Loudness, pt. 2

I got to thinking about Loudness v Volume after the last blog post, and had some thoughts in a different direction.  In the late sixties, guitarists started using feedback as a part of the electric guitar repertoire.  It's useless to say anything other than 'guitarists' because the number of people who've been credited with inventing intentional feedback includes: John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck, and so forth.  So sufficeth to say that 'guitarists started using feedback.'

The reason it all happened simultaneously (or close enough) is that as we moved into the late sixties, musicians were looking for ways to play louder and louder, amplifier manufacturers were building bigger amplifiers, for musicians to play larger clubs, and people just started turning them up.  At some point, feedback becomes inevitable, as does the idea of using it rather than (hopelessly) trying to suppress it.

Now, this is a pretty standard explanation, but I got to thinking.  Rather than just trying to play with more volume, the musicians mentioned were almost all of them playing louder music - louder in the sense of yesterday's post.

Listen to the guitar in a song from the fifties, or even the early sixties, and it sounds pretty tame by today's standards.  For example, the Beatles song "I Feel Fine" has a scream right before the guitar solo - a pretty credible scream, by today's standards - and it leads into a very tame and laid back guitar solo.  Even the blues guys, who were turning it up and using distortion before just about anybody, weren't playing with the same sort of abandon and loss of control that typifies, say, a Jimi Hendrix solo.

Now listen to the music that was coming out in '67, '68.  The Who.  Hendrix.  Cream.  Even the Beatles, a la "Helter Skelter" - the music itself is louder, and they had to turn up the volume to match it.  It's one of the reasons Chuck Berry sounds dated in a way the Stones don't.  He was just a little too early, and for a lot of reasons, couldn't play as loudly as the Stones later did.

Feedback has kind of been subsumed into the mainstream now, and the thing that replaced it - Hip Hop's block rocking beat - is going the same route.  But I remember the first time I heard the Smashing Pumpkins song "Soma" which explodes halfway through.  The centerpiece of the song is a solo, and four notes in, it sounds like the guitar is being fed through a shredder.  The Pumpkins are one of the last times a band really sounded loud to me.  That solo in "Soma", the riff in "Pissant."  Pearl Jam's "Do the Evolution."  But now that I think about it, I guess the White Stripes still manage it pretty regularly.  So maybe there's hope for the future.