Recently I managed to find a 2021 reissue of the marvellous 1990 World Party album Goodbye Jumbo. I wore out my CD copy from high school and haven’t had a physical copy of the album in years. It was a very important record for me when I was younger. As I spun my new copy, I went down a Karl Wallinger rabbithole, an occupational hazard of the ADHD music fan. One thing I learned is that Wallinger is a multi-instrumentalist and my beloved Goodbye Jumbo is almost entirely him on everything.
But here’s the thing which spawned this column — Wallinger played the guitar weird. He is left-handed, but plays a right-handed guitar — strung right-handed — upside-down and left-handed. That’s the same way as both Jimi Hendrix and Bob Geldof. I suppose one advantage is you can just grab any righty’s guitar and just play.
Paul McCartney first played bass this way, as well, when he used the Hofner President bass of bandmate Stu Sutcliffe. Just flip it upside-down and play left-handed, E string on the bottom instead of the top. It hurts my brain. The late Jeff Healey also had an unusual playing style. The blind guitarist sat with the guitar flat on his lap and played it almost like a piano with his left hand on top of the frets. This allowed him to incorporate his thumb, like a viola player.
Drums are a bit different — because it’s not just about being right or left handed, but feet are also required. Some drummers’ dominant hand is different from their dominant foot. Me, for example — I’m right-handed but left foot dominant. I also golf and bat left-handed. Right-handed drummers typically play — arms crossed-over — with the hi-hat on the left of the snare, which is to the left of the kick drum. The ride cymbal is to the right of the kick drum. A typical leftie will have the same setup in reverse, like a mirror. To see this, just cue up some YouTube videos of Phil Collins from the Genesis days, or Deep Purple’s Ian Paice. Two of the very best. But drums can also be played open-handed. This is when a leftie leaves the set-up as it would be for a righty, but plays without crossing over the arms. Mickey Dolenz and Dennis Wilson played this way; so did the more accomplished Billy Cobham.
Then there’s the non-pick guitarists and bass players. I taught myself to play bass with the back of my fingernail like Geezer Butler. Jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery plays with his thumb — something he did to keep the volume of his practicing down. Jeff Beck uses his thumb and a pick … and sometimes a finger But he also finds ways to hit the tremolo arm and roll the volume at the same time as though his fingers were like the snakes in Medusa’s hair.
Jimmy Page is famous for playing a bowed electric guitar — unlike Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel, whose solos are his “trademark” and has employed a violin instead of a bow to play his guitar at times. That’s cheek, eh. Page wasn’t the first to play a bowed electric guitar, I believe that honour goes to Eddie Phillips of The Creation. If you’ve seen the movie Rushmore, you’re familiar with their biggest song, Making Time from 1966.
For a more modern sound, Iceland’s Sigur Ros also use a bowed guitar in their songs — so too does Jeff Martin from The Tea Party. Of course he does. I’ve tried bowed electric bass with mixed results — Roger Waters did this on both The Scarecrow and Lucifer Sam from the first Pink Floyd album.
If you Google Karoo Kitaar Blues, you’ll find a documentary about South African guitarist Hannes Coetzee, who plays slide guitar by holding a spoon in his mouth.
I play guitar on all my songs, with overdubs from my pal Jordon Zadorozny of Blinker The Star. I don’t really know how to play any proper chords, so I come up with my own tunings instead. But one of my guitars stays in a “Keef” tuning because, like Keith Richards, I find it quite fertile ground for hooks — and that’s open-G with the low-E string removed. So, G, D, G, B, D. You’ll immediately find stuff like Happy and Beast Of Burden.
But Keith is far from the only guitarist who is a never-ending knob-twister — Nick Drake’s tunings are all over the place. And he can’t compete with Joni Mitchell, who even uses banjo tunings on her guitar. That’s how This Flight Tonight is played, for example. And Coyote is C-G-D-F-C-E instead of E-A-D-G-B-E.
My partner Chelle is a huge fan of Kaki King. The self-taught American guitarist and composer is known for her unusual tunings — including viola tunings, seven-string Russian tunings and double open tunings. She mixes this with a wild blend of fingerstyle picking, slapping, tapping and Flamenco fanning.
I first saw Dizzy Gillespie on The Muppet Show. I mean, mostly I saw his cheeks and that unique bent trumpet. My father told me about how this was actually not good form — a statement confirmed years later by my Grade 7 music teacher when many of us started learning to play trumpet, tuba, trombone or baritone. Students are taught to keep their cheeks tight when blowing into the instrument; it’s called proper embouchure. The self-taught Gillespie was brilliant, but did not have proper embouchure and ended up with what’s known as Glassblower’s Disease. His facial muscles and tissue were deformed by years of playing incorrectly, thus the bionic chipmunk appearance.
Harpo Marx (Adolph Marx) was one of the multi-talented Marx Brothers of vaudeville and early Hollywood. He got his name because he played the harp — in a most unusual way. His only guide for how to hold the thing was from a poster of a harp-playing angel in a convenience store. He also couldn’t find anyone who knew how to tune it, so devised his own system and spent three years teaching himself to play on an instrument which turned out to be tuned at a much lower tension than normal. He never learned to read music, but became an incredibly gifted performer despite this, his technique and the tuning.
Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen lost his left arm in a car crash in 1984. He’s still able to play, but with obvious adjustments to his technique — and a lot of special equipment. He uses a custom cable and four electronic pedals for his left foot to play the pieces he used to play with his left arm, which from left to right trigger sounds of a closing hi-hat, bass drum, snare drum, and tom drum.
Here’s a different kind of constraint — Funkadelic leader George Clinton decided to record their second album Free Your Mind … And Your Ass Will Follow with all members tripping on acid “to see if it can be done.” They managed it — recording the entire record in a single day. And it really, really sounds like it: Raw, rough and rocky.
Gypsy jazz guitarist Django Rheinhardt is considered among the greatest of all time. It’s virtually impossible to tell from listening that he only had two functional fingers on his fretting hand, having lost the use of the others in a fire. Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi had to first make — and then eventually procure two prosthetic fingertips on his fretting hand after a workplace accident.
A bit of finger, you might say.
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Area Resident is an Ottawa-based journalist, recording artist, music collector and re-seller. Hear (and buy) his music on Bandcamp, email him HERE, follow him on Instagram and check him out on Discogs.
