California Noise

Abstract

Tinkering has long figured prominently in the history of the electric guitar. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, two guitarists based in the burgeoning Southern California hard rock scene adapted technological tinkering to their musical endeavors. Edward Van Halen, lead guitarist for Van Halen, became the most celebrated rock guitar virtuoso of the 1980s, but was just as noted amongst guitar aficionados for his tinkering with the electric guitar, designing his own instruments out of the remains of guitars that he had dismembered in his own workshop. Greg Ginn, guitarist for Black Flag, ran his own amateur radio supply shop before forming the band, and named his noted independent record label, SST, after the solid state transistors that he used in his own tinkering. This paper explores the ways in which music-based tinkering played a part in the construction of virtuosity around the figure of Van Halen, and the definition of artistic ‘independence’ for the more confrontational Black Flag. It further posits that tinkering in popular music cuts across musical genres, and joins music to broader cultural currents around technology, such as technological enthusiasm, the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos, and the use of technology for the purposes of fortifying masculinity