The one artist Brian May said “basically invented” rock guitar
There’s hardly anyone that could accurately recreate what Brian May brought to the electric guitar.
He may not have been the flashiest player of his time or anything, but the fact that he built his own guitar from scratch and could create harmonies layered on top of each other for every Queen song put him in a league of players who can be recognised within the first five notes they play. But while May did have a distinctive sound, there were always bigger giants that helped steer him in the right direction.
Because when listening to Queen’s first albums, you can feel the influence from the other hard rock bands that were cribbing from at the time. They weren’t hacks by any means, but if you look at the kind of music that they were writing on their debut album, for instance, it feels like a slightly cleaner version of what a band like Led Zeppelin might have been doing a few years down the road.
And when they started to gain a foothold in the industry, it’s hard to think of any of their albums as sounding exactly the same. They wanted to work with anything they could get their hands on at the time, and while May’s guitar always stayed the same, it wasn’t that hard for him to shoehorn it into everything from a showtune to a massive rock and roll epic to the most facetious pop songs anyone had ever heard.
While Queen have had their moments as true pioneers of popular music, it wasn’t like all of their songs were focused squarely on rock and roll. That was simply one element of their music half the time, and if anyone wanted to crank up the volume and air guitar along to their favourite tunes, they couldn’t have done much better than listening to people like Pete Townshend.
Aside from being the sole writer of The Who, Townshend truly believed in the spirit of rock and roll whenever he performed. There was a lot more focus on the humorous side of their sound whenever Keith Moon was behind the drumkit, but if you were to take a song like ‘Baba O’Riley’ and bottle up that kind of feeling, anyone would give everything they had to feel the same way they felt when they heard those ringing power chords that Townshend starts the tune off with.
There had been plenty of rock and roll before The Who, but May knew anyone wanting to play guitar needed to take notes from what he did, saying, “I can’t imagine Rock Guitar without Pete Townshend. Looking back, it seems to me he basically invented it! Townshend brought to the scene a blistering clang of super-amplified but not over-saturated chords – razor-edged monoliths crashing angrily through our brains, biting rhythmic hammer blows which would change the likes of me forever.”
If you were to take out the attitude behind every one of Townshend’s strums, though, a lot of what made him so alluring to someone like May was how much he was focused on the big picture. He was also looking at every song like a studio technician, and while he had a vision for what he wanted a few Who tracks to be, no one has been able to realise one of their albums from front to back in the same way Townshend did when making records like Quadrophenia.
Queen had learned how to make their brand of rock and roll sound extravagant, but with Townshend, those massive power chords were the cherry on top of everything. He liked to add a bit of spectacle, but the reason why everything sounded so gargantuan was because he wanted to make an epiphany go off in the audience’s head whenever he played one of his tunes.
