Re: Pete the soloist - Great

[ACLGC <antonioclaudiocerqueira@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Excerpts from an old interview on Guitar - August
1996. Pete: "I don't think of myself - and never have
thought of myself - as a guitar player at all. One of
the reasons for that is that the other guitar players
have diverged. The guitar, in my lifetime, has gone
from being an instrument of accompaniment, an
instrument of composition, a portable approximation of
the piano and one of the few instruments that enables
the minstrel to do his work to becoming one of the
great expressive virtuoso instruments of the driven,
creative player. That latter individual is not me. I
have no interest in going off into the stars and doing
new things on the guitar. So I'm kind of left out of
it, in a way." (...) "After that (the bike accident),
when I was relearning how to play, I thought I was too
old to change the way that I expressed myself, by
practicing scales, and it turned out to not be true.
But I do find it very difficult to break through a
barrier that came up when I was about 17 or 18 on the
guitar. I couldn't get any faster, even though I was
practicing and practicing. It was some kind of
coordination problem that I had - and have - that
causes a delay between my left hand and my right. On
the piano that leads to an interesting delayed
backbeat, but on guitar there is very little
connection. And I've never been able to break throught
it, even though I've tried meditation and everything.
Plus, I've never had lessons. It may be that if I had
handed my life over to a teacher, I might have been
able to break throught it. I don't know whether I was
being stupid, but I made a conscious decision not to
take lessons. I thought I could concentrate myself -
the narrow place in which I did have to work - on
rhythmic work, rather than using the guitar as an
expressive instrument. Not to make any kind of
distinction for other player, or to say that one is
better than the other, because obviously for the
average guitar player, it should be possibly both."
(...) "I do love the guitar, I do think it's
wonderful. If I can say something about my life as a
guitarist, it's that I'm very proud of my contribution
to the way it's changed technically. I have the honor
of still knowing Jim Marshall and his son Terry very
well, and we still get together and go over what
really happened in the early days with the design of
the first really big amplifier. They credit me amost
entirely - along with a couple of other people, a
couple of bass players - with being the guy that drove
them to produce the four-valve power amp. (...) I said
I wanted that sound, exactly that sound (a Fender Pro
amp, with a 15" speaker and  a tweed Fender Bassman),
but just a bit louder, a bit bigger. They mamaged to
achieve that. And then I went back and said, "No, I
want it even louder, even bigger. What's happening is
very, very interesting." There were harmonics
happening that were very interesting. And I got very
angry, very frustrated - I kept pushing them. I said,
"You'd better fucking do this, there's something
happening here which is really interesting." The
guitar kind of starts to sound like a symphony
orchestra. You get up to a certain pitch, and
something happens between the pickup and the amp.
Remember, I'd been experimenting with beats, and
listening and listening, hearing all these kind of
huge, cascading harmonics. I knew that in distortion
ther was music of a much higher harmonic order than
anything that I could play, so I started that whole
trip off."

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