Revival Revival vs Primus

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Vocals by Barbara Singer. Samples and programming by me. The guitar licks were originally played by Alex Torovic but have been chopped up pretty dramatically. This is part of our ongoing strategy, learned from hip-hop, of taking a familiar chorus and coming up with new verses.

“Tommy The Cat” is far and away my favorite Primus song. Les Claypool does the spoken intro and the choruses, but Tommy The Cat himself is voiced by Tom Waits. The song has a cool video, which I had never seen before the very moment of embedding it in this post, because it’s not like it got a lot of MTV spins back in the nineties. What did we do before Youtube?

I’m a funk, blues and jazz guy more than a metal guy. Among the metal virtuosos, Les Claypool is the funkiest. He says that when he auditioned to replace Cliff Burton in Metallica, he suggested they all jam on some Isley Brothers tunes. I’m sure that went over huge. Metallica wisely advised Les to go start his own band.

As with everybody we sample and remix, we hope Primus is cool with it, it’s purely a gesture of love. I imagine that they’d be okay, since they themselves have been known to do some sampling. “Jerry Was A Race Car Driver” uses a line from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (“Heh heh heh, dog will hunt!”)

My first reaction to Primus as a high schooler was mostly alarm. Growing up in New York City, you don’t get exposed to a lot of metal. If you’re a brooding white city kid looking to annoy your parents, you’re likelier to turn to hip-hop or punk (or both, this is why my high school classmates loved the Beastie Boys so much.) For most of my adolescence, I didn’t even realize that punk and metal are two different things. So I didn’t have a lot of context for Primus. I liked the spazzy energy but couldn’t handle the tightly coiled anger that seemed to underlie it. Was I ever so innocent? Having heard a lot of genuinely angry rock music since then, Primus sounds pretty harmless, and the comedy aspect comes across as more dominant. But of course, the best comedy comes from anger. It’s fitting that Primus did the theme song to South Park, they inhabit a similar emotional space.

Primus’ material isn’t exactly my cup of tea but I stand in awe of their musicianship. Most guys at their level of skill have no sense of humor whatsoever. I’d like to know how Les managed not to lose his sense of playfulness even after the tens of thousands of hours of disciplined practice it must have taken him to get that good at bass. I especially love hearing him play fretless, he gets so much microtonal excitement out of it. Ditto with Larry LaLonde – I can’t think of a more harmonically adventurous guitarist. Here’s to spazzy virtuosity.

Here’s a documentary about the wah:

Cry Baby: The Pedal That Rocks The World from Joey Tosi on Vimeo.

Combined with a guitar, the wah can do more than vowel glides. When you mute the strings and strum through a wah, you get a percussive sound ranging from “chicka chicka” to “chucka chucka.” By filtering the overtones differently, you can make other vocal sounds too. I have a digital effects unit that can make the guitar say the word “yeah” pretty convincingly. These kinds of effects give a guitarist the emotional immediacy of the voice combined with the guitar’s wide range of pitches and richness of harmonic possibility.

The guitar isn’t the only instrument you can use with a wah, and it wasn’t the first. The pedal was invented somewhat by accident when the Thomas Organ Company was developing a tone modifier for amplifiers. The first instrument they tried with it was an amplified saxophone, and the company thought they might market it for wind instruments in big bands, as an electronic version of the Harmon mute. A guitarist who worked for the company named Del Casher heard the possibilities of the new tone modifier, and he was the first person to make a recording of it in 1966.

Frank Zappa was an early adopter, and he introduced it to Jimi Hendrix, who would be the first to break it into mass consciousness with “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” Jimi also introduced the percussive “chicka chicka” on “Little Miss Lover.” Jimi’s solos on “All Along The Watchtower” is another distinctive early adventure with wah. Plenty of other hippie rockers followed suit. George Harrison has a song called “Wah-Wah” on All Things Must Pass, named both for the pedal and for the Beatles’ whining during their final sessions together. Eric Clapton uses wah with Cream on “Tales of Brave Ulysses” and “White Room”.

Pop culturally, wah is most associated with seventies funk and soul, like on “Theme From Shaft” by Isaac Hayes, with Charles Pitts on guitar. Curtis Mayfield also had a distinctive and much-imitated wah style. From blaxploitation soundtracks it was a short jump to the porn movies that imitated them, which is why funky wah guitar is an effective comedy shorthand for getting busy. But wah doesn’t have to be seductive. Eddie Hazel of Funkadelic used it for a dark, spacey cry on “Maggot Brain.” Click here to listen to some standard wah techniques on electric guitar. The wah pedal sounds especially good on E9, the mother of all funk chords.

Hard rock and metal guitarists have found a vocabulary for wah drawing more on Hendrix and Zappa than on funk. Zappa used it less like a speech effect and more like a simple adjustable filter. He would leave it partially open to filter the high frequencies over the course of an entire song. Distortion exaggerates out the guitar’s upper harmonics and other partials, and the wah makes a great envelope controller. Jimmy Page used it on Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “No Quarter” and “Custard Pie”. Slash used it with Guns N’ Roses, and Kirk Hammett leans heavily on it with Metallica.

Bassists sometimes use the wah too, especially in the funk and soul world. Michael Henderson played with one on Miles Davis’s album On the Corner. Other wah-loving bassists include Metallica’s Cliff Burton and Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler.

Electric pianos and harpsichords operate in very much the same way as electric guitars, so it was only a matter of time before keyboard players started investigating guitar effects. Clavinet with wah sounds so much like guitar that it’s hard to tell them apart. Garth Hudson plays some pretty groovy clav with The Band on “Up On Cripple Creek”, but nothing is as funky as Stevie Wonder on “Superstition,” “Higher Ground” and his other seventies classics. Electric piano also sounds great through wah, again because of its guitar-like tone when played through an amp with distortion. Richard Wright uses it on Pink Floyd’s “Money”, and it’s on tons of Miles Davis electric recordings, especially the ones with Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea.

Any instrument that’s amplified can be played through a wah. Miles Davis got a devastating trumpet tone with wah on Live-Evil and his other darker funk records. A few saxophone players have experimented with it too, as the pedal’s original inventors intended. David Sanborn played with one on the David Bowie album Young Americans, and Dana Colley used it with Morphine.

Violin sounds great with wah. The leading practitioners are Jean-Luc Ponty in the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Boyd Tinsley in the Dave Matthews Band. Pink Floyd even tried some wah on an acoustic piano in their song “Echoes”, which also includes wah guitar made to sound like crying birds. I myself have found that wah sounds terrific on mandolin. I’ve also tried it on harmonica, but there it’s redundant since you can do the wah effect so easily with your mouth.

Wah is just one flavor of the envelope filtering you can do with a synthesizer. A lot of the craft of electronic music comes down to creative rhythmic use of the filter. A standard technique is to get a repetitive loop happening and then sloooowwwly open and close the filter over the course of a phrase or section. Since a sequencer or computer can play the actual synthesizer notes, it frees up the musician’s hands for complex multi-parameter filter control using knobs or touchscreens. We’re only at the beginning of our collective exploration of the artificial vowel glide in music.