Guitar Player
September 1988
By Joe Gore

A Blue Messiah Screams

"The early blues stuff that I like is the stuff with a bit of edge," declares Bill Carter, the Screaming Blue Messiahs' guitarist and vocalist. "I find that a lot of R&B revival bands don't have that edge – it usually sounds very middle-of-the-road."

A London-based trio, the Screaming Blue Messiahs dish out a truly dangerous-sounding blend of blues, punk and early rock 'n' roll. On their two Elektra albums (the 1986 Gun-Shy [9 60488-1] and this year's Bikini Red [9 60755-1], the band fires a barrage of angry, guitar-driven sings. Carter sings in an enraged bellow and plays guitar like a man possessed. His Telecaster-pounding is backed by a real Mack truck of a rhythm section, bassist Chris Thompson and drummer Kenny Harris. The Messiahs, however, are no simple thrash band. For all their frenzy, they have plenty of rhythmic sophistication and a terrific ensemble sense – groove predominates over grunge.

The Screaming Blue Messiahs don't try to reproduce a literal -minded '50s sound in the manner of some rock and roll revivalists. They seem to understand that recapturing the 'edge' of early rock and roll means more than just aping its mannerisms. Oh, they might slip in a warped New Orleans feel or some mutant Bo Diddley here and there, but they've managed to forge their influences into a unique and decidedly modern sound. They've even put their own stamp on the one cover tune in their repertoire, a smouldering version of Hank Williams' 'You're Gonna Change Or I'm Gonna Leave' (from Gun-Shy). In short, they reinterpret earlier styles instead of just regurgitating them. Carter claims that the subtle allusions to early rock and blues that permeate the Messiahs' songs aren't premeditated. "I don't really give a fuck where it comes from," he says with characteristic bluntness. "It's just a feel thing. I don't know how to analyse it, and it's not acquired knowledge. I think what we do is true, and that's it."

For Carter, feel and spontaneity are all-important. 'Someone To Talk to' (from Gun-Shy), for example, has the unpredictable, semi-improvised character of an early John Lee Hooker or Bo Diddley record. The song is sung from the point of view of a nameless soldier in the front-line trenches of a nameless war. Driven by a simple but powerful open E chord riff, the song picks up steam until, by the third verse, Carter's persona has disintegrated into an incoherent, babble-spewing lost soul. It's the scariest vision of apocalyptic dread this side of Robert Johnson's 'Helbound On My Trail'. Carter has no rational explanation for the song – "I just felt haunted at the time," he explains.

Born in the north of England in 1951, Carter didn't begin playing the guitar until he was in his early twenties. His first instrument was a Rickenbacker, "the Pete Townsend one" (probably and export model 1997 or 1998). "I was trying to do what punk eventually did," he recalls. "I liked the aggressiveness of the early Who, Capt. Beefheart, and Dr Feelgood." His first band, Motor Boys Motor, was formed in the wake of the punk explosion and featured Thompson on bass. After that band split up, Carter and Thompson joined forces with Motor Boys Motor fan Harris, and the Screaming Blue Messiahs were born. "The sound came together as soon as Kenny joined," Carter remembers. "He's a very loud, powerful drummer, and I just had to turn up, I had to go to 11, like the guy in Spinal Tap."

The guitarists that Carter acknowledges as influences are all unpretentious, groove-oriented players: Steve Cropper, Howlin' Wolf sideman Hubert Sumlin, and perhaps most of all, Wilko Johnson, the brilliant British R&B minimalist who played with Dr Feelgood and Ian Dury in the '70s. His more recent favourites include the Clash, the Gun Club ("when they're good"), and PiL's 'Rise' (from 'Album' [Elektra 60438-1]), which features Steve Vai. He's also a big fan of the Cramps' Ivy Rorschach: "If you cencentrate on what she's actually playing," he confesses, "it's brilliant."

Carter avoids the clichés of rock and blues soloing, in fact, he almost avoids soloing altogether. The solo section of a Messiahs song is less likely to feature generic pentatonic riffing than a searing blast of, well, sound, an approach that Carter quaintly describes as "kill, kill, kill!" Does he consciously avoid standard linear solos? "It's a combination of not being able to do it, and actually liking one-note solos and the one-chord sort of sound," he replies. "The only person I've ever heard who played a lot of notes and really interested me was Jimi Hendrix. I don't really have the capabilities to play the guitar in a conventional fashion."

Carter tends to be very dismissive of his own abilities; he emphasises his lack of technique and his ignorance of music theory. "I don't know the names of any chords; I don't even know the names of the strings," he claims. He also pleads guilty to brutalising his guitars, although he admits that "it looks worse than it is. We have somebody who puts them together again after the gigs. I just think of them as bits of wood. I'm torn because I have a couple of really nice old Teles, and I know they're just gonna go to pieces. It's not anything to be proud of, there's nothing good about it at all."

But even if he won't admit it, there's a lot more to Carter's playing than Neanderthal axe abuse. He's got a superb rhythm feel, and he pulls an enormous tone out of his guitars. He also has a knack for concocting cool riffs that are grounded in rock and roll tradition without being clichéd. The lines from Gun-Shy's 'Wild Blue Yonder' and Bikini Red's 'Too Much Love' (Ex. 1 and 2 respectively, see music notations) are both based on simple blues pentatonic figures. Each contains a short melodic motive (the C-D-F figure in the first and third measures of Ex. 1 and the A-B-D-E-D figure in the second measure of Ex. 2) that repeats itself in a pattern that moves out of phase with the song's pulse. When paired with Kenny Harris' straight back-beat, these syncopated riffs generate enormous rhythmic momentum.

Carter also has an ear for manipulating the timbre of his instruments. In the studio, he experiments continuously with his tone, drawing upon a wide variety of high- and low-tech effects. "I do whatever it takes to make it sound good," he asserts. "I'll play through a transistor radio if that's what we need at the time." He makes impressive use of harmonising devices (check out the brontosaurus-sized guitar sounds on Bikini Red's 'Big Brother Muscle'), and he gets plenty of mileage out of his Ibanez Harmonics / Delay,which he uses for both pitch-shifting ('Let's Go Down To The Woods' on Gun-Shy) and timed slap-back effects a la Albert Lee and The Edge. The riff that begins 'Sweet Water Pools on Bikini Red is a good example of the latter (refer to Ex. 3 below).

Here, the delay is set for a single repetition at an interval of about 200 milliseconds. Each note the guitarist plays is echoed one eighth-note later. The composite effect is rotated on the second line. (Actually, it's possible to play the composite line, but the delay trick produces a much better sound because the chords 'bleed' into each other slightly).

Some of Carter's best effects, however, are quite a bit trashier. "The sound of the car starting on 'Jesus Chrysler Drives A Dodge' [from Bikini Red] is an old fuzz box going through a Fender Twin amp with the tremolo on," he reports. In fact, the creative use of amplifier tremolo is one of the hallmarks of Carter's sound; he manages to generate striking sounds with an effect many guitarists find too primitive to bother with.Typically, he sets the speed of the tremolo to match a song's tempo (listen to the oscillating feedback wails at the end of Bikini Red's 'All Shook Down').

Onstage, Carter favours a fairly straightforward setup. He runs his Telecasters simultaneously through two combo amps, a MESA / Boogie and an HH outfitted with Gauss speakers. Aside from the occasional use of a wah-wah pedal, his only onstage effect is the Ibanez DDL. He's been exploring the possibility of having a wah-wah installed in the body of one of his Telecasters, to be controlled by a whammy bar-type lever. "It's a question of cutting a big lump out of the guitar and putting it in," he states. "It's gonna cost about $2,000 to get it done, because everything's got to be made. I might want to spend it on my car instead." He plays heavy-gauge Rotosound strings without a pick. For his occasional forays into slide, he favours "the mike stand, or whatever's handy." He uses open tunings, "only when the strings go open by accident."

Carter is well aware that the Messiahs are following a 25-year tradition of English bands returning blues-based music back to America. To him, the blues spring from real life despair. Some English bands, he says, have been able to assimilate the blues because England is "a miserable sort of place, as I suppose it must have been miserable where they were doing the blues." America figures prominently in the Blue Messianic worldview, their words and music express a complex love / hate relationship with a land where bigotry and random violence are the dark flipside of the big cars and rockin' music. On a more practical level, their career strategy is based on gaining a foothold in the American music market. The Messiahs rarely perform in the UK because, according to Carter, "it just doesn't pay – people would rather go hear some disco band." Still, Carter realises his music may never garner massive popularity. "I was an odd man out when I started playing, I was an odd man out during punk, and I'm still an odd man out. There's nothing really acceptable about us at all. Our faces don't fit, and I like that, but there's no way we're going to be the darlings of rock 'n' roll."

The Screaming Blue Messiahs are beginning work on their third album, one that Carter hopes will differ somewhat from the first two. "I don't think we've made a record that quite represents what we're about," he complains. "Everything we've done sounded safe on record compared to how they were live, like The Who always sounded safe on record compared to how they were live. Producers tend to flatten it out and make it safer than it would normally be. This time we're going to turn the guitar up. I want to make an album that sounds really raw."

Consider yourself warned.