NO GAFF TAPE marks on the stage are necessary for Simon McBride — he always remembers where the sweet spot is. Alone under the lights for his big guitar cadenza each night with Deep Purple — and just after kicking on a Tube Screamer to make his white-hot guitar tone a few degrees hotter — he moves to that invisible X, hits a single note high up on the fretboard, and, with zero vibrato, gets it to sustain infinitely. When a shimmering overtone emerges from within the sound, the endless note becomes all the more prismatic. It grabs your ears the way a laser beam shooting up into the night sky attracts your eyes.
It’s an old trick, but, after watching McBride do it flawlessly at 16 different arenas all over Europe last fall (I was playing with the support band, Jefferson Starship), I can report that I’ve never seen anyone do
