Original subtitles

Man, you know, who says you need to buy a guitar?

It's like a piece of sculpture. Wonderful span of wood varnish.

The whole aroma of it. Like a woman, you know?

You can caress it like a woman.

Every element, the wood, the finish,

and all the different aspects are there in the sound.

Electric conveys, like, amplification, energy.

It's all part and parcel of who I am,

is playing the electric guitar and bonding with it.

It's gonna be very interesting.

It's gonna be very interesting

because both are really, really strong character guitarists.

Both White Stripes and Zeppelin

were able to do something that was their own, was unique,

and had never been done before.

When the three of us get together, what's gonna happen?

Probably a fistfight.

There's a lot of soul in this guitar.

When Jack plays it, it just goes wild.

This is Edge's main... His main enchilada. This is the brain of the system.

It's going to be interesting to see him layering his effects.

He's known to be a sort of sonic architect.

l plan to trick both of these guys. That's basically what I'm gonna do.

Trick them into teaching me all their tricks.

We're going there to have a chat.

But it just so happens that the instruments

are sort of there as well, so who knows?

-What's this, Edge? -It’s a little... It’s a form of yoga.

It actually was devised in Wales.

It’s called Daboke.

Are you... What's the BlackBerry to do with it?

It’s just a little adaptation I've made

just to make better use of time.

Does Sting do this?

He doesn't do Daboke, he does some other kind of yoga.

I'm very interested in what hardware can do

to an electric guitar sound.

I love effects units.

They've always pushed music forward.

When he pushes a button...

Let's say that button addresses that unit, you know?

This button addresses that unit.

And it's very rarely

that he will use the same sound ever again in 20, 23 songs.

The guitars are set per song

with their output levels.

They're dedicated for that song and that guitar level is...

He sets his effects to receive that guitar level in a particular way.

I drive everyone crazy.

I drive myself totally crazy, trying to get the sound

that I can hear in my head to come out of the speakers.

It's my voice, that is my voice, what's coming out of the speaker.

That'd be wicked.

Take out the TC.

Technology is a big destroyer of emotion and truth.

Opportunity doesn't do anything for creativity.

Yeah, it makes it easier, and you can get home sooner,

but it doesn't make you a more creative person.

That's the disease you have to fight in any creative field.

Ease of use.

All right, sing it.

Yeah, that's it.

By the time I'm getting into teenage years, like, late '80s and things like that,

I don't remember that many rock 'n' roll bands

being around that were that popular.

Things were changing so much in music.

The technology was taking over so much.

Technology was heavily distracting everybody.

I mean, people started spending weeks trying to get the perfect snare drum

and gated reverb sound.

That's right. That's right.

So processed, it wasn't real at all anymore.

Just go up top.

lf you really want to get girls to pay attention

kick that chair out like...

Because of the amplification and the tactile quality of it,

you can hear the very, sort of, characteristics of each player.

People have just tried to stretch the limits, come up with new techniques.

There's always something new that other people are bringing to the table

that is to be reckoned with very seriously.

Dynamics,

light and shade,

whisper to the thunder,

sort of invite you in, sort of intoxicating.

Well, the thing that fascinates me about it,

and always has about the six strings, no one has ever approached...

They all play in a different way and, you know, their personality comes through.

During my time as a songwriter and performer,

I’ve kind of watched and felt that I was seeing the end of the guitar

as a kind of focus for popular music.

And yet every time I think it's kind of counted out,

it flares up somewhere else.

l keep guitars that are, you know... The neck's a little bit bent,

and it's a little bit out of tune, and I want to work and battle it

and conquer it and make it express whatever attitude I have at that moment.

l want it to be a struggle.

l have no idea what these are, but...

My early demos were real sketches. They weren't fully fleshed out.

That's interesting. That ended up...

It's the music that tells us the direction the song should go.

As writers, we start with the feeling and everything follows from that.

These guitar parts ended up in the final version,

so this could be discovering, you know,

those particular voicings of the chords and what have you.

Four, five, six.

Bono's actually calling out the timing.

That's funny.

Four, five, six.

'Cause the first section's in a different time signature,

so it was a little bit of a head trip to go between the two.

One, two, three, four, five, six. One...

But you can count it in different ways.

...six. One, two, three, four, five, six.

One, two, three, four, five, six.

Or you can go, one, two, three, one, two, three.

It’s like a waltz beat.

One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three.

When you start to treat the sound, you start to invoke locations.

As I'm working, I'm often thinking about, "Where is this?"

Where is this location?

Wow, there was a whole science block there when I was living here.

That's amazing.

We played on a kind of flat area over there with,

I wouldn't say a paying audience...

We all got up here.

Larry was back here obviously

and I think I was on this side.

-You were there? -Yeah, I was this side, yeah.

Actually, and have been ever since.

This was where we used to rehearse.

Now, this is really the very, very beginning for us, you know.

So, this was Mr. McKenzie's room, and he was very nice to us.

So, rehearsal was 1 0 minutes of clearing away desks and chairs,

and then an hour of

seeing if we could get anything together.

None of us could play at this point, really.

For a while, we would come and we would try and go through songs,

and it was really bad. Like, really, really bad.

The thrill was just being able to do it even if you did it badly.

Hello.

We're always worried about being satisfied.

When you become satisfied, it's sort of like you just die.

My name is Jack White, and this is my big sister, Meg White, on the drums.

Thank you for letting us into your home. We really appreciate it.

What can I do with three strings on a guitar instead of six?

It takes me three steps to get over

to play the organ in the middle of this song. Put it four steps away,

then I'll have to run faster and I'll push myself harder to get to it.

Meg and I don't even talk about what the first song's gonna be.

We just go out and play.

Think of something fast, hurry up and think of something,

because these guys want a show.

People know when something's fake

and they know when something's rehashed and rehearsed.

They know when you're telling the same joke between songs

that you told in Poughkeepsie last night.

They can smell it.

I play really old guitars, plastic guitars.

If you want it easy you buy a brand-new Les Paul

or a brand-new Stratocaster.

And this is my main guitar that I played live

for my 1 0 years in the White Stripes.

It’s a hollow piece of plastic.

And you got this at Montgomery Ward's department store.

Sears sold Silvertones and Montgomery Ward sold Airlines.

l want to show you, Jack, what the... lf you just take this and...

Yeah, that's it. Pick a fight with it.

That's what you gotta do. Pick a fight with it and win the fight.

He's learning.

I'd like to introduce Led Zeppelin to you.

On bass guitar, John Paul Jones. This is John Paul Jones.

On drums, John Bonham.

Lead guitar, Jimmy Page.

And myself, Robert Plant.

We were so comfortable playing with each other

that we could take it in any direction.

The four members of the band had taken on this sort of fifth element.

Passion, honesty and competence.

Absolute musical heaven.

Wow.

Boy, oh, boy, this brings back some memories.

Yeah, this is... Well, come straight into the entrance hall

and this is the hall where the drums were set up

and where Levee Breaks was recorded.

We had been recording in this room here.

Bonzo had ordered a new drum kit.

His tech, you know, his road manager, had set it up in the hall.

And when Bonzo came out, he started playing it in this thing,

and it was this huge expanse.

You're getting the drums reflecting off of the walls,

you know, this wonderful ambience to the drums.

Yeah, you can hear the reflective surfaces.

You know, it's really live and ambient.

We had a recording truck parked on the outside here.

And you'd be running the wires from their cables

with the mic leads, running them into the house.

The mics were put up here over the banisters here.

In those days, the drummer would be in a little booth

so the drums were just totally, you know, crushed.

This was quite radical.

After this you heard of other, you know, drummers

and bands looking for lift shafts and things to record in,

to get the height, you see.

We'd done three albums that were recorded in the studio.

And this was another approach.

As a kid, what was going on in the music

was as important to me as what was going on vocally and lyrically,

and it always was.

Just word of mouth and grapevines.

Isolation.

We moved house and the guitar was there, left behind.

It was one of these, sort of,

weird interventions of the guitar into our family.

It was just like a sort of ornament left behind at the house.

For anyone who could play guitars, they all played skiffle.

That was the sort of community project at the time.

Played on massive guitars and washboards.

Local cuisine.

Very, very English. Pre-rock this is.

We all weaned on that music.

It was like a sort of rock 'n' roll breastfeeding of it.

l went to school one day after hearing this stuff

and seeing Lonnie Donegan on the television.

This guy actually had a guitar and he was playing Rock Island Line.

It was like, "Wow."

And I said, "I’ve got one of those at home."

And he said, "Bring it along and I'll show you how to tune it."

Well, that was more accessible to be able to start to play.

Right, you could put a band together pretty easily.

l mean, you could get to know one chord and just strum it all day

and be having a great time, you know.

We were a little local band and we were playing around

school dances, and not even the slightest,

mildest consideration that that would go into something.

There wasn't this driving thing, that the minute you hit your teens,

you gotta be famous.

What are your two names? Yours is?

-James Page and... -David Houston.

And you're just learning to play the guitar?

-Yes, from a teacher. -From a teacher.

Do you play anything except skiffle?

Yes, Spanish and dance.

Do you? What are you gonna do when you leave school?

Take up skiffle?

No, I want to do, well, biological research.

Dublin in the mid-'70s was really economically very challenged.

The economy was in the toilet.

We just didn't believe that anything could change.

There has to be more than this.

This is not the only thing that is on offer here.

You want to figure out how you want to play guitar,

what your niche will be.

You just start digging deeper.

When you're digging deeper into rock 'n' roll,

well, you're on a freight train headed straight for the blues.

1930s, really scary version of the blues.

If you go back and listen to some of these songs,

I mean, you can't really believe that they were even recorded to wax.

Robert Johnson. Dark Was the Night.

Blind Willie Johnson.

"I asked her for water, she gave me gasoline."

Minor key, anti the establishment.

Questioning themselves.

Painful.

There's a tension in that music that you can feel.

It just feels like there's this place where, you know,

my soul rests and those guys were expressing it.

In the Bible, God cursed the ground,

so that the man will always be... Will have to work hard.

Whether you're a farmer, or a carpenter, or a guitar player, or whatever it is,

you have to fight these man-made materials.

Fifteen-minute guitar solos,

1 5-minute organ solos or the drum solos.

There was a huge element of self-indulgence.

Professional rock musicians who looked down upon their fans.

Those old colors were dead, and we wanted none of it.

Spinal Tap, that's a movie that I watched.

I didn't laugh, I wept. It was so close to the truth.

Music really was searching at that moment.

I'd listen to anything with a guitar on it when I was a kid, you know...

Yeah.

...that was being played, and all those different approaches and the echoes,

but the first time I heard the Rumble, it was like...

That was something that had so much profound attitude to it.

-Yeah, it really does. -It really does.

Now he's starting to increase a vibrato on his amplifier.

You hear... And it gets more intense.

Most of my day was spent going through these records,

listening to sounds,

or playing guitar with the sounds.

I was pulled in through those speakers.

This wonderful guitar playing.

Got to get to grips with that.

Just two people, bass.

Go home and see if you can play it.

All these old friends that I used to visit on a daily,

almost hourly, almost a per-minute basis.

Okay. Might get loud for a second.

As kids, we were so experimental with whatever was around.

Taking stuff apart,

we were always tinkering, always messing around.

We built a guitar when my brother was 1 6. I was 14.

Literally hand-wound the magnets to make the pickups.

Every little component.

Got wood from Barry O'Connell's parents' place.

Hand-carved the neck, hand-carved the body,

sawed the grooves, put the fret wire in,

every aspect, and put it together.

I mean, it wasn't the best guitar that's ever been made,

but it functioned.

Never wanted to play guitar, ever.

Everyone plays guitar.

What's the point?

I'm the youngest of 10 kids, and there was just stuff around.

A microscope, a power tool.

When you're in a family of 10 kids,

I mean, it's just a given. You're gonna be sharing all day long.

Hand-me-down clothes, hand-me-down toys.

Different interests, and everyone's in and out all the time.

Some people are walking to work, some people are taking the bus.

Competition, fighting for food.

You push each other over. You muscle your way into situations.

My brothers, a bunch of them were musicians,

bass, keyboards, played guitar.

I got really into drumming, playing along with the records.

Those rhythms got into me early.

100% only caring about music and rhythm.

I had a bedroom that was about seven by seven feet, really small.

There was so much junk I had collected.

I had two drum sets in there,

a guitar amplifier and a reel-to-reel and no bed.

I took the bed out.

I slept on a piece of foam on an angle by the door.

The thing that we started out with is a clear idea

of what we did not want to sound like.

Time to bop with the best in rock and pop on this week's Top of the Pops!

Top of the Pops was this longstanding pop TV show.

Most of it was pretty anemic.

If one out of the 10 items on the show was cool, you were lucky.

That was the only live music that we could get to see.

Making their debut on this week's Top of the Pops,

here's The Jam and an effervescent new 45.

One, two, three, four!

It was like somebody just lit the touch paper on this bomb.

So unexpected. I'd never seen anything like it.

And a hope for a new beginning.

It was like a switch went on.

If we believed fully in what we were about,

that actually was far more important than how well you could play.

Our limitations as musicians were ultimately not gonna be a problem.

I was like, "I can do that."

Total commitment,

getting across what you wanted to say in as straightforward a way as possible.

I started inventing chords to get that sound,

that kind of ringing sound.

Most people play E like this.

Full of a sort of rich, complex tone,

which is a combination of all the major elements of the chord.

I always wanted to simplify it and make it more pure,

and so I found ways of playing those chords where I'd eliminate certain notes.

So there's a more clear sound.

You probably hear it more... As opposed to...

Really paring it down to the absolute bare minimum.

When it's so simple, you can turn it up really loud

and it's got more aggression.

Is it right to the C?

-No, actually, what I meant is... -It can't be.

Yeah.

And then up to the hook.

-Right. -Are you sure about that C?

-Okay. -That sounds good, doesn't it?

Sounds great, guys. Roaring, yeah.

Punk-rock nihilism.

-There's a bit of the punk rock in this man. -l think there's some punk left in there.

Distortion, anger,

the punk ideal.

Guys or someone maybe who got picked on, like a lot of us did, in high school.

This is our chance to, you know, push you down now.

Southwest Detroit, a tough town.

It puts up with a lot and keeps going.

There was very few white families left in the '80s.

My family had a stiff upper lip.

Well, we're not leaving. We're not running away like everybody else.

I lived in an all-Mexican neighborhood. Mexican Town, it's called.

It was uncool to play guitar.

To play an instrument was

the most embarrassing thing you could probably make up.

But hip hop and house music, that's what everyone wanted to hear.

DJs and rappers.

It was very uncool to actually play an instrument.

There was no record store, no guitar shop.

Nobody liked rock 'n' roll or blues music.

By the time I'm 1 5, I'm playing more and I'm pretty reasonably accomplished.

Pop music was rubbish, so we weren't gonna be playing that.

Playing blues music, music of the Chess catalog,

not going with the flow.

Planning winter gigs, coming out hot, getting in the back of the van.

There's not proper heating in the van.

I thought, "This is getting really tiresome."

Sleeping on the equipment in the back of the van,

driving to the next gig.

Getting ill, heavy bouts of influenza.

I just thought, it's like beating your head against a wall here.

And I figured that it was...

Best thing to do at that point was actually retire.

So I went to art college.

Just as much as I wanted to play guitar,

I also wanted to be an artist.

It had always been something in me.

I wanted to know the techniques of oil painting, life drawing,

graphic design, sculpture

and the techniques used by the old masters.

You know, I apprenticed out to a lot of people when I was younger.

I was an apprentice in an upholstery shop when I was a teenager.

Brian Muldoon was the master of the upholstery shop

and he was the one teaching me, and he played drums.

Well, I guess I'll play guitar then.

So when we were done with our workday

we'd move the couches over, and set up and play in the shop.

Surf and rockabilly, Dick Dale, and trying to absorb everything.

He'd pick me up from school.

I'd start tearing down the furniture,

ripping off fabric and cotton off of old chairs,

gluing fabric to foam on weird curves,

tearing off all of the old fabric.

You can imagine all the stuff that's inside of a couch.

M&M'S, cereal, and babies' toys.

Here's how you sew a welt cord,

or here's how you sew a fly strip on the back of a decking.

He exposed me to punk music.

The Velvet Underground, The Cramps.

Really took me under his wing to be an employee and to play music together.

And then I started writing songs. We kind of became a band.

We got to put out a record and we called it The Upholsterers.

So, this song is Froggy Went a-Courting,

you know, the folk song, Froggy Went a-Courting.

But I’d never heard it like this before though.

l was really into the drummer first off, l...

Oh, yeah.

And this right here, it blew my mind here.

The Flat Duo Jets, two-piece band from North Carolina.

Guitar, drums and vocals, just like me and Meg.

I went and saw him play and I was blown away.

There was nothing on stage. There was nothing there.

He was using a little 10-watt amp and Silvertone guitar.

Headed in, what I would have thought at the time, backwards direction.

I had to reassess what backwards meant in my mind.

That opened up a whole new inspiration for me about the guitar.

I started to leave the drums alone a little bit.

The first guitar I ever bought.

This was, you know, brand-new when I bought it.

It’s just been with me ever since.

And when we recorded our first album with Steve Lillywhite,

we were in the studio in Dublin and we did the backing tracks.

And he said, "You know, let's do some overdubs with a different guitar."

l said, "What do you mean?

"We only have one guitar. This is the only guitar we own in the band."

I was 17, I think, the summer of '78.

And my family actually were in New York.

It was like walking into a movie for me.

I mean, I remember, not only did they speak like they did in the movies,

but the cars looked like they did in the movies.

That's actually how people spoke. That's actually what the place looked like.

It's a burden when you have a truck or a van,

because everybody you know wants you to move their stuff for them, you know.

So every time you get a phone call,

you're like, "Yeah, I'll come help you move your stove or your safe."

I helped my brother move a refrigerator.

Him and his wife started managing a St. Vincent de Paul store.

It's like a Salvation Army kind of store in Detroit.

So I helped him move a refrigerator there.

The sunburst. Tobacco sunburst.

My first electric. Just tremendous.

Just couldn't believe it when I actually got it home,

and there it was in the house.

Fantastic.

This was the one. This was the one that I was after.

I went around to the stores on the street

and found Stuyvesant Guitars.

Guitars everywhere, people everywhere.

This instrument was just there, calling out to me.

This Explorer.

I was really starting to go on my way then.

My technique started to improve. It became like a total addiction,

to the point where actually I was now starting to take it to school.

And I'd be practicing during the recess breaks.

And then it got to the point where the guitar was confiscated.

They thought it was going to be counterculture or something.

It wasn't doing any harm to anybody.

Not then, it wasn't.

So, when I helped him move the refrigerator, he said,

"Well, how about taking this guitar for payment?

"Thanks for helping us," you know.

And I loved it so much I couldn't believe it.

I was like, "Whoa, man, that was worth it."

I plugged it into an amp in the room and just could tell.

This was the kind of guitar that had possibilities.

There were songs in this guitar.

Twenty minutes in this store just defined the sound of the band.

This better work out.

I had ideas about modifying or kind of designing my own guitar.

I liked the body shape of this one.

I was trying to customize one of these Gretsch guitars for The Raconteurs.

When people take a guitar that's known for a certain sound

and throw it into a whole different context,

something interesting happens.

Knowing that there was a threshold, to volume,

I wanted to get more sustain out of things.

I bumped into this chap, Roger Mayer,

and all he told people was he worked at the Admiralty.

Did I have any ideas?

l had this record at home of a guitar that had a lot of sustain on it.

And I got him to come around and have a listen to it.

l said, "Can you get that?"

And he went away and came back with this phenomenal thing.

A distortion pedal which overloads the signal,

overdrive the sound and make it sound pretty rude.

This is what I’m actually playing.

That's it. The rest is the foot pedal, the effects, the whole thing.

You know, so if you're on an acoustic, trying to say,

"Here's my new riff. It’s a really cool riff. Listen."

Oh, my Lord.

Wow.

That's impressive. That's great.

It was a single cutaway, and I had this brilliant luthier

in Seattle, Randy Parsons.

And he made it a double cutaway for me.

And then I said, "Well, listen, I have an idea.

"Can you just... Can you put a silver...

"A Green Bullet harmonica mic on the guitar,

"so I can just take it out, and right there?"

I got this echo unit and I brought it back to rehearsal,

and just got totally into playing, but listening to the return echo

filling in notes that I'm not playing, like two guitar players rather than one.

The exact same thing, but it's just a little bit off to one side.

I could see ways to use it that had never been used.

Suddenly everything changed.

So, Jimmy, what...

You know, those early songs that you played on in the studio,

-what did you actually play on? -Yeah.

l mean, that I would have heard,

-like, there's all these legends about... -Well, sometimes you could hear what I did,

and other times, you couldn't hear what I did.

But, I mean, I was on Goldfinger.

That was fantastic.

Yeah. She did one take and collapsed at the end of it.

But, you know, it was huge, huge big orchestra in the EMI number one,

which was a massive, great studio, you know.

They did a lot of film stuff in there.

-And, like, The Kinks stuff? -l did some Kinks stuff.

-Really? -Yeah. I didn't...

l mean, you know, it all got out of hand, you know, about what I had done

-and what I hadn't done. -Really, it became, like, the stuff of legend.

You know, before you knew what it was, you'd done everything.

I was filling in, in an interval band at a club called The Marquee Club,

playing on Thursday evening.

And somebody asked me, said, "Would you like to play on the record?"

The record just bubbled in on the lower end of the Top 20.

Then it moved so quickly.

The invitations to do more records were so frequent after that.

An apprenticeship, going into recording studios.

"Can you put a riff to this?"

A song with all its parts, the verses, the choruses, the middle eights.

Feel free to add light detail on it.

The musical notation, you needed to be right on top of it.

I could put on all these different hats.

Film music or a jingle. "Well done, Jimmy, that's great."

By the time I was about 1 8, somebody played me Son House.

That was it for me.

This spoke to me in 1 ,000 different ways.

I didn't know that you could do that.

Just singing and clapping.

And it meant everything. It meant everything about rock 'n' roll,

everything about expression and creativity and art.

One man against the world in one song.

That's my favorite song. Still is.

It became my favorite song the first time I heard it and it still is.

I heard everything disappearing.

It didn't matter that he was clapping off time.

It didn't matter that there was no instruments being played.

All that mattered was the attitude of the song.

Jumping off into the unknown.

Hope and have faith that the next chord or the next few notes will come to you.

On occasions, you get nothing

and you come out feeling like a complete idiot

and that you don't know anything,

and you can't play guitar and you can't write songs.

There's this little house on the coast of an area outside Dublin, called Howth.

We decided that this is where we would rehearse,

leading up to the recording of the War album.

There have been bombs here before, but nothing of the scale of yesterday's.

And as the full implications of the number of dead and injured

and the destruction to property became apparent,

it's also clear that the South now has a serious security problem of its own.

Bombs going off on a weekly basis.

So many lives destroyed.

Perverted, distorted idea of freedom.

No life was sacred.

The crunch came. This one day I went into this session.

I saw this big ream of paper in front of me.

I started to get very uncomfortable.

There was no run-through. They counted you in, and off you went.

It literally was Muzak.

I'm not actually creating anything.

I'm interpreting whatever it is that's written down now.

And I'm even doing Muzak sessions.

Tearing my hair out.

And I've got to get out of it.

And I thought about it for a long time, for days.

There's this whole new world that's just opened up in front of me

and I have to figure out, "How do I get there?

"Am I not allowed to get there?"

Bono put it to me, he said, "You know, Edge, I think maybe if you

"would do a bit of time on your own."

I remember feeling, "Well, can I write?

"You know, am I a writer, or am I just a guitarist?"

This is it. This is the day of departure.

I wanted to get out there, and I had a lot that I really wanted to do.

The minute that I was in The Yardbirds, that bow was out immediately.

I shed this coat off of me, and then I wanted to try everything

that was breaking rules. I wanted to do things that sped up.

I wanted to do things that were like playing a bow and hurting people's ears.

I started to look for ways to get away with it

and not be some sort of white-boy blues band.

And we went and played open-mic night.

We were kind of in our own little world.

Meg didn't really want to do it.

I was pushing her.

If I put her behind the drums,

then, you know, maybe something interesting will happen.

She just played like a little caveman and a little child.

We started to form everything around Meg.

We saw a bag of peppermint candies.

I said, "Well, that should be on your bass drum.

"We should paint that on your bass drum."

By this time, I had found a red guitar.

This red guitar and the peppermint candy dictated the aesthetic of the band.

White Stripes became the big way to get away with it.

By having a brother-and-sister band that was, you know...

Red, white and black was the complete aesthetic.

And it was childish, and we're presenting ourselves

in a real childish manner, almost like cartoon characters.

And a lot of distractions to keep people away

from what was really going on,

which was, we were just really trying to play this, you know.

You know, still are, so...

l would just go to D with it sort of in a blues way,

and I was just singing a Son House lyric.

And then we go to D, then...

Floating around blues structures.

Did the press understand what you were doing?

No, I don't think they did.

l didn't think they had a clue what we were doing,

as each album changed in its sort of concept and variety.

The reviews were terrible.

They didn't understand what we were doing.

They gave the fourth album a one-paragraph review.

Now, there's a lot of material on that.

Black Dog, there's Levee Breaks, there's Stairway to Heaven.

One paragraph.

They didn't have a clue what was going on.

I just didn't even bother to read music papers after that.

This car bomb has gone off.

This bar has been raked with machine gun fire.

Total disregard for human life.

We're not buying into this.

I just remember being in a rage.

When you go past a managed forest,

you see a mass of tree trunks.

Then, at a certain point, you look again, and you realize they're all in perfect rows.

Clarity.

Clarity of vision.

What you've been looking at from the wrong angle and not seeing at all.

You labor.

You sweat to see

what you couldn't have seen from that other perspective.

I just remember just scrambling to try and put it down

before that moment passes and fades.

And picking up the guitar and that's what I came out with.

You know, I come in here and sometimes it's just not a great day,

but there's always gonna be something if you just keep going.

If you don't have a struggle already inside of you or around you,

you have to make one up.

These little things during the day.

Extreme feelings.

Something that made you angry or something that made you

upset or jealous.

You wrote the essence of Stairway to Heaven before you got here.

-Yes, I had... -What is your process

when you write a song?

l can't tell you what the process is.

It changes from one thing to another, but it usually comes just from...

For anybody who's writing or,

you know, whether they're writing written word or music or whatever,

it just comes from the creative spark, really.

It's all very spontaneous,

but, you see, the whole reason for being here was for that.

The double neck came as a result of Stairway.

Stairway was done on the acoustic,

with all these electric guitar string parts on it that build it up.

l thought to myself, "How am I going to do this on stage?"

So, it became a necessity relative to the song, if you like.

'Cause then you could do the six-string part,

the acoustic part, electric, of course, but the solo on this,

-and do the rest of it on the 1 2. -Right. Yeah.

Being a studio musician, you certainly don't speed up.

One of the things that I really wanted to do straightaway was crescendo and speed.

I liked this idea of movement.

Pulse, push.

Rise and fall in its intensity, in its power.

Light and shade.

Wouldn't I want to be employing that?

That was something that was gonna keep increasing,

building, accelerating, from the beginning to the very end,

like an orgasm.

Every night that we went on stage, it was living.

Totally living at every point.

The spark had become the flame and the flame was burning really bright.

That's it.

There's a total concentration on music and creativity and writing.

Pushing the boundaries.

Looking over the horizon.

Musicians that were absolutely on top of their game.

Great!

Nice.

Nice. That's it.

You're supposed to join the family.

You're supposed to become part of it.

That family of storytellers.

When it goes down into that break bit. It’s, yeah... It’s G. Yeah.

-D, C, C, G. -Okay. Yeah.

G, B minor?

-G, D, C, it's the... -Right here. I see. Yeah, okay.

The biggest thrill is creating something

that has the power to really connect with people.

That's why I took up the guitar in the first place.

What's the note here for the vocal? For me, if I do it lower.

Oh, that.

l can do the high, but...

Afraid I can't hit it.

-l can't sing. I’m hopeless. Yeah. -Really high ones, isn't it?

Whether I took it on, or it took me on, I don't know.

The jury's out on that.

But I don't care.

I just really, really enjoyed it. That's it.

l just noticed, I’ve been playing the wrong second chord in the verse.

-Have you? -It’s a B minor, actually, not an E minor.

-Shit. -Yeah, that's better.

For me, it was a much bigger world.

I had a voracious appetite for everything. All of it.

Music keeps progressing and moving on

and people come up with new ideas and new tricks

and new ways to tell the same story in a different way.

We're all doing the same thing,

attempting to share something with another human being.

In essence, we are effectively the same band.

We're a little bit more complex.

But we're really still the band that's crowded into the small little rooms,

trying to play with each other

and find those clues that will take us somewhere new.

Now, exactly where this note was l have no memory.

But this is where it was put.

I loved this whole idea of, you know, getting a band together.

So I was definitely gonna do something.

But if Larry had not put the message up, I would have been in some other band.

l don't know. It wouldn't have been U2.

God knows who it would have been. And if, you know, would l

be doing what I am now? Probably not.

I mean, I could be doing anything.

I'd be, I don't know, working in a bank somewhere or something.

The day when you pick up a guitar

and there's nothing coming through whatsoever.

There's no new pieces, no new ideas.

And that's the sort of gift that any creative person has.

There's always that point that that might happen to you.

Or you're too old to be able to pick the guitar up.

And we're just trying to keep that day far, far away and out of sight.

This one's called Claudette. After the actress Claudette Colbert.

My tattoo artist did all this for me.

He's really good at doing this on people, so we figured he'd be doing it with...

l bought him a wood burning tool, so he could burn her face on the side of it.

l made the pick guard, so it looks like a brunette.

And you come out and bring your amp out here all the time?

Yeah. Yeah.

It’s my thing. You know, I like to get out here in the elements and rock out.

Yeah, with the islands.

The islands I always find very inspiring for those long echo, delayed sounds.

It’s an actual theremin.

It hasn't got six strings, but it's a lot of fun.

l notice you have a picture of the Fab Four.

It’s actually not so much reverence for The Beatles.

It’s a kind of haircut reference for the crew.

We almost had an accident with a suit and a cell phone.

He was probably right in the middle of saying the words "totally organic."

Look at that. Somebody's put the lyrics to Glad to See You Go on their locker.

What a coincidence. Okay.

We used to play this song.