Allan Holdsworth

Another chapter from Pity the Genius (and Allan truly earned the title)

Friends, Allan’s life was epic, beautiful, heartbreaking, just like his playing. I have added a paywall part way through the essay from the new book. Please consider bumping up to a paid subscriber. And buying the book.

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Thank you!

Allan Holdsworth: Sphere of Innocence—Wardenclyffe Tower (Restless Records 1992)

“Music is so huge…I don’t know anything!” AH 2014

I met Allan once—between sets at The Iridium in New York City, circa 2012. Journalist Bill Milkowski introduced me as the two began to converse outside the club. Allan leaned casually against the asphalt wall as the mass of humanity sped by on Broadway. He was thin, tall and looked with wry indifference towards the small gathering of fans around him. Bill said, “Allan, that was an amazing set, you’re on fire tonight.”

“I fucking sucked.”

“What? C’mon!”

“Bloody wanking.” This was, I later found out, Alan’s common refrain.

I wondered what to ask him. Given his self-deprecation, questions about technique seemed improvident, as did reverential platitudes. So I inquired about the massive, churchy reverb he’d employed for a gorgeous solo chordal intro. Reverb and delay settings are quite personal to a guitarist. Some like a lot, Metheny, Terje Rypdal, others use almost none, Jim Hall, Steve Cardenas. Bill Frisell had a period where he had a long, silky reverb, but now he frequently uses very little.  There’s a lot of area between to swim in. Allan’s was massive. To me it felt inspired by the grand acoustics of European cathedrals that I imagined he’d grown up near. My question interested him. He said it wasn’t reverb at all, rather a series of 8 stereo delays cascaded together. He began to describe a one-of-a-kind contraption he’d built, the delays of various lengths routed through a re-purposed early Mac computer, then sent through an “AMS” unit which somehow triggered various dingles and doodles and dattles, and after nine seconds he’d completely lost me. It reminded me of calculus class in high school.

Holdsworth was an inventor. He loved beer and despaired of getting a proper British ale in the U.S. Apparently to get the smooth head of an English draft beer you need wooden casks, and in the U.S. all beer kegs are metal. Allan invented a mechanism that would attach to the metal keg, and through some sort of alchemical transformation remove the carbonation to deliver the taste and head of his beloved ales. It was called the Fizzbuster. To soak the tubes of his amplifiers he invented the Juice Extractor.

In the 80’s he built a box he called “the coffin.” This was an attempt to get the overdrive tone he desired without turning up too loud. It was a 12- inch speaker enclosed in a sound proofed box that had a Shure SM 57 microphone attached to the speaker. The mic connected to a mixer, from which he processed the sound with his delays, and that led into one of two power amps and his speaker cabinets. If you’re not a guitar player rest assured that this level of engineering detail was extremely rare. And how did he even learn to build this stuff? Allan had a recurring dream of seeing himself from the back staring at a wall of equipment, as he heard a glorious sound, and upon waking he would try to find that sound, but never succeed. He might spend the entire day of rehearsal tweaking his sound with no music played.

Holdsworth invented a new way of playing guitar. He invented his own chord voicings, his own scales, his own song forms. He was one of only a handful of people to play the Synthaxe, a space age midi guitar from the mid-80’s that triggered synthesizers, and which he tuned in 5ths. He designed his own overdrives, sometimes using toaster wire, he played in an instantly identifiable, virtuosic style. No one has emulated him, and so far no one can. His first love was the saxophone, and he based his legato playing style on horn players such as Cannonball Adderly, Coltrane, and Michael Brecker. Imagine a basketball player regularly sinking shots from mid-court. That’s Holdsworth. Allan didn’t read or write music. He kidded his bandmates who needed the “little dots” to tell them what to do.

There are virtuosos and prodigies, visionaries and trend-setters. A genius is something different. A genius can’t be explained. His or her ability defies logic and most laws of the physical universe and may or may not have to do with technique. A genius could practice 2 hours a day and be one of the greatest musicians alive, whereas, well…I could practice 6 hours a day and not even make it onto the rising star Downbeat poll. The genius isn’t capable of thinking like other people and seems to have arrived fully formed onto earth. This is partly an illusion, of course. Even a genius works hard and goes through a developmental stage, but it’s quicker and more self-directed than most. Thelonious Monk comes to mind. Prince, Wayne Shorter. Geniuses can be notoriously circumspect about their talent. If you asked Wayne Shorter how he achieved a certain transcendent solo he might reply, “I’m just watching time go by.”

When called a genius Allan would respond with a shrug that he was “no genius,” he was “dumb as hell.” If effusively praised he would say, “Maybe it was something I ate.” He would have none of what I’ve just written.

Allan came up in the 1960’s working in top-40 bands and he played a ton of blues. He subsequently tried to completely excise the blues influence from his sound. In the 1970s, he was a sideman in bands led by Tony Williams, Bill Bruford, and Soft Machine. He was obviously a singular talent. But nothing could prepare the listener for his breakthrough solo record, IOU. This was something brand new in electric music. Its epic scope and original compositional style were leaps and bounds above what he'd done before.

Around this time the powers that be decided they wished to make Allan famous.

He was signed to Warner Brothers records, Eddie Van Halen was set to help him, and the acclaimed pop producer Ted Templeman was brought in. It was a disaster. Allan was supposed to wait till Van Halen was done with a tour to begin the record, however, he was impatient and brought the band into the studio with Templeman, who began by refusing to let him use his own singer. They wanted someone who was a star. Finally Jack Bruce was brought in. But would Jack sell records? The whole thing was recorded twice with differing personnel, and Allan lost interest in the effort due to creative differences with Templeman.  If you listen to Holdsworth for even one minute you know that this man's priorities have nothing to do with fame. Certainly he wanted to be successful, to make enough money to live comfortably, but he had zero interest in games and pop mentality. Everyone walked away angry, and from then on Holdsworth released records on small independent labels. None of them sold very well. He was always broke. Sometimes to fund a record he would sell his gear.

To some Holdsworth’s music sounds like pure athleticism, perhaps entertaining in the way a sports event is. It certainly has its share of “chops.” He and his band demonstrate bravura technique at every turn. And yet he purposely tried to avoid any of the “jazz fusion cliches” of the day, for instance fast unison lines. Unlike so many metal speed demons Allan plays extraordinarily lyrical lines. The huge sound of the drums, the saturating sound of synthesizers are not to everyone’s taste. But behind it all are beautiful, big-hearted compositions, his tone is like a violin, there’s an ache to it, a questing sound, a longing. Take away the rhythm section and some songs can sound deeply romantic.  At times I feel a certain sadness, or perhaps it’s vulnerability, behind his writing.

Allan grew up in Bradford, a working class mill town in West Yorkshire, England. Bradford was always “gray skies and rain pissing down,” he said. A depressing place. He couldn't wait to get out of there. He was born in 1945, a so-called war baby, raised by his grandparents, his birth father was a Canadian soldier whom he never met. Until around the age of 10 he was told that his mother was his sister. One time the band had a layover in Calgary where Allan believed his birth father lived. He found a phone book, this was the early 90s, and there was his father's name and number. He tore the page out of the phone book. Sometime later he went through the official process of requesting a meeting. However, his father denied the request.

His intricate harmony avoids cadences, he disdained dominant chords. Most of his songs have no discernible key center. They’re made-up of major and minor chords that work in cycles that Allan had no interest in explaining. He claimed to not know what he was doing. “It’s just a load of rubbish,” he’d say, “I dunno ‘Jack Cheese’ like you Berklee boys.” He loved modulations, harmony that would change seamlessly so when an idea returned it was always different yet recognizable. He called it a magic puzzle. A recurrent theme might show up in a through-composed piece a minor third or half step up.

 As a young man he never listened to traditional music, his only teacher was his father, who was a pianist, which explained his fondness for wide-spaced voicings. He was an auto-didact, and at one point catalogued every scale that was mathematically possible in one then two octaves. He saw the guitar neck as a big abacus and would visualize all available notes. Though he never analyzed any piece of music his inspirations were Ravel, Debussy, Bartok, and Stravinsky. He didn’t listen much to guitar players. Allan’s hands were huge, he employed huge finger stretches that yielded never-seen voicings. The only person who’s come close to this kind of left- hand work is Ben Monder. Songs can change meter from bar to bar, unlike most of his contemporaries he almost never sits on a one-chord vamp. There’s a sense that everything is airborne, and perhaps not even of this earth. One could employ any number of useless superlatives regarding his speed. It simply doesn’t seem possible. What more can be said?

The piece I’ve chosen, Sphere of Innocence, is through-composed. The structure is oblique, it’s a series of verses where themes keep revealing themselves in new harmonies, as if a single idea kept reinventing itself. The chord changes are achingly beautiful, evolving, moving forward and yet feeling maze-like. When I began to learn this piece I came upon voicings that told me to research his tuning. Ah ha! His guitar is tuned in 5ths (F,C,G,D,A,E). This gives the chords a wide, open feel and the tuning alone sets it apart from any other guitar composition. And it is a guitar piece. You can tell he wrote it on the instrument. The solo form is its own entity, referencing the opening but not repeating it. To me this is one of the most gorgeous pieces of music ever written for the instrument.

Listening to Allan can, for me, be draining after a while because so much information goes by. This is one reason I chose this track, because it shows a more quiet, intimate side. I suppose it’s rare that a player who can shred like Allan chooses not to. It must be like driving a race car. If it can go fast, it must go fast. And what a thrill this velocity can be. As one after another impossible phrase builds towards the climax of a solo the intensity can be overwhelming. Partly because of his astonishing technique Allan was constantly being called by journalists and fans the greatest guitar player in the world. He hated that. Once when the band approached a venue Allan noticed that the marquee called him a “guitar god.” Horrified, he grabbed a cloth and erased those words from the chalkboard.

Allan's life was filled with drama. A breakup with his wife around 2000 caused a rupture that never entirely healed. He lost interest in the guitar for a few years. He also began to drink more heavily, moving from beer to gin. Allan recorded only one solo record between 2000 and 2017 the year he died. He began many projects that he never finished. He might record something at night and erase it come morning. All other late-career releases were compilations or live recordings. By 2015 he told a friend backstage after a show that he was finished. “I can't do it anymore, I've had it.” He'd said such things before. But this time he meant it.

Vernon Reid once said to me “You know—life is so unfair. Why couldn’t one of those one percenters peel off enough money to make Allan comfortable? Just write him a check, you know? I mean this was Allan Holdsworth—and…”

 True—but I wonder. Would all the money in the world have brought Allan Holdsworth peace or contentment? This gentle, humble soul was endowed with superhuman traits, he cut out a solitary path, setting new standards for what’s possible on the electric guitar. But happiness was as elusive as that sound he kept hearing in his dreams.