Porcelain Philosophy 101: What happened to Daddy’s Old Guitar Mags?

One day, when I was ready to ‘finish’ a ‘project that I had been working on,’ I went to the bathroom. Sitting on the porcelain throne in deep concentration, I looked to the myriad of guitar magazines that were strew across the bathroom floor and started doing some reading to accompany my personal time. As I read chronologically from the 80’s that saw the advent of guitar rags like Guitar Player all the way through the new millennia, I thought of what’s happened to daddy’s old guitar mags.

When I was just a little Knox, I remember running home to beg my mom for cash so that I could go to the nearest magazine stand to buy a copy of the latest issue of whatever monthly guitar mag I was infatuated with at the time. Running home, I would open those glossy pages like I was reading a Playboy for the very first time. Pulling out my axe, I would go through the tabs for the month, learning all I could from my heroes like Metallica, Testament, and Pantera. Then I would read intently though all of the interviews of those same guys. What amps were they using? Why did Kirk Hammet use Dean Markley Blue Steel strings? Did the new Dimebag signature model come out yet? Finally, to help hone my craft, there were the articles by the contributors, letting me know what the difference between the natural minor and harmonic minor scales as well as where in the hell I was going to use them.

As my legs began to numb while I sat on the pot reading through all of the years, I noticed that they were slowly morphing from magazines that paid attention to the actual playing of the guitar to more and more senseless ads and scandalous stories about how some great guitar player got himself wrecked on smack and drove his car into a tree before finding god, checking himself into rehab, and deciding to record his first ‘clean’ album.

After comparing an article in an issue from 1985 showing how to incorporate chromatic climbs into minor progressions to an issue from 2006 on how to play a power chord in dropped ‘D’ tuning, I realized that these mags hadn’t simply been casualties in the war between paper and electronic devices, but they had slowly degraded themselves into paparazzi publications and soft-porn ads with well-endowed vixens strategically holding products with promises of sexual adventures that can only be found with the purchase of a fifty-nine dollar guitar tuner. What had once been a valuable resource for musicians had quickly been diminished to mere eye-candy.

Don’t get me wrong. I love guitar porn as much as the next guy, but in these older issues, there was a balance. You had your sex-crazed ads selling their swag, but when you were done ogling the models, you still had lessons that were going to teach you how to shred like the greats. Check out the transcription of any Yngwie Malmsteen tune and try playing it. Guess what? Unless you’re one of about 0.005% of guitar players out there, you probably cant! Yet, Guitar Player never shied away from putting those transcriptions out there; check out any Guitar Player mag from the 80’s and you’re likely to find at least one mention of old Yngwie. Pick up a more recent publication, and there’s almost no mention of him at all, unless it’s to remind you that he’s still not dead.

Old school favs like Guitar One and Guitar For the Practicing Musician have joined the fate of the dinosaurs and are currently rotting into nothing. And, what’s left are mags that are only good for masturbation material or to wipe with after you’re done with your biological duties in the bathroom, or we’re left with the internet, a free-roaming pool of information where you can find any bit of information, young or old, and likely find it for free.

I don’t want to mock the Internet for various reasons. First, I’m not altogether sure that the Internet isn’t self-aware and trying to eat me, but a close second is that I use it all of the damn time. Whenever I write an article, I check out several sources to make sure that I don’t sound like a complete idiot. But, as Shakespeare would say before barbequing, “Therein lies the rub.” I’m looking at information that has been posted by other idiots like me, usually drunk and belligerent, with some deep-seeded misanthropy that only serves to misinform and distort for malicious purposes. OK. Maybe it’s not that bad. Most people will likely try their best to put out the most accurate information they can find, but they haven’t dedicated their lives to the pursuit of music and therefore only have a limited knowledge of it. The old Guitar mags were great guitar players talking to the people. Now, it’s just the people talking to themselves. Which, if you’re like me, you get nervous when you start talking to yourself, no matter how often it happens.

Just be careful out there. There a definitely a few sites that are still trustworthy, besides this one obviously. Guitar World still tries to put their good foot forward by offering online content that should keep you busy until your fingers bleed. Gear-Vault.com is another one. The guys reviewing their gear are players who, while not big names, still make their bread in the music industry. There’s also TheToneKing.com where you’ll find guys who don’t push any particular brand but just give you the straight up on what’s out there, play it for you to hear, and let you make your own decisions. And, if you happen to talk to Mike O’Cull at Gear-Vault.com or Marc Johnson at TheToneKing.com, tell them both they still owe me money, and I know where they live.