“Rediscover the beauty”: two guitarists that changed how Stone Gossard played
When a world-class guitarist tells you that your own playing shows an “affinity toward simplistic”, it doesn’t exactly come across like a glowing endorsement; maybe a back-handed compliment at best. But when Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard said these words to Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme during an interview for Pearl Jam’s fan magazine, Deep, in 2007, the intent was clearly to make a larger point about Gossard’s own evolution on the instrument.
“I think that that’s been one of your strongest things,” Gossard explained to Homme. “Just by the way you naturally want to lay your vocal over something and the way you want to play—two chords or three chords—you are immediately identifiable as Josh Homme because you have this style, this fingerprint… I thought about some other greats in music that have that sort of thing and I wrote down Neil Young and Kurt Cobain.”
Again, Gossard takes a bit of a circuitous route to praising Homme, here, but he does ultimately get to the crux of the matter, comparing him with two of his own influences and all-time champions of “less is more” on the axe.
“They are two people who embraced simplicity with such abandon,” Gossard explained, referring to Young and Cobain, “they certainly helped me rediscover the beauty of one note, two notes, three notes—particularly if you lay the vocal across it in the right way and the drummer is swinging it in the right way—how powerful that can be.”
Perhaps inadvertently, Gossard’s later-in-life appreciation for the styles of Cobain and Young—compared with Homme’s admitted foundation in those influences—speaks more to his own youthful interest in rock ‘n’ roll’s more flamboyant, fretboard-tickling guitar heroes. As he’d once admitted in an interview with Spin magazine, Gossard and his bandmate Jeff Ament started out in music with the dream of replicating mid-1970s Aerosmith and playing epic solos like Joe Perry.
Josh Homme, by contrast, grew up a punk kid, loving Black Flag, the Misfits, and the Subhumans. If anything, the guitar playing of Neil Young and Kurt Cobain would have sounded comparatively intricate and complex compared to that template.
“You know, with both those guys [Young and Cobain],” Homme replied to Gossard in 2007, “I have just learned over the years that when someone says that you sound a bit weird, really what that means is that you are headed in the right direction… It might sound awkward to someone at first, but it’s about acclimating someone’s ears to understand, to make weird comfortable. Forget about comfortably numb, how about comfortably weird.”
That phrase—”comfortably weird”—pretty well summed up something both guitarists had arrived at from different angles: that musical identity comes from confidence, not complexity. Gossard had found new freedom in fewer notes. Homme had learned that the right kind of strange can become signature. Different approaches to the guitar is essentially what has allowed rock music to remain vital and interesting for 50+ years.
Mastering the instrument on a technical level, or recreating one approach that’s worked in the past, will sometimes fall short of delivering the impact of playing two simple chords in a way nobody’s quite done it before.
