We’re back with Part Two of Axvault’s interview with Ed Gerhard. (Here’s Part One in case you missed it).

In the second half of our conversation, Ed waxes on the evolution of guitar music, the rise of a global instrumental guitar scene, and gives us a detailed preview of his forthcoming album.

Check the links at the bottom to learn more about Ed and his music!

Leading up to your first record was there a particular moment when you realized that you wanted to come out and share your music with other people?

Well I always liked to play. I always enjoyed performing for people. It took me a long time for me to get really, really comfortable with playing instrumental music. But I never wanted to do anything else. Early on I did some blues stuff and sang a little bit, and sang some singer-songwriter-y kind of stuff. But I was never really much of a songwriter, and I liked interpreting other people’s stuff, but it wasn’t my thing. It was really just an excuse to do something so I could play the guitar, and then I said “wait a minute”, why not just make up my own rules, and just do what I love to do the most. So I stopped that, and then when I realized that people continued to come out and listen, I realized that maybe my voice was scaring people away [laughs]. But maybe I could do what I wanted to do and not have to worry that I wasn’t singing, because there really weren’t a lot of people doing what I was doing. This would be probably 1977-78, or something. And there weren’t a lot of people that were really, like; Windham Hill [Records] had just sort of come and gone before my first record came out. So there were some instrumental guitar things happening, but it wasn’t really catching the world on fire, it was kind of a New Age thing rather than a guitar thing. But as I started playing out I got the sense that people did enjoy that, and the audiences were a lot more attentive and a lot more perceptive and intelligent than most people give them credit for being, you know? “Ah people will never sit through that shit! You gotta give them a barn-burner to start out with!” And I’m saying no, I can play three or four ballads in a row and go a little deeper each time, and people get that! People don’t want to have the same generic stamped out experience every single time they go out. People like something that’s a little different from the formula. People like to be at the edge of their seat a little bit, even in the middle of a guitar tune. Even in the middle of a real simple sweet pastoral guitar tune you can get people sitting on the edge of their seat in anticipation. That’s…[pauses], that’s a deep experience to have. And when I realized that my music was doing that sometimes—if I played it right—I realized yeah, I could have a career doing this.

But for me it always started with doing the work. It wasn’t contrived or designed to be able to go out and make a living doing this. There was no image or gimmick consultants or anything. It was just really all about music, and just doing the best I could.

Maybe that’s where some of the entitlement comes from? Younger players who are enamored with the images associated with playing guitar, but aren’t necessarily interested in putting the work in?

Well I think we all do that. I think as younger players we all want to imitate what we see, as part of our fantasy, to get us out of ourselves. It’s really a growth thing, and it’s kind of testing the limits of the universe, testing reality for ourselves as kids. What’s really impressive to me is the technical facility of kids nowadays. When I was 14 just starting to play guitar there was nobody who could do any of that stuff, even like the hot players couldn’t do any of that stuff that these young kids are doing right now. So technically, it’s really a great world. There’s all kinds of really crazy shit happening with the guitar, and I love it all.

But I do hope that the value of really good writing and actually having something to say, is brought along with all this superior technique. If you can marry those two things you can takeover the world! And I often don’t hear the marriage of really incredible technique with really deep, informed kind of writing. A lot of time’s it’s kind of a formulaic thing, you know what I mean?

Yeah, it’s like exhibitionism almost. Like, “Hey. Look what I can do!”

Yeah, I mean it all starts out with a groove and goes into sort of a formula, and you can sort of expect what’s going to happen. And it’s not like there’s anything wrong with that. That’s what a good deal of music is, you know, good Classical music. But I do like hearing somebody that’s not just coloring in the boxes in a formula, but actually making their own formula, and changing something. I like to hear somebody really getting personal with it. To me that’s the most important thing; feeling that personal connection with the music, because there aren’t a whole lot of players who really have their own sound—their own thing.

I remember as a kid, a lot of players really had that. It was a really great time, hearing that stuff in the late ’60s early ’70s. There was so much great guitar music that was happening back then. A lot of the blues guys were still alive. They had some of theBritish Islesguys like Burt Jansch and John Renbourn. You had some of theBluegrassguys that came up from the ’60s and ’70s like Doc Watson. We just lost Doc unfortunately, but when you listen to those guys, and especially when you listen to Doc Watson, there’s a sense of natural excellence that those guys have. It’s like cool clear water straight from the ground. Pure, and just the best stuff, you know? The best stuff that the universe has to offer. And a lot of times you don’t get that in modern music, that connection to the earth, that connection to the essential part of what makes music really peerless.

It’s fun as a technical kind of thing, but that thing that really led you play, is what I try—when I do clinics and workshops—I try to get guitar players to thinks about that. What is the thing that inspired you to play? And these are good questions to ask yourself. There was something that infused you with this desire to play, and what is that first thing you played that ever gave you that little guitar player buzz—do you play?

Yes.

So you know what I mean. When you’re a kid, the first thing you do right—like maybe it’s a D-chord—you get that buzz and you get chills?

Right. And that’s all it takes; something so simple.

That’s all it is; the simplest things. And people forget that. People forget that you don’t have to be good to sound good, and if you can stay consistent, and really stay close to the thing that give’s you that buzz that first time, you’re going to be in your zone. And then it’s up to you to sort of enlarge your zone to include other people, but if you can sort of start out in that zone, that’s the best. Play for yourself first.

Jumping back a bit, what you were talking about earlier was really interesting—about instrumental guitar music, or lack thereof. Because now with the internet there’s this culture of instrumental guitar music that’s kind of grown up all around the word. And people are covering a lot of the same songs, but they’re saying: “Here’s my arrangement of ‘Hey Jude'”, for instance. So it’s neat how that whole thing has developed over the past few decades.

It’s kind of amazing. You know when I started out doing this, after my record came out, the Windham Hill thing had kind of come and gone—are you familiar with what Windham Hill is?

No but you mentioned it earlier…                                                                                                         

It was a record label. It started out as kind of a guitar label, with a lot of instrumental stuff, but became kind of a New Age label with some instrumental piano stuff—real pastoral stuff that yuppies used to play at fondue parties [laughs]. And that got really popular for awhile, and then it just kind of went away. And then my record came out, right at the end.

You know, no music magazines were writing about guitar music. Acoustic Guitar Magazine wasn’t there yet, there was no internet. There was very little interest in that kind of stuff, but my first record came out, and it caught on. A few stations were playing it a lot, and I got out there and toured whenever I could, but it was kind of building an audience one member at a time. So I felt like I was going my own way. I felt sort of on my own. There were very few of us who were at my level out there playing at the time. There was Leo [Kottke] and [Michael] Hedges were out there and they were touring at a pretty high level, but I was grassroots. I was starting out in clubs and any place I could play. And to see the scene grow up so crazy around me, with [people saying], “Oh I’ve got four million YouTube hits”, you know what I mean? It’s wild.

But I guess the bulk of my career has just been not going away. I’ve been around for a long time, and I love doing it. And I love the fact that guitar music’s evolved and changed. I see a lot of guys who are resistant to that: “Ah what is that hittin’ on the guitar crap?” But there’s room for all of it. There’s a million ways to play the guitar and I hope I live long enough to try them all.

So it sounds like you’re going to keep doing what you’ve been doing. Do you have any other plans for the future? Are you going to keep making records?

Yeah I have a new record that I’m way, way overdue on, but I’m about a week away from getting it into mastering. It’s been a real arduous process trying to write and record and put this record together, but it’s finally happening and I’m really happy with it. I think the writing’s really interesting. There’s some stuff that people will not have really heard before—some nice covers as well. It’s a pretty well balanced piece of work I think.

I don’t know what the future for recordings is going to be for me. I still think of a record as a complete body of work, and this record in particular. I’ve always wanted to make records like Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue”. Nobody put’s on one song from that record, and if you do you’re missing an incredible experience. You put that whole thing on. Or “Sketches of Spain” [Miles Davis], you put the whole thing on. I like records that hold together like that.

And this record in particular, that I’m making, (it’s going to be called “There and Gone”), and the tunes really do rely on one another for their identities. Taking for instance, there’s a version of “I’m so Lonesome I could Cry” [Hank Williams] on there, and if I were recording that tune on a different record I do a slightly different interpretation. I was considering what the whole was going to be like, and then I’d get things whittled away or expanded or make things faster or slower to get everything to fit together, to have a narrative develop. I like narrative as a concept in music, that sense of unfolding. And then there are some of the shorter songs on this record that don’t have a whole lot of narrative to them. They’re almost scenic in a way. The put you in a scene or a place, a climate of some kind. But each tune on the record is fully formed and has a reason for being, not just to be a segue.

But the way you put a record together, I love the challenge of doing that. I want people to sit down and listen to the whole thing. That’s the ultimate thing; if you can make a piece of work good for enough for people to do that. The way people utilize music these days, I don’t know what it is, whether it’s just for shutting the world out or something like that?

Yeah. It’s almost like an accessory in some cases. You know people walk around with their IPods and their earbuds in their ears like it’s a piece of jewelry or a watch or something.

Or so nobody will talk to on the subway. The way these people listen to music is a lot different from the way I like to listen to music. But I do hope that people take this record and spend a bit of time getting to know it, as a whole.

Well I think we’re all looking forward to hearing it. Thanks for taking the time to sit down with Axvault and good luck with your show tonight.

Thanks a lot man. My pleasure.        

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http://www.virtuerecords.com/

http://www.last.fm/music/Ed+Gerhard