All Episodes

Things were hurtling rapidly forward. We had shaved the mustaches and the sideburns. We were aerobicizing. We were moonwalking. Every garage housed fuel-injected cylinders, and in every living room sat a teenager twisting a Rubik's Cube and winning at Pitfall. (Or a nice game of chess.) And as our home entertainment was chasing Moore's Law, so was our guitar technique. In the '80s, the relentless pursuit of perfection turned rock guitar into a kind of pre-Wright Brothers scramble for innovation. Eddie Van Halen, the decade's spiritual mentor, had blasted away convention with his iconoclastic tapping technique. For kids around the world, that was all the cue card we needed. The next breakthrough would come from us.

Our pedals were digital and our headstocks were pointy. But our riffs were another story. They were still stuck in the past. And they were defiant. They hung out at the bar, dancing the hustle, and refused to leave even after the lights were turned on. Someone called security. And it turned out to be a long-distance call: all the way to Sweden. Yngwie Malmsteen fused advanced technique with classical motifs to a degree few foresaw and fewer still could emulate. That the genesis was Yngwie's idiosyncratic idolatry of classic rock guitar heroes and vintage gear was ironic, because his technical mastery fit perfectly with the prevailing vision of modernity. In an era of shiny and new, Yngwie had crafted a world of anachronistic fantasy. And overnight, it became the future.

While Eddie's feats of fretboard wizardry often involved the sly subversion of traditional playing techniques, it was Yngwie's rigorous and utter domination of them that was so shocking. And when guitarists attempted to match his athleticism, we ran headlong into an old foe: the pick itself. From the moment that we learned there was life outside the blues, there was trouble. Scales and arpeggios, and devilish mixtures thereof, posed a host of torturous challenges that players in genres as far afield as jazz and bluegrass were already, unfortunately, all too familiar with.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the wolf DNA of the blues diversified into myriad new forms of musical expression. The essential nature of rock as a vast recombinant conversation became only more apparent as recording media were developed which could capture its subtle evolution for the future. But modern guitarists, with our rewinding tape decks, still had trouble copping solos note-for-note. The inherent imperfection of deciphering someone else's rapid playing was actually a default source of creativity, as ideas were inadvertently transformed from one ear to the next. So what would happen, then, if you found a way to instantly freeze everything you heard?

As the decade drew to a close, the pages of guitar magazines swelled with an eclectic palette of colors: heavy metal heroes and prog fantasists were now joined by the hometown hues of country and bluegrass. David Lee Roth built an MTV juggernaut around a music school alumnus. And an instrumental guitar solo by an underground fusion artist from Texas would eventually score a top-5 billboard hit and a Grammy. The limelight was as bright as ever, but the set design was no longer neon. Somewhere in the distance, beyond the smoke machines and the flaming gongs, we felt the first muted tremors of change. The message was clear: adapt.

The path of discovery is less a gradual slog than a punctuated equilibrium of sudden insights. A chance meeting of CPU and sound had turned a toy synthesizer into the ultimate musical x-ray. Like a glass-bottom boat, it opened a window on a world that had existed only in imagination. But as the pile of data grew, so did the frustration. Peeling back the armor of the guitar colossi only revealed even more complex rigging underneath. Rock videos and record collections had failed to provide all the answers. And this felt like a defeat. But that's only because they had taken us as far as they could go. What we really needed now was a change of scenery.

We sat in the front row. We took good notes. We did the readings. We had good class participation. We even aced the midterm. But none of it would matter: They cancelled the course. If the '80s had arrived like a vortex, instantly dispersing the sweaty haze of disco and decadence, their sudden, unheralded departure was all the more striking. The wholesale abandonment of fretboard frippery was so swift, that by the turn of the decade, any recording featuring two-handed tapping may as well have been delivered directly to a sandy sarcophagus. The search for clues to the mystery of guitar mastery could no longer take place on pop radio. But that only made it that much more urgent.

If the secret sauce of a liberal education could be boiled down to one ingredient, it wouldn't be humanities, and it wouldn't even be beer. (Though a case could be made for sweatpants.) No, the ultimate enabler of the examined life would have to be none other than the singular catalyst of all great ideas since Pythagoras quit his day job at Dairy Queen: free time. In the summer of 1991, Professor Malmsteen brought his medieval music appreciation class to VCRs everywhere. While pre-med students were busy pipetting their titrations, language majors, with only verbs to conjugate and almost no papers to write, were glued to their cathode ray tubes in an effort to deduce just what the good professor was trying to say.