couldn’t figure out what. It had been a few years since I last tried to figure it out and last week after an inspirational first viewing of their Rumble In Brixton DVD I decided it was time to try and tackle it again, and this time I was going to get it right once and for all.
It’s a very simple solo, but sometimes simple is incredibly deceiving: I searched out other people’s interpretations of the tune on the internets for some pointers and the dozen or so I came across were in the right neighborhood but inaccurate. If it’s so “simple” then why can’t anyone seem to get it right?! I checked out the original music video on the YouTubes and thankfully when the solo came along it showed him guitar-syncing to it. As I was watching I realized that his guitar was tuned down to Eb, not the standard E that most guitarists play in. Ah HA! So THAT’S why figuring it out always seemed so counterintuitive. To those who don’t play guitar, trying to figure out an intricate Eb-tuned guitar part on a guitar tuned to E is like switching a few letter keys around on your computer keyboard. Everything would kind of be there but you’d have to really focus on it. It would feel really weird and have no flow.
After sifting through all of the botched E-tuning interpretations on the internet I felt it was my duty as a fan of that solo to provide both myself and the internets with an accurate transcription. I’m sure the correct version is probably available somewhere else out there but I felt like after all these years of listening to it that I owed it to myself to figure it out on my own. Between watching the positions of his hands in the YouTube video and looping the shit out of the mp3 on my computer I am proud to say that I’ve finally cracked the code. Even if only one person out there trying to learn that solo stumbles upon this page years from now, that’s one less person learning from incorrect interpretations of it. If that one person is you, hello, one person.
I transcribed it in E just to make it a lot less confusing to read (it’s safe to assume 99% of electric guitars out there are tuned to E). I am by no means Mr. Music Theory – I play by ear first and foremost – so cosmetically some things may not look correct, but mathematically it’s all there. If’fn you’re playing along with the tune you’ll have to tune to Eb or shit’s gonna get ugly real quick. Either way the fingerings remain the same. I posted the music video at the bottom of this post for reference. Brian, Lee, and Slim Jim look like they’re 15 years old. The video is pretty cheesy but cut them some slack, it was the early 80s. I set the video to automatically start around the 2 minute mark where the melodic guitar solo glory ensues. I can now sleep at night and cross learning this super influential cozy warm blanket of guitar notes off of my bucket list. *exhale* Without further ado, here it is.
It still blows my mind that he cranked out all of that amazing guitar work when he was in his early 20’s. Jerk.
