Eddie Vedder on the guitarist that pushed music forward: “Plays through the holes”
Every artist who has ever tried expanding the palette of rock and roll usually has the guitar as their weapon of choice. No one has ever said that they are going to be the next forebearer of a generation of rock music by playing the trumpet, and whether it’s bashing out ringing chords or making lyrical solos, every guitarist has tried to cover new ground that no one else could have thought of before. While Eddie Vedder didn’t really have time for the Eddie Van Halen set of guitar gods, he knew that there was something a lot more interesting going on when listening to Peter Beck play in REM.
Because in the era Vedder was brought up in, the alternative brand of rock stars didn’t have that much to be proud of. They had missed out on punk’s first wave in the late 1970s, and now that the decade had turned a corner, disco was good and dead, but every other rock band seemed to be making the most toothless brand of rock and roll. So, if you wanted something heavy, the closest you would get on the charts was probably REO Speedwagon.
Vedder had claimed to be a student of many heavy genres, but when he picked up REM’s first few records, he heard something different. These Georgian musicians were playing the kind of songs that spoke to the deeper side of one’s psyche, almost like Michael Stipe was digging deep into your heart to find something no one knew was there.
Then again, no one was going to get very far trying to figure out what Stipe was actually saying, so that was where Peter Buck came in. Although his signature Rickenbacker had the same chime as 1960s acts like The Beatles and The Byrds, it was always about filling in the holes in the sound, either working off of Mike Mills or playing those sweeping arpeggios that made the song sound like it was swirling around the room as it played.
When inducting the group into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Vedder even marvelled at how much Buck could get out of just one guitar, saying, “He knows music so well; it’s this thing where he plays through the holes and invents things and hits spots that have yet to be covered, and thereby pushing the progression of rock and roll. I think about what he’s done, cutting a path for alternative music for bands like Nirvana and Radiohead and forever on after that.”
Even when Pearl Jam started rising to the forefront, Buck made bold new strides for the guitar. After coming up with tunes like ‘Radio Free Europe’, Automatic for the People stood as the group’s most haunting release thanks to what Buck came up with, like the guitar part on ‘Sweetness Follows’ or the way the electric guitar screams in on ‘Drive’.
That kind of reinvention wasn’t even limited to the guitar, either. When he decided to pick up the mandolin for ‘Losing My Religion’, the entire soft-rock regime got a second wind listening to him play, almost like he was trying to put a baroque twist on what a traditional ballad was supposed to sound like.
While Buck earned his keep by working in a record store for years, his knowledge of all things rock and roll seemed to congeal whenever he picked up his instrument. He wasn’t trying to push the guitar forward by any means, but by filling in those holes, he created a new vocabulary no one had yet uncovered.
