Shred is a word that has slowly disappeared from my mind as the years have passed, but I think the feeling that I originally connected to it has always been present. As a child I loved music and in my family we all had to play an instrument. I started on organ (my mom's idea) and then added the drums (my idea). When I was 13, my dad signed me up for guitar lessons and I had no reaction to it one way or the other. It just meant more lessons. Then one day I heard Jimi Hendrix. It was the first time I encountered music that made me utterly surprised, hearing sounds I had never heard anywhere else. I loved that feeling - what is happening here? Even though it was decades old, it was so new to me. At the time I didn't realize that what I was connecting to was encountering an artist who had a fully realized approach and ideas that were pure and honest, raw and direct. I was hooked and practiced endlessly chasing that emotion. Soon I came across other music that gave me a similar feeling. THE SHREDDERS! Malmsteen, Gilbert, Becker, Vai, Satriani and so many more. I had never heard anyone playing that way. How could humans achieve this? I would sit in the back of the school bus playing their tapes out loud, convinced that this must be the best music in the world because it was so hard to play.
I had entered the arena of speed gladiators. There's a reason people love seeing the spotlight solos in rock shows - the spectacle of the superhuman. Who doesn't want to be the next superhero? As a musician there was also the bonus of being able to have perceivable progress. I could spend hours every day running scales and doing picking exercises, jotting down metronome markings to see if my speed had increased. When it's so hard to tell if you're getting any better as an artist, judging yourself based on improved technique is much more secure and grounded. I couldn't do this certain thing a month ago that I can do today so I MUST be getting better. My dad would occasionally poke his head into the room and yell, "can't you play any SONGS!?". I barely could.
In the midst of all this I was also being extremely influenced by other musical realms. I regularly came across small statements that had the largest impact. John Cage was one of the first, with so much encouragement to not follow the pack. He introduced the idea that if you care about music, the best way to show that appreciation is to try and do something new, without thought of where and what it will get you. I started to view music as what I was meant to do instead of a way to be a superhero.
When I was about 15, I read an interview with Vernon Reid who pointed out that music was a reflection of your life and if your life consisted mainly of sitting in a room by yourself, what exactly were you saying?
Around the same time I read an interview with Derek Bailey. He pointed out an idea that was a mind-blowing revelation to me. It was simple. If you ask a piano player to play the notes C, D and E they'll press those keys. As a guitarist you have many possibilities, such as playing C fretted, D as a harmonic and E as an open string. It was one of those moments where someone shows you the power of an idea, the impact a decision can have. You hear the cliché all the time, a journey of 1,000 miles starts with a single step. Here was Bailey, a thousand miles away, waving hello to me proving that this was real. He found an approach that made sense to him and therefore was able to reach a place no one else had.
My desire to be just one of the fastest started to fade from sight. I began to realize that I had chosen a goal that wasn't really who I was. At some point I was listening to a recording of myself and couldn't get over how fast and clean it sounded. I hated it. At that time my favorite guitarists in the world were Sonny Sharrock, Hendrix, Glenn Branca and Derek Bailey. They all had a rawness and grit that meant everything to me. I had drifted away from the very feeling that initially got me excited about the guitar. No disrespect to the shredders, it just wasn't really who I was.
I think that's one of the hardest tasks in being a musician. Finding who you really are. I had a similar situation a few years later when I got drawn to the idea of being a jazz guitarist. I worked for a long time before I could see that I would never add anything to that music because it wasn't me and it wasn't what I truly felt.
For me, the word shredding has moved into the same place as the words rock and punk. It'll always be more of a feeling than a style. Derek Bailey is way more punk than most punk bands and any Glenn Branca symphony will rock your ass off. And to me, Sonny Sharrock and Keiji Haino shred the guitar to pieces.
I don't feel like I've reinvented the instrument in any way, but I do feel like I've done my best to resist the temptation to follow. Some people hear the bands I've been in and think our intention must be to mess with people or just be different. The reality is that I've only ever worked to be closer to who I really am and tried to play with people who feel the same. One thing I've learned is that if you're honest about what you're doing, the listeners who relate to your music will usually be those you can connect with as people. It may mean that you might have a smaller audience, but I find that those connections will be truer and deeper.
The future of the guitar lies in the hands of those who keep working to make a slab of wood and strings express exactly who they truly are, any way they can. So shred like Dimebag Darrell or shred like Arto Lindsay. Just shred that shit.