He Can Play Guitar, but Can He Grimace?
By RANDY KENNEDY
In England they call it, rather elegantly, "throwing shapes." One American practitioner says he thinks of it as "selling a move." But to most people who have seen it up close as a rock concert, it is simply that nutty face that the guitar player makes: a contorted grimace, sometimes involving liberal amounts of tongue, that suggests either ecstasy or accidental electrocution.
"My sister always asked me: why do you make those faces when you play?" said Gary Lucas, who played for Captain Beefheart and was interviewed recently while touring England with the Magic Band. Mr. Lucas could never exactly explain it to his sister, except to say that the "strings have always seemed like an extension of the nervous system."
And somehow, too, making the face was sexy. Mr. Lucas remembers that when he was young, he even noticed the familiar look of pained pleasure on the face of the second or third cellist in the New York Philharmonic.
"He had a certain female section of the audience absolutely swooning," he said.
Now both men and women â?? professionals, nonprofessionals and air guitarists alike â?? are being given a chance to put their best swoon-inducing faces on display. As a way to promote a video-on-demand guitar instruction show on cable television called "Guitar Xpress," the company that owns the service, Rainbow Media Holdings, recently came up with the idea of holding a national "guitar face" contest.
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Pretenders to the throne of, say, Angus Young of AC/DC (among the widely acknowledged kings of extreme-pain guitar face) or Stevie Ray Vaughn (who patented a kind of uncontrolled hideous laughing look) or Eddie Van Halen (of the prolonged wide-open-mouth school) can take a picture of their own look and send it via e-mail to
guitarface@magrack.com or mail it to the company, which has lined up a panel of celebrity guitarist judges including Dick Dale, Roger McGuinn and J. J. French of Twisted Sister. When the contest ends in October, the winner will end up with an Epiphone guitar, 15 or maybe even 20 seconds of fame and possibly calls from reality-show casting directors offering more.
Sal Cataldi, a public relations executive and part-time guitar player who came up with the idea for the contest, said that when he started trying to recruit judges "they all immediately knew what I was talking about.
"And they all had these great stories about the guys they thought had the world-class guitar faces," he said, adding that B. B. King's was mentioned often as a classic, an intensely painful look, as if he were playing with broken fingers or had intestinal spasms.
The faces break down into a few general categories: the pout, the pucker, the catfish (open mouth), the heavy squint and the full-face wince. There are combinations, such as the catfish crossed with the heavy squint, which one Web site describes as the Mr. Magoo, after the seeing-impaired cartoon character. And there are also regional variants, like the angry, disdainful no-expression look of the New York guitar player, a face used frequently by Mr. French, the Twisted Sister guitarist, who admits that he adapted his techniques from early performances by Mick Ronson, David Bowie's guitarist.
"This is the J. J. really cool New York look," Mr. French said the other day in an interview at the Sam Ash guitar store on West 48th Street in Manhattan, demonstrating his special almost-no-expression snarl with sunglasses. But then Mr. French, who owns a management company and still tours in full makeup with Twisted Sister ("We always looked like a bunch of middle-aged hookers, but now we really do") showed how his look can change into a tortured but blissful squint when playing high notes at the top of the guitar neck and then relax into a kind of pouty, elongated gape with the lower notes.
Once during a big stadium show in the 1980's, he recalled, he achieved his all-time most successful guitar face after jumping from a drum stand and sliding across the stage, smashing his knee badly against an amplifier. "At which point," he said, "the pain and the expression on my face probably out-Hendrixed Hendrix. And when I was in all that pain, I remember saying to myself, `Go with it, J. J. Milk it. The crowd is eating this up.' "
Which of course brings up the ongoing debate regarding guitar face: how much of it is an expression of genuine, unfiltered musical passion and how much is calculated, the well-honed moves of a seasoned performer?
Mr. French says that he was aware of the need to perform boldly onstage, especially for huge audiences, and that the facial expressions helped.He said they helped "sell the move" he was about to make by windmilling his strumming arm or kicking up one of his waxed legs. But he swears that he never put that much forethought into the look on his face and thinks few professional rock guitarists do.
"I don't think it's like professional wrestling where guys sit around and figure out how they're going to con the audience," he said. "Forgive me for not being that cynical. I like to think we really feel it."
They may, but Mark Weiss, a veteran rock photographer who is a judge for the contest, says that in his 30 years of watching guitarists, he has seen quite a few who were not only very aware of their stage expressions but worked on them.
"That's probably how they got into playing in the first place â?? it's that they figured out how cool they looked doing it," said Mr. Weiss, who has spent many hours focusing his camera on the faces of Ted Nugent, Mr. Van Halen and the guitarists for extreme-guitar-face hair bands like Poison and Mötley Crüe.
While he will not say which guitarists, he described how some in photo shoots for album covers or magazines "insisted that I have a mirror behind me while I was shooting so they could see their own poses."
"They were thinking about the look a lot," he said.
Mr. Lucas, for one, admits that he did. When he was young, he says, he decided to give up playing the French horn for reasons other than not being so good at it.
"Basically," he said, "I couldn't put on a good rock face while I was playing it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/22/arts/music/22FACE.html?8hpib
