For a musician like Paul Stanley, “flash” was never a bad word in rock and roll.
Sure, Kiss could have made great music if they had played their signature tunes without the makeup, but would people have really cared about listening to a tune like ‘Strutter’ if they didn’t see the ‘Star Child’ in massive heels prancing around the stage every single time they performed? As far as they were concerned, the flash was half the reason why the gig was fun, but Stanley was always aware of those people who could be flashy with only a guitar in their hand.
Then again, it’s not like Stanley needed a ton of lead guitar skills to be an excellent frontman. Every member of the original lineup of Kiss never claimed to be the greatest musicians when they first started, but what they lacked in technical ability they made up for with their ear. They knew how to create hooks, and even if a tune like ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’ is fairly easy from a guitar perspective, there’s a reason why it’s remembered more often than most prog-rock exercises.
But there’s a fine line between getting the right hook whenever you play and actually caring about the instrument. Beyond their musical masks, all four of the original members were songwriters in their own right, and they wanted to be respected as such. And while Stanley’s solo album gave people an idea of the kind of singer-songwriter chops he had, he didn’t shy away from the guitar gods he had been following for years.
Although Stanley normally gets the reputation for being the eternal rhythm guitarist alongside people like Malcolm Young and Keith Richards, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, either. Anyone can spend years practising their rhythm playing, and by sticking to the riffs, Stanley has helped create the biggest moments in the group’s career, whether that’s the opening riff that kicks off ‘Detroit Rock City’ or the marching beat in ‘Love Gun’. Being a great rhythm player is impressive enough, but the true standouts are those who can do both lead and rhythm at the same time.
It sounds like it would be an impossible task, but Stanley saw Lindsey Buckingham make everything look easy in Fleetwood Mac. It certainly helped that he didn’t play with a pick, but by sticking to fingerpicking, you could hear the guitar be broken up into a symphony whenever listening back to his tunes.
From ‘Never Going Back Again’ to ‘Big Love’, Stanley always knew he was looking at one of the best guitarists he had ever heard when hearing Buckingham, saying, “I mean, my God, the guy does the impossible. What Lindsey Buckingham does is timeless and genuinely unmistakable, and it made those classic Fleetwood Mac albums very special. I’ve never really heard anything like it or anyone else play the way he does.”
Despite the pop-flavoured tunes he would put on every Fleetwood Mac project, part of the magic of Buckingham is how simple every one of his challenging moves feels. It might seem like there’s nothing to a song like ‘Dreams’, but when listening to the individual lines bouncing off each other in the mix, it’s nearly impossible to figure out where every single one of them fits in the tune when trying to play it live.
There’s no way that anyone’s going to convince someone like Buckingham to throw on the Kiss makeup and take the stage with them by any means, the fact that Stanley branched out into more intense acoustic stuff like ‘I Will Be There’ is partly due to what he heard in him. Anyone can make it work with a few crushing power chords, but not many guitarists are able to make the guitar sound like two instruments at once.
