Songbook by Nick Hornby Read Free Book Online

any sort of solo illustrate any sort of plight, whether it be the plight of Eskimos, or the plight of a youngman whose girlfriend is seeing his best mate behind his back? Why are words suddenly suspended while the guitarist or the sax player or the violinist steps forward and does his thing?
    Those of us who were born in the late fifties and fell in love with rock music during the early seventies have a complicated relationship with the solo. I can remember seeing Grand Funk Railroad play in Hyde Park, and trying, with what in retrospect strikes me as a heartbreaking earnestness, to enjoy, appreciate or understand the twenty-minute drum solo; a couple of years later, older and wiser and in a late-teenage, pre-punk, anti-bombast frame of mind, I nipped out of Led Zeppelin’s show at Earl’s Court during John Paul Jones’s interminable keyboard extravaganza, went to a local pub for a game of pool and a pint, and came back just in time to catch the end of Jimmy Page’s bit with the violin bow, thus missing ‘Moby Dick’ (The One with the Drums) completely. I have no regrets. (Not only do I have no regrets, but also, now I come to think about it, that night taught me one of life’s most useful lessons, one of the only pieces of advice I have to offer to younger generations: YOU’RE ALLOWED TO WALK OUT! I still remember the feeling of giddy liberation I had when we walked into that pub; and had I not left the Zeppelin show then, who knowswhether I would ever have realized that it was possible? Oh, I knew that people walked out because they were shocked. But I didn’t know that it was permissible if you were simply a little bored. Since that night I have tasted that sweet relief hundreds of times: I’ve walked out of films, gigs, and – of course – the theatre. If you sit next to me during the first act of a play and my fidgeting is annoying you, don’t worry – I won’t be back after the interval. And let me tell you, there’s nothing like the taste of pasta and a glass of wine at nine-thirty if you thought you weren’t going to be eating until eleven. It is not overstating the case to say that John Paul Jones and his keyboards turned my whole cultural life around.)
    Nobody does the extended-solo thing any more – or at least, no one I’m interested in seeing live – so all fears of The Solo have long vanished. (And in any case, we’re talking about songs made in a recording studio here, not live shows, so the solos are almost always contained, and always involve a lead instrument, rather than bass or drums.) In fact, since the members of Grand Funk Railroad went their separate ways (although, like everybody else, they have almost certainly since reunited), I have learned to love solos; and, though of course it’s possible to find a great song which doesn’t have any kind of instrumentalbreak, I would argue that a great song containing a great instrumental break is by definition superior to a great song without one.
    There are two kinds of great solo. The first, and most common, type is the one where a brilliant (or momentarily inspired) musician steps forward and fills the allotted number of bars imaginatively – even thrillingly, if you’re lucky – but not necessarily appropriately. At the end of Steely Dan’s ‘Kid Charlemagne’, for example, there’s a guitar solo of such extraordinary and dextrous exuberance that you end up wondering where it came from, and quite what it has to do with the dry ironies of the song’s lyrics; ‘Kid Charlemagne’ is a typically clever, mordant look at the death of the sixties, but the solo that closes it is the sound of pure, untethered joy; the guitar jumps up on the song’s shoulders and then just launches itself toward the clouds, and as the song fades you can tell that it’s going to reach them, too. But what the sound of pure joy has to do with