The Guitar Geek Dossier — wit and wisdom for guitar heroes in-waiting
An unfeasibly entertaining collection of 25 columns from Guitarist magazine by legendary author and journalist Charles Shaar Murray.
The Guitar Geek column Murray contributed to Guitarist magazine for almost a decade reflected his passion for the instrument, his encyclopaedic knowledge of its history and culture within a multitude of musical traditions and the finely-honed sense of the ridiculous without which it is impossible to contemplate many manifestations of Planet Guitar.
Aaaargh! Press now brings you the author's pick of his columns in The Guitar Geek Dossier. Your rock guitar blues — Fender, Gibson, whatever – Marshall amp traumas, guitar gear mishaps and all manner of musical escapades, never read so smart, funny and electric.
This is what you get ...
- Intro: Birth of a guitar geek, and how I got this way
- These we have loved and lost
- Guitar shopping for time travellers
- Shopping by proxy
- String theory
- Playing by the book
- A heartwarming Christmas fable
- The problem with drummers
- One size fits all
- Somewhere, Jimi Hendrix is 'aving a larff
- Pornography and advertising
- The heavy metal cockroach
- Does gear actually matter?
- Amps! Huh! What are they good for?
- The world's most irritating guitarist
- King Solomon and the Les Paul Sunburst
- Fifty ways to leave your band - or fire someone
- Classicism and it's discontents
- No ukes!
- Why do we play what we play?
- Sex with the ex
- Is this adulthood, or just the end of time?
- Smoke on the (40-) watter
- Cheer up! What's the worst that could happen?
- Wubbish is still wubbish
- Even better than the real thing?
What they said ...
"The Johnny Cash of rock journalism" Phil Campbell, Motorhead
“The rock critic’s rock critic” Q Magazine
“front-line cultural warrior” and “original gunslinger” Independent on Sunday
Charles Shaar Murray is the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award-winning author of Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix And Post-war Pop and Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century (both Canongate), later short-listed for the same award. The first two decades of his journalism, criticism and vulgar abuse were collected in Shots From The Hip (Penguin). His first novel, The Hellhound Sample, was published last year (Headpress). He teaches his "essential" Hothouse Project Journalism as Craft and Art course in north London.
He has appeared regularly in print for four decades, and has long been recognised as one of the most admired stylists in British pop-cultural journalism.
