OK, except Craig Goldie with Dio on the Dream Evil tour, but he did shoot a giant mechanical spider with a laser mid way through which would've woke up the philistines like you :P
If he'd carried on playing the spider would've just gone to sleep. Craig Goldy is one of the most boring guitarists I've ever heard in my life.
& I just cannot agree that ignorant, intolerant, shoe-gazing grunge cr@p represented any sort of benefit or "renewal" (or any of the other hackneyed clichés used to describe it). It led to a whole generation of musicians that don't know how to play their instruments, didn't know how to smile, thought teen suicide & heroin overdoses were cool, as well as spawning some of the worst music journalism you'll ever read...
I think it's clear we're in disagreement here. :P :lol: (although I suspect in fact there's probably a surprising amount of overlap between our record collections).
Lots of '80s metal was great, I still listen to it and love it. What
wasn't great (apart from the poodle hair, scarves tied around knees :roll: etc) was the way
every hair metal band ended up with their own little Yngwie/Eddie wannabe who'd deliver a meaningless shred mini-epic in every one of their throwaway four-minute pop songs ("The Archies with fuzz guitars", to quote Frank Zappa). It was pap, it was boring, there was too much of it and it needed something to come along and shake things up just like punk did in the '70s. Was it really such a terrible thing (except for them personally) that Warrant, Trixter, Slaughter, Danger Danger, Tuff and Pretty Boy Floyd saw their careeers take a nosedive? There's nothing wrong with a new broom from time to time.
Are you really going to write off the whole of grunge as "ignorant, intolerant, shoe-gazing cr@p"? It had its share of dud bands like any other scene, but produced brilliant albums like Nirvana's
Nevermind (obviously), Pearl Jam's
Ten, Soundgarden's
Badmotorfinger and
Superunknown, Mother Love Bone, Temple of the Dog... And they may not have been grunge but we'd probably never have heard Alice In Chains if grunge hadn't happened.
As for the "generation of musicians that didn't know how to play their instruments", songs are more important than virtuosity, always have been and always will be. I
love guitar solos (even long ones), but they shouldn't be there unless they add something to the song and they don't need to be displays of dazzling technique to be effective.
Incidentally, the real dark days for rock music weren't the grunge years but the Nu Metal period which came shortly afterwards - when songs again got chucked out of the window in favour of how LOW they could tune their guitars. Whole albums without a tune
or a guitar solo. I'm bloody glad
that didn't last long.
**************
But anyway, this is getting completely away from the original point. I
wasn't objecting to great guitar players or great musicianship, I was objecting to them displaying their technique (not musicianship) in a pointless manner.
I'm quite happy to watch Govt Mule (for example) spend 15 minutes extending a song, deconstructing and rebuilding a riff. The very
best parts of live gigs are when bands depart from the recorded songs and improvise. But that's all about the
interplay between musicians, reacting to and feeding off each other. It's music. Look-at-me solo spots aren't.
