Peter Buck meets Johnny Marr: The moment when two indie guitar heroes finally crossed Rickenbackers
“People used to ask me if I was influenced by Johnny Marr,” REM guitarist Peter Buck said in a 1987 interview, “And that used to piss me off so much that I said really nasty things about The Smiths…but I do like The Smiths. It’s just, when I came over to England, people asked, ‘Are you influenced by The Smiths?’ and I was like, ‘Fuck you! I’ve had two records out before they even started!’”
Guitar players can understandably be a little bit pernickety about getting compared to other axemen, especially when there’s a subtle accusation of ‘borrowing’ one’s style from a forebearer. Johnny Marr ran into some of this himself in the early days of The Smiths, when journalists began peppering him with questions about his similarities to the great Byrds guitarist Roger McGuinn.
“I knew a little bit about The Byrds,” Marr wrote in his memoir Set the Boy Free, “But I wasn’t familiar with them to the extent that everyone had assumed. I’d come to my sound through different early influences like glam and New Wave, and besides the influence of folk music, it was a coincidence that my and Roger McGuinn’s sound came out sounding similar.”
Eventually, all the comparisons to McGuinn inspired Marr to investigate The Byrds more closely, and he became a fan. Similarly, Buck got over his initial aversion to Marr’s band and became an outspoken Smiths defender.
“’How Soon Is Now?’ is one of the greatest songs ever,” Buck told the magazine Bucketfull of Brains in 1987, “And I just heard ‘Sheila Take A Bow’…that’s a great song, reminds me of T Rex. I’m sorry they broke up before I got the chance to admit that I like ’em!”
There is, of course, an obvious thread connecting Marr, Buck, and McGuinn, and that’s their prominent use of the lovely and jangly Rickenbacker guitar. McGuinn famously played a Rick 360 12-string on those ‘60s classics like ‘Turn Turn Turn’ and ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, while Buck, a lifelong McGuinn admirer, favoured a Deluxe 6-string Rick 360 in the black ‘Jetglo’ style with flatwound strings; he used the very same one on just about every single REM album across the band’s 30+ year career.
Marr, meanwhile, picked up a standard Rickenbacker 330 Jetglo as his original guitar of choice in The Smiths, believing its unique tone “would make it more difficult to fall into an automatic rock technique, and from a sound point of view it wouldn’t be bluesy. It suited me perfectly, and it steered me towards writing new songs like ‘You’ve Got Everything Now’ and ‘Still Ill’.”
While Buck and Marr certainly drew plenty of comparisons to each other during the relatively brief overlap of REM and The Smiths in the mid-1980s, their styles weren’t actually all that similar, save for the ringing tones of their Rick-created arpeggios. The fact that both men were also the silent knights of arguably the most influential college rock bands on either side of the Atlantic was probably a bigger factor, as record shop employees and guitar nerds could happily spend a few hours debating which master of the Rickenbacker would win a riff fight.
Multiple generations of Rickenbacker enthusiasts came to appreciate Buck and Marr as two of the chief ambassadors for the instrument, but well into the 2000s, any thought of them somehow joining forces remained a pipe dream. After all, REM didn’t need another guitar player, and if some other band wanted a hired gun, they might recruit Buck or Marr, but certainly not both of them.
The circumstances that finally set the stage for the unlikely Buck and Marr guitar summit began in 2006, when Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock invited Marr to join his band. Marr, always open to a new collaboration, accepted and would spend the next three years recording and touring with the band.
During that period, in the summer of 2008, Modest Mouse booked a few gigs as an opening act on what would prove to be REM’s final world tour, supporting the album Accelerate. By this point, any old rivalries or resentment from the ‘80s were long since buried, and Peter Buck and Johnny Marr had only gained a stronger respect for one another.
“Peter and I were already friendly, having hung out together in Portland,” Marr wrote in his memoir, but this arena tour was going to offer up an opportunity they’d never had before; one that believers in the Rickenbacker doctrine had fantasised about since first trying to learn the licks to ‘Wolves, Lower’ and ‘Girl Afraid.’ “I saw [Peter] holding his set list one day,” Marr recalled, “And I grabbed a pen and wrote ‘Fall On Me’ on it because it was my favourite REM song. The band added it to their set, and they asked me to play it with them every night in the encore.”
Marr had mostly been playing a Fender Jaguar with Modest Mouse, but for these encore performances, he provided the nerds in the audience (including yours truly at a show in Chicago) with the fan service they desired, breaking out his Jetglo Rick to ‘duet’ with Peter Buck; the two jangle-rock icons playing back-to-back to each other, clearly enjoying the moment.
‘Fall On Me’ isn’t the most complex or bombastic REM song, and Buck and Marr’s collaboration on it wasn’t exactly a Jeff Beck vs Eric Clapton technical showcase. If you happened to grow up with Smiths and REM posters on your bedroom wall, however, basking in the chiming perfection of those guitar-first 1980s records, then seeing your two heroes together on stage was a magical moment, and a fine advertisement for the timelessness of the glorious Rickenbacker.
