Reading Fargo

So, on recommendation, I picked up Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City, which is his 2001 memoir/apology for 80s glam metal. Right at the beginning of the book, he sets out his mission to properly recognize the cultural importance of 80s metal in the face of the complete dismissal it receives (and always had) from music journalists. Not so different from what originally motivated me to start this blog (see here and here).

As Klosterman described his childhood self encountering Mötley Crüe's Shout at the Devil for the first time in the mid-80s, I immediately had the shock of recognition. Klosterman's rural North Dakota is the same cultural milieu as small-town BC, except where he has cows, we had trees. The way the music hit us, and the place it claimed in our hearts and minds, is exactly the same as he describes. Now, I'm a few years older than Klosterman, so some of these things reached my ears at a slightly different point in my life, and some of my major touchstones are a little earlier than the ones he talks about in the book—I was already 16 or 17 when I heard the Crüe, so it wasn't quite as eye-opening for me as he suggests. But everything he writes about the sensibility of 80s metal—and 80s metal audiences—is dead on, especially where he talks about how different bands (and different albums) had credibility (or not). Hey—I was there when Def Leppard hit the scene; I loved that first album in high school, and I also had to laugh at myself after a little critical distance. But AC/DC, Van Halen, the Ozzy albums, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest—this was the soundtrack to my life, and all my friends'. We were conscious of being 'losers' musically, that both the mainstream media nor the 'popular' kids laughed at our tastes. But it didn't matter. Angus Young mattered. (Actually, one of the scariest things was going back to my hometown about six years later and seeing high-school kids at the beach with their ghetto blaster, still playing Back In Black—whoa, the land where time stood still.)

Where Klosterman and I part is about 1987. The bands he lionizes in the book—Cinderella, Skid Row, etc.—came after I took a left turn and started to think that American metal was getting to be a bad joke. The difference was simply that I moved to the big city in 84-85, and got exposed to a new sound—punk rock and hardcore was completely absent from my early-80s small town world. In Vancouver, punkrock outfits like DOA and NoMeansNo, and the hardcore/metal produced by Death Sentence spoke to me in a way that the hair bands couldn't anymore. By the end of the decade, Hüsker Dü was providing me with umlauts in what I felt was a more authentic mode.

The thing that gets me about Klosterman's book—as funny and insightful as it is—is that he never talked about actually wanting to be in a band. He talks about his idolatry from a comfortable place in the audience. He never talks about identifying with his favourite bands as musicians. Tellingly, the one and only mention of "air guitar" in the whole book is an off-hand reference in a passage about his own alcoholism. My God, air guitar was pretty much what the whole affair was about for me and my friends—that is, until we picked up our own instruments.

Maybe this partly explains my point of departure. Klosterman at one point dismisses punk rock, repeating the old refrain that anybody who could play two chords was suddenly "only two weeks away from their first gig"—as if this was a bad thing! Thank the stars this turned out to be the minority view.

The '59 Sound

Note that this post has absolutely nothing to do with that band from New Jersey. I'm talking about my Seymour Duncan '59 humbucker, which, I am extremely pleased to announce, has finally found peace in my strat.

Last year I went through a long phase of experimenting with pickups. The stock "Highway 1" gear in my strat was not what it could be. So I put in a set of fabulous GFS overwound single coils, and then replaced the stock HB with a "real" humbucker: a Duncan '59 (TB59 to be exact).

The trouble was that even through the '59 was an improvement on the stock HB, it still didn't sound right—a bit muddy, especially noticable when switching from the single coils (yes, I know it's supposed to sound different, but it shouldn't come across as straightforwardly 'worse'). The solution was to re-wire the guitar so that the humbucker runs through 500k pots instead of the 250k pots that Fender normally puts in a strat. I wrote this wiring solution up in detail elsewhere.

The result really has me stoked. It sounds FABULOUS now, especially through my tweed champ. The brilliance and balance of this pickup is revealed, and what you hear going from the singles to the humbucker is now what you would expect: the glassy, harmonic-rich fender sound and the fatter, warmer humbucker sound. But it's all there now, where it really wasn't with the generic wiring. The clincher has really been the pinch harmonics—I mean, they're actually there now, where they kind of weren't before. Playing straight into the Champ, even at a low volume, I can pinch and get all kinds of high-end dynamics that make me think of Billy Gibbons. Similarly, the attack I get from muted picking and raking sounds much more like what it should be.

Why do so many people live with fat strats with the compromised stock circuitry? Humbuckers require different pots than single-coil pickups, and the sound suffers if you try to just run it through. Maybe all those HSS people are just playing through enough distortion that it's not so noticable, but gee, don't they want it to sound good clean too?

Update:

I got with some friends the other night and had opportunity to turn everything up to 11. I was even more impressed with the sound I was getting from the 59. There was another loud strat in the room, and drums, and I had a great cutting tone. The 500k volume and tone pots gave me exactly what I wanted; I was able to dial in what I was getting out of my Champ (which, with its tiny speaker can tend to be pretty high-mid). Most impressed with the blaze of sound from chords hit on the top 4 strings. All in all, more evidence that this is indeed the right way to wire an HSS strat.