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Hey, it's Alan. And I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music. Early and ad free on Amazon music included with Prime. Once upon a time, not that long ago, all music was expected to sound clean and clear like this. Let's hear that again. Pure, accurate, right in tune. It's a lovely sound, but then again, so is this. Interesting though. Dirty, distorted, filled with harmonics and overtones and various amounts of feedback. It's a far cry from the first example, but it's also the greatest effect ever applied to the electric guitar. And today we're cool with both. But why? That sound of a fuzzed up guitar was once considered undesirable, irritating, excruciating noise. Today, though, such distortion is almost universally thought to be a thing of beauty and is very much part of what we love about making and listening to music. So how did we get from. To? Let's find out.
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This is the ongoing history of New Music podcast with Alan Cross.
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Let's begin with a song that features many different colors of distortion. The White Stripes with Seven Nation army featuring all kinds of different distortion rung from a single guitar. The riff was created by running a K hollow body guitar from the early 1960s equipped with a single pickup into a Digitech Whammy pedal which shifted the notes Jack White played down an entire octave. He later plays the same seven notes on the same guitar with a slide without the pitch shifting, but run through an effects pedal called a Big Muff Pie with the sustain turned almost all the way up. From there, the single went to a Sears Silvertone amplifier dating from the mid-1960s, set with a little extra bass and treble and the result is distorted tones that sound awesome. Hello again, I'm Alan Cross and there will be lots of distortion on this program. How did something that was once considered noise turn into something beautiful? Like I said at the top, it wasn't all that long ago that distortion was unwanted and unwelcome. Remember when Marty tortured his future dad with some uncredited Eddie Van Halen in Back to the Future?
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Who are you? Silence, Earthling.
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That scene was set in 1955, even before distortion was a thing in modern music. But hold on, let's back up. We need to define exactly what we're talking about. Distortion is also known as overdrive. Basically, it means you've pushed the electrical signal past what the circuitry and the amplifier can handle. It's too loud, too powerful, and this causes the signal to clip, which means the peaks and troughs of the signal are cut off. This adds all kinds of new characteristics to the signal, including overtone sustain and compression. Distortion results from extreme overdrive. Fuzz is a special type of distortion that was discovered when amplification equipment malfunctioned or was damaged. When fuzz tones were discovered, a lot of time and effort were put into creating add on electronic devices that could summon fuzz on command. But we'll get to that. We also need to talk about feedback. This is when you take a signal and run it back into the original input of a circuit. In other words, the signal feeds back into itself in its untamed form. Feedback manifests as those sharp, high pitched squeals and shrieks from a PA system and amplifier. But feedback can also be harnessed to create a special type of distortion. We'll return to that too. None of these sounds existed before the invention of the electric guitar and amplifier. And the beauty of distortion was discovered by accident. Early amplifiers were fragile things and frankly, not very good. It was easy for them to go out of whack and start producing sounds that weren't clean and pure electric. Bluesmen as far back as the 1940s began to use distorted guitar sounds to add some extra rawness to their playing. One of the very first people to experiment with distortion was Junior Barnard, A country swing guitarist from Oklahoma who played with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. In 1945, he plugged an early electric guitar, an epiphone Emperor Archtop, to be specific, into a tiny vacuum tube powered amp. And then basically turned everything up to 11. This pushed the guitar, its pickup and the amp beyond their design limits. And every step of the way, the signal took on a gritty, growly sound. Here's an example. This is from a 1946 recording called Roly Poly. The distortion effect is subtle, but it's definitely there. From Junior Barnard, we move to gory Carter in 1949. You can hear the fuzz in his guitar. In fact, this sounds a little like what Chuck Berry would do half a decade later. And even though rock and roll still hadn't been invented yet, the song is still called Rock Away. Both the Gory Carter and Junior Barnard examples came from deliberate attempts to make the guitar sound more raw. But then, in 1951, a happy accident. Sometime around March 1, 1951, Ike Turner, future husband of Tina, was driving with his band along Highway 61 on their way to a recording session in Memphis, Tennessee. Some of their gear was being hauled on the roof of the station wagon. And somehow the guitar amp belonging to Willie Kitzert was damaged. One version of the story says it fell off the car somewhere around mile marker 200. Another says that somebody dropped it from the trunk when the car pulled over because of a flat tire. Whatever happened, when the band arrived at the studio, they found that the speaker cone had burst. With no money or no time to repair it, Some newspaper was wadded up and jammed into the enclosure to hold things in place. And that worked well enough. And the sound that came out of this amp was pretty cool. They used the amp to record a song called Rocket 88. And this was released under the name Jackie Branston and the Kings of Rhythm. Now listen carefully and you can hear the fuzzed up guitar played by Willie Kizart.
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You women have heard of Jalopy's, you've heard the noise they make but let me rent a deuce my new Rocket 88 Dance it straight just one way Everybody likes my Rocket 88 Baby, we'll ride in style Moving all along
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Is that the first rock and roll song? Maybe if we use guitar distortion as our guideline. That was 1951. Over the next few years, more guitarists experimented with trying to get that warm, fuzzy sound. This is Pat Hare playing on a 1954 song called I'm Gonna Murder My Baby, on which he says he turned the volume knobs all the way to the right to get the amp to.
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Good morning, judge, and your jury, too. I got a few things that I'd like to say to you now.
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This is Chuck Berry and Maybelline from 1955.
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Maybelline, why can't you be true? Oh, Maybelline, why can't you be true? You done started doing the things you used to do.
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And for 1956, this is Paul Burleson. He was playing with the Johnny Burnett Trio. He discovered that if he dislodged one of the tubes in his amp, something that he did to try to replicate the sound from a damaged amplifier, he ended up with this sound for a song called the Train Kept a rollin.
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I call the train I'm better She was a Hester and a real gold name she was printed from New York City and we fucked on down that old fair lane with a heat Then
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we get to link Ray in 1958, messing around with a damaged amplifier. He found a sound that he just loved. Experimenting a little more, he started poking holes in the speaker cones of his amp to make them sound all raspy. The result was an instrumental called Rumble. This song was so sinister for its day that it was banned. By some radio stations, believing that it encouraged not just juvenile delinquency, but gang fights. The sound link Ray got out of his guitar was hugely influential, and guitarists all over the world began looking for ways to duplicate it. Meanwhile, though, something weird happened. During a recording session in Nashville, country star Marty Robbins had a guitarist named Grady Martin. In late 1960, Grady was called in to lay down some guitar parts. On a song called Don't Worry, he plugged in a baritone guitar directly into the recording console. Now, it just so happened that he plugged into a channel that had a faulty preamplifier. Instead of reproducing a nice, clean sound, it was all fuzzy. It turned out that the manufacturer of the console had been in the process of moving operations from New York to California, and some faulty transistors and transformers had been used in the manufacture of this particular mixing desk. Marty Robbins hated the sound, but Grady thought it was cool. And so did producer Owen Bradley and so did studio engineer Glenn Snoddy. Overruled. Grady's part was left in, and it sounded like this.
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Love can't be explained, can't be controlled. One day it's one, Next day it's cold.
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The bad transformer was eventually located, but no one wanted to touch it because that sound was so cool, and nobody knew how it was actually making that sound. And when Don't Worry became a hit in the spring of 1961, Marty and Grady started getting calls from other artists. How'd you do that? And the answer was, we don't know. But as long as that malfunction was working in his favor, Grady recorded a song on his own called the Fuzz. When that song came came out, Gibson Guitars made a call asking if there was any way Grady had some gear that could conjure up that fuzzy sound on demand. No, not really, he said. But with help from engineer Glenn Snoddy and a TV engineer named Revis Hobbs, they came up with a circuit that seemed to do the trick. They devised a foot pedal, which meant that a guitarist only needs stomp on it to call up the sound. The prototype was shown off to Gibson, and they immediately bought in. And in 1962, they started selling the first ever fuzz pedal, a gizmo that could carefully and deliberately distort the sound of an electric guitar. And they called it the Maestro fuzz tone. Here's the pitch. It's mellow, it's raucous, it's tender, it's raw. It's the maestro fuzz tone. You have to hear this completely different sound effect for the guitar to believe it. They even distributed a demo record to prospective customers.
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It's mellow, it's raucous, it's tender, it's raw. It's the maestro fuzz tone. You have to hear this completely different sound effect for the guitar to believe it. It opens a whole new world of music for you instantly. With fuzz Tone, you can create guitar sounds never before heard. Yes, Maestro fuzz tone, an exciting new accessory which fits any guitar amplifier, creates unbelievable sounds never before played on the guitar. Organ like tones, mellow woodwinds and whispering reeds, booming brass and bell, clear horns, plus many, many more. And combined with reverberation, tremolo and vibrato, it expands even further the range of startling effects. Now let's listen to some of the unbelievable effects that you can create with the fuzz tone. First, let's use an electric bass. This is a sousaphone effect.
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Now, we'll come back to the fuzz tone in just a second, but first we have to veer off into the world of feedback. This is where we meet Robert Ashley, an American experimental musician and composer who was always looking for different sounds. In 1964, he released Something called the Wolfman, which was a treated musical composition that was droney and full of feedback that was designed to play through speakers at the same time he was playing live on stage. As you'll hear in just a second. It's a pretty tough listen, but it's believed that this was the first time anyone harnessed feedback to create a musical landscape. It was simple feedback through a vocal mic placed in the wrong but very right position. This still sounds weird today. Imagine how it sounded in 1964. Okay, that's, that's, that's probably plenty, but you get the idea. Around the same time, the Beatles entered Abbey Road Studios for another recording session with producer George Martin. On October 18, 1964, the band began messing around with bits of a song that John Lennon kept playing. But it's after they got the basic structure down that things turned interesting. The discovery began when Paul McCartney picked a string on his bass, apropos of nothing. And then John laid his semi acoustic Gibson guitar against Paul's bass amp and started to walk away. But then the guitar picked up the sound of that bass note and started feeding back. And the sound was really cool, but a total accident. Paul and John asked George Martin to capture that sound. It was then edited to the beginning of their brand new song. And as far as anyone can tell, this was one of the first uses of Controlled, well, semi controlled feedback on a rock record. Meanwhile, Pete Townsend of the who was discovering ways of incorporating feedback into his playing. Around the same time the Beatles and the who were discovering how to use feedback, others were still working on how to fuzz up a guitar. In 1962, surf guitar king Dick Dale worked with Fender to produce the first ever 100 watt guitar amp. A very big deal. Setting everything to overdrive created a sound. Two months before the Beatles found the sound for I Feel Fine, the Kinks were working at IBC studios in London adapting a song Ray Davies had written on piano. A bluesy version was recorded at first, but that didn't work, so it was re recorded, but not before brother Dave Davies hacked up the speaker cone of his Vox Elpico amp with a razor blade and poking some holes in it with a pin for good measure. He says he did this because he was frustrated that he couldn't get the right sound out of the thing. And when he turned on his amp and plugged in, it was cool. By 1965, guitarists all over the world were looking to toughen up their sound with bigger amps and better pickups. But for some reason, fuzz pedals had not caught on yet. After Grady Martin's Fuzz Tone FZ1, there was also a pedal called the Fuzz Face and another called the Tone Bender. But as good as these things could make a guitar sound, few people were actually buying them. Gibson sent 5,000 fuzz tone units to distributors, but they all just sat on the shelf. Maybe a dozen sold in all of 1964. The big breakthrough came with Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. He fell asleep in a hotel room in Miami and he woke up in the middle of the night with a riff going through his head, which he immediately recorded on a cassette machine which was sitting bedside. He brought the riff to the rest of the Rolling Stones, insisting that the riff needed to be played by a horn section. At the very least a big honkin saxophone. Remember, this is no R and B and Blues guy. Two recording sessions were held using Keefe's guitar as a placeholder until they could assemble the required horn section. Keefe hated how his guitar sounded because that's not what he heard in his head. But the rest of the band overruled him and on May 12, 1965, a final version was recorded with Keith's guitar part intact. However, this version had a different beat and this time the guitar went through a maestro fuzzbox pedal and the result was, well, you,
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I can't get no.
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When I Can't get no Satisfaction was released in the summer of 1965. It was an instant hit. Everyone wanted to know how Keefe got that guitar sound. And suddenly maestro fuzz tones started flying off the shelf. The sound of the electric guitar was changed forever. Distortion was here to stay. We'll pick up the story in just a second.
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In a world where swords were sharp
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and hygiene was actually probably better than you think, two fearless historians, me, Matt Lewis, and me, Dr. Eleanor Yannaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood and very strange customs of the Middle Ages.
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So for plagues, crusades and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from history. Hit wherever you get your podcasts.
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A
By 1969, distortion pedals were being sold all over the world. And they all had one thing in common. They could fuzz up a guitar on command. But in 1969, there was something new. Mike Matthews was the founder of a company called Electroharmonics. They were selling a unit called the Muff Fuzz. And like others on the market, it offered the ability to overdrive a guitar sound. But Mike wanted to take things further. He hired an engineer at Bell Labs named Bob Meyer to come up with a foot pedal that could provide on demand fuzz to, but also one that can make a guitar sound ring for a long time. And the word here is sustain. Strike a fuzzy chord and it would just go on and on and on and on. Electroharmonics actually used the word distortion in addition to fuzz to describe what they were doing. They were the first. The unit was called the Big Muff. Stop giggling. That's what it was called. While it was stamped with the name Electroharmonics, Another company called SovTech, which was based in the USSR was also involved. Commies knew their fuzz. Apparently one of the first people to buy one was Jimi Hendrix, who walked into Manny's music store in New York City and loved what he could do with it. Jimmy ended up using his first Big Muff on this song, in which we hear both distortion and controlled feedback. The Big Muff was a huge hit with guitarists everywhere. David Gilmore of Pink Floyd added one. Carlos Santana, Ace Freely and Paul Stanley of Kiss, Thin Lizzy, Frank Zappa, and dozens and dozens of others. The Big Muff not only worked well with chords, but could also make individual notes really stand out. A model called the Big Buff PI helped create the electric guitar sound of the 1970s. Here's a sample from a demo. Electroharmonic sold many different Versions of the Big Moffat, which has gone in and out of style with trends in music. It was virtually impossible to be in a 90s alt rock band and not have a big muff. I know that sounds silly, but anyway. Korn, Bush, no Effects, Dinosaur junior The Chemical Brothers, Sonic Youth, all big muff bands. Mudhoney released an EP in 1988 called Super Fuzz Big Muff in honor of the thing. And there would not have been a Smashing Pumpkins if not for a specific model of Big Muffin. Electroharmonics even sold a version that some guitarist describe as all the guitars on Siamese Dream in a box. And this one was painted orange, of course. Pumpkins, right? First, bonus boxes and distortion pedals, especially those like the Big Muff, could be used for things other than a guitar. Any electrical signal could be routed through one of these pedals to get some growl. Check out John Lord from Deep Purple on Highway Star from 1972. This is a Hammond organ run through a pedal. And let's move to 1980. For the first Depeche Mode album, Martin Gore and Vince Clark experimented with running their Korg and Roland synthesizers through a big muff. And the result was an instrumental by that same name. There are other ways of creating beautiful, powerful distortion without a foot pedal. We've already talked about overdriving amps powered by vacuum tubes, which simply means turning everything up to 11. But that results in ear splitting volume, not always a good thing, especially if you want to practice in a small space. This was solved by adding a pre amplifier section to a standard amplifier. Turn that up and you get distortion. Meanwhile, the overall volume was controlled by a master volume knob. Later, guitarists were able to buy gear that emulate the sound of big amps while still using a small one at low volume. These became known as power soaks. Tom Schultz, the leader of Boston and a graduate of mit, invented something called the Rockman, which. Which gave the player all the fuss and distortion and sustain of a big amp playing loud but in a small box that could be enjoyed quietly. Another way to make sound heavier was to change the tuning of an electric guitar from the standard to something known as drop D tuning. This is where you tune the lowest string on a guitar to a D instead of an E. That's a whole step without going into a lot of music theory that changes the way chords are formed in sound. The guitar sounds grittier, heavier, more powerful. Put that through a foot pedal and a carefully overdriven amp and you've got something that sounds pretty, pretty cool. Drop D Not only became synonymous with grunge, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, but it can be heard in a lot of other songs by the Foo Fighters, Muse, Tool, Green Day, Rage against the Machine, and dozens of others. Andrew Stockdale used drop D tuning to come up with this song. Still more with a history of distortion and feedback coming up, here are a couple of other highlights from the history of distortion. While these sounds can be used for good, they can also be weaponized. Take the case of Lou Reed's metal machine music. No, wait, hang on, back up. Lou's previous band, the Velvet Underground, has often been called the first alternative band. They were rough and raw and besotted with distortion, feedback and noise. For example, here's something from the second Velvets album, White Light, White Heat from 1968. One take, no overdubs. John Cale uses an electric keyboard tuned down as low as it will go, and then he turned up the volume as high as possible, which is how he got that distorted sound. When they played this live, it could go on for three quarters of an hour. The Velvet Underground and sister Ray from 1968, creating distortion and feedback the old fashioned way over, driving every amp and every instrument they had. Now, fast forward seven years. Lou Reed was unhappy with his record deal with RCA and he wanted out. The problem was that he was contractually obligated to deliver more albums, albums that Reed really didn't want to give rca. But rather than roll over, Lou recorded a double album. Now, to hear Lou explain what he did, he was merely channeling the experimental spirit of an avant garde composer from the 1960s named Lamont Young. One of his groups featured John Cale, by the way, and Lou said that he was into a Greek composer named Xenaxis. Plus, Lou claimed that he'd been listening to a lot of Beethoven and that there were allusions to his work on the album. Okay, fine, but this is actually what metal machine music sounds like. That's. That's it. That. That goes on for over four sides of a double album. And if you manage to get to the end of side four, the last groove is locked, meaning that the stylus never gets a chance to run out. In theory, that means these sounds will continue forever, or at least until the record completely wears out or you put a bullet in your brain. RCA said screw you and released it as an in your face move back at Loo. And since it came out in the summer of 1975, people have been trying to make sense of it, justify it, praise it, and even cover it. And get this. If you're into Star Trek, specifically the Next Generation series, you might remember an alien species called the Breen. Their language in the TV show is based on metal machine music sounds. The Grateful Dead were into feedback. When they played live, Deadheads were often treated to long wails of guitar screeches played through the band's custom wall of sound PA system. Here's another great moment in distortion. It comes courtesy of Robert Fripp, the guitarist of King Crimson, who was brought in to do something with David Bowie in 1977. Bowie was in Berlin working on what would become his Heroes album, and the title track needed some special treatment. Now, there's a lot going on in this song. There's a piano, there's a special microphone set up, some early synthesizers, a Mellotron type keyboard called a Chamberlain, and Fripp's guitar stuff Do Something Weird were his only instructions. So he did three takes, all based on feedback loops. For example, his first take was him feeding back an A note four feet from the amplifier. The second was a G feeding back while standing three feet from the amp. And then the third was something similar. All of the tracks were then fed through an EMS synthesizer, which was a synth but didn't have a keyboard. It was about the size of a briefcase. You know the result. Bowie. With Robert Frith contributing some distortion and feedback, here are a few more heroes of feedback and distortion. Sonic Youth spend most of their career trying to master feedback and distortion. They might have been one of the few groups to actually study metal machine music and learn from it. Trent Reznor has been experimenting with taming noise since Nine Inch Nails began in the 1980s. An album like the Downward Spiral would not have been possible without distortion and feedback. We must speak of My Bloody Valentine. Their wall of fuzz and feedback and distortion took things to new levels, creating the foundations of shoegaze, a genre that could not exist without these sounds. My Bloody Valentine has a reputation of playing brutally loud shows, culminating in something fans called the Apocalypse, which is up to 30 minutes of nothing but distortion and feedback. From there, it's a quick hop to Japanese noise bands who take things to extremes. If you're interested, look up acts like the Boredoms and Mersbo. And finally, there are drone bands which can be nothing but fuzz and distortion. Try a band called Sun O for that. Modern rock. And by that I mean anything from 1965 forward would not have existed without fuzz and distortion. Clean, clear electric guitar sounds may have been fine in the 50s and 60s, but but for the music to get heavier, it had to get louder, and once volume was brought into the picture, distortion and fuzz followed. Not everyone finds this noise beautiful, but there's no question that it changed the way many of us perceive beauty. What was once agonizing is now bliss. There are plenty of ongoing history podcasts available for free download. If the spirit moves you, download them all from whatever podcast platform you choose. There's music, news and information on my website every day. Look for a journal of musicalthhings.com and get the free daily newsletter while you're there. We can meet up on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And if you need to reach me about anything, use AlanLancross CA Technical Productions by Rob Johnston we'll talk soon. I'm Alan Cross.
- [34:09]
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You've been listening to the ongoing History of New Music Podcasts with Alan Cross. Subscribe to the podcast through itunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, and everywhere you find your favorite podcasts.
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The world is changing.
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From the misuse of AI and the rise of deep fakes to the dangerous spread of misinformation, it's getting harder for Canadians to separate fact from fiction. That's why having a trustworthy news source is vital. At Global News, we're committed to objectives Journalism that cuts through the noise. Stick to the facts. Global News, Canada's trusted news.