“AAARRRRRGGGHH!!! THIS IS so flippin’ AMAZING! Hahahaha. Hmmm, what should I do first? Burn my guitar … or light MYSELF on fire! Give me MORE, but GOD ALMIGHTY, MAKE IT STOP!”
Does that sound insane?
Yes, indeed. But that was the kind of crazy talk many guitarists engaged in during the Eighties. And who could blame them? George Lynch, Vito Bratta, Steve Vai, Nuno Bettencourt, Reb Beach, Yngwie Malmsteen, Kirk Hammett, Eric Johnson, Paul Gilbert, Marty Friedman and about a billion other handsome virtuoso shredders just kept getting faster and better until all you could scream was, “I surrender! Fuck playing the guitar, I’m gonna join the Marines.”
Then suddenly on September 10, 1991, a date that will live in infamy, everything changed.
Nirvana, a melodic punk rock band from Seattle, released a simple four-chord slugfest titled “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and sparked a musical revolution that blew all the fleet-fingered pretty boys out of the water.
Nirvana and their charismatic singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain championed gritty “authenticity” over the glamorous excesses of the hair metal of the Eighties, and their disheveled presence suddenly made bands like Winger, Warrant and Whitesnake look like dolled-up saloon girls in comparison. And just like that, the guitar virtuoso crazy train was completely derailed like the Norfolk Southern locomotive in Ohio.
As shredder extraordinaire George Lynch recalled in Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock’s excellent 2021 book, “Unfortunately, [] worked its way to an apex, and then we backed ourselves into a corner. There was no place to go. Because you could only play so fast and then what did it really matter? Nirvana came along and said it all with one nasty, dirty, attitude note. You go, ‘Ah, that’s rock and roll!’ ”
