The first urgent stirrings of alternative rock aren’t hard to find. Just look for the loudest, noisiest or most iconoclastic bands making a scene in the underground of rock and roll’s early years. Long before the term “alternative rock” came into popular use, there existed a strain of guitar groups united in their disregard for convention and commercial acceptance.
The earliest prototypes can be found in 1960s garage rock acts like The Seeds and The Standells, whose use of feedback, distortion and inexpert playing laid the groundwork for rock’s anti-conventional future genres. A few, like The Velvet Underground and The Stooges, took the music to experimental extremes on albums that remain touchstones for guitarists who have followed.
By the late 1970s, New York City’s art rock scene brought us Television, Patti Smith and Talking Heads, proto-alt-rockers who were incorrectly swept into the punk dustpile. Meanwhile, the life force for the future alt-rock movement was underground and growing. It began to emerge in the early 1980s, simultaneously, via R.E.M. in the US and The Smiths in the UK. Both group’s commercial successes opened the door to alt-rock’s viability and led directly to the rise of the early ’90s alternative explosion.
With the arrival of Nirvana, alt-rock came to the popular music’s forefront. The genre dominated for much of the 1990s, but like all movements, it splintered and lost its potency. As the decade faded and the genre fractured further, a few guitarists – Jack White and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, namely – emerged as leading lights. Over these next pages, we explore the histories and contributions of these and other guitarists who fueled and continue to power the alternative rock scene.
LOU REED AND STERLING MORRISON
THE PROTOTYPE FOR ALT-ROCK GUITAR TANDEMS
Many guitarists will decry The Velvet Underground’s lack of guitar expertise, but there is no avoiding the group’s impact on alternative rock or its guitarists. Perhaps no album of theirs is as important in this regard as their first and most influential, 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico. Beyond its music and anti-establishment production, the disc gave us the band’s guitar tandem of Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison.
As players go, they couldn’t be further apart. Reed was the bombastic one, drawing shrieks, squawks and drones from his guitar and creating at times a dense ambience of noise that could be an agitated precursor to the haunting drone of shoegaze. Check out his jagged lead work on ‘Run, Run, Run’, the exotic drones on ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ or the cacophonous sonic cloud that engulfs ‘European Son’, all three from that remarkable debut.
Morrison, less celebrated, played the more traditional single-note lines and ringing arpeggiations on songs like ‘Femme Fatale’ and ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ from 1969’s That’s him picking the bluesy sliding lead guitar line that loops hypnotically, and patiently, through ‘I’m outtakes ‘Foggy Notion’ and ‘Lisa Says’.
