Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Hump Day Treat, Guitar Geek Nostalgia edition

I finally got around to googling Elle magazine's recent 12 Greatest Female Electric Guitarists list, but I wound up spending more time on reading the comments posted by other readers than on the list itself. The following from Drowned in Sound caught my attention:

In terms of cheesy rock soloage, it's gotta be Louise Post from Veruca Salt. She's also dead pretty.


Oh wow, what about Louise Post? I wondered to myself. I don't think about her often, even though Veruca Salt was one of my favorite bands before Nina Gordon's departure. This comment made me realize though that Post was my first real guitar heroine. I devoured articles about her, and I got my first guitar pedal -- the now discontinued Boss FZ-2 Hyper Fuzz pedal -- because I read in a guitar magazine that Post used it on a song called "Shutterbug".


Here's another geeky first: the first guitar solo I ever learned was the face-melter at the end of "Shutterbug". And I learned it from watching Veruca Salt's performance of the song on Saturday Night Live. (In the live broadcast, Post made a mistake, and yeah, I learned the mistake even.) Solo's aren't the be all and end all that some (read: dude) guitarists make them out to be, but it was definitely an important step in my development as a musician. No matter what rumors and mean-spirited critiques may abound about Post now, I owe her. So in her honor, I present "Shutterbug" as today's hump day treat. Enjoy!





***EDIT*** I just found the original SNL performance I learned the solo from, and it's just like I remember it, with Louise and Nina's weird outfits that I thought were awesome when I was in middle school, and Louise's bad ass ice blue eye shadow! Looking at it with adult eyes, the performance isn't even that great, but that's beside the point. BEST DAY OF MY LIFE. (watch the SNL performance HERE.)

No comments: