Paul Gilbert has one of the most stylistically diverse discographies in rock guitar. From his time in the shred outfit Racer X to his Top 40 success with Mr. Big and beyond, Gilbert has carved path that sees him moving with ease from the guitar heavy music of the 1970s to the layered, multi-faceted world of smart singer-songwriters such as Todd Rundgren. His latest release is I Can Destroy, an album that finds the Illinois-born musician’s senses of facility and humor intact.
The record began taking shape in 2015 while Gilbert was on a guitar clinic tour in Italy. He spent most of his days riding in a van, jotting down lyrical ideas on his phone. When the tour ended he’d collected more than 40 ideas for songs. “Verses grew into choruses and pretty soon I had an album’s worth of stuff,” he says, speaking from his home in Portland, Oregon.
The first single from the album is also the lead cut. Inspired by some of the less courteous drivers he encountered while living in the Hollywood hills “Everybody Use Your Goddamn Turn Signal” is indicative of Gilbert’s musical and lyrical sensibilities. “I’d be driving along and generally get angry and go, ‘C’mon man! Let me know what you’re doing so that I can react to it,’” he says.
He adds that he wanted to write about more than the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle and the mundanities of domestic life. “I look for uncharted territory,” he says. “There’s so much pop and rock music where the lyrics don’t matter. That’s OK. I grew up listening to Led Zeppelin and to this day I have no idea half of what Robert Plant’s singing. That’s just part of the style, this blues singing that has so much passion to it that the words become almost secondary. But I don’t have the kind of voice that can get away with that. So I need to rely on something where there’s some meaning to it.”
Humor isn’t entirely his stock-in-trade. Instead, Gilbert sees himself as an observational songwriter. “I don’t set out to have a sense of humor,” he says. “I set out to be interesting and not boring and not pretentious. In a way, I would love to be pretentious. Some of my greatest guitar heroes, Ritchie Blackmore, Tony Iommi, have that quality. They go out on stage and they’re kind of dark and they don’t smile. They come up with these great heavy riffs and the music is serious. I love that stuff. It’s great. I don’t know if I could it. I’ve seen Spinal Tap, I know the truth. I can’t keep that straight face for a whole two-hour set. It’s not that I’m funny it’s that the world around me is funny.”
He points to a song idea he had while still in high school titled “A F**king Snickers and A Goddamn Grape Soda.” “I walked in to a convenience store to get a snack and there were a couple guys behind the counter and they were posturing. They were trying to be cool and swearing like crazy. ‘Goddamn this, f**kin’ that.’ I thought, ‘I’m going to communicate to them in their own language. I went up and with a completely straight face I said, ‘I’d like a f**kin’ Snickers and a goddamn grape soda.’ They knew something was off. I was speaking their language but it didn’t make sense. Of course my friends who were with me were, like, ‘Oh my God! You’re gonna get your ass kicked, Gilbert!’ There’s always stuff in life that amuses me and I can’t help but have it come out in the music.”
I Can Destroy features two songs that speak directly to his time with Mr. Big. Formed at the end of the 1980s the band was rocketed into mainstream success via the single “To Be With You.” After nearly a decade of constant touring and recording Gilbert left the group circa 1997, then rejoined in 2009. “I Am Not The One (Who Wants To Be With You)” plays on the hook of the group’s biggest hit while “Love We Had” serves as a tender look back at the group’s climb toward success.
“A lot of firsts happened for me with that band. It was the first time I played on a big stage and the first time I had a tour bus and the first time I had a video on MTV. The list goes on,” he says. “I experienced those things with the team, with the other guys in Mr. Big. Even if those things happen again in my life there’s something special about having it for the first time.”
Although Racer X had garnered some international attention it wasn’t a band destined for mainstream success. Mr. Big, on the other hand, had potential to connect with audiences who loved topnotch musicianship as much as songs they could sing along with. There was major management involved and almost immediately the quartet was opening shows for legendary Canadian progressive rock band Rush. To be part of that world, Gilbert says, was to know that he had arrived.
“When you’re an unknown and you’re not sure if you’re ever going to have a career, you’re kind of stepping your foot through this doorway where the people who are career musicians live. It’s really exciting at first because it makes you think, ‘I might really be able to do this,’” he says.
It was also a band that saw him take to the stage with one of his musical heroes, bassist Billy Sheehan. As a teenager in Pennsylvania, Gilbert’s band had opened for Sheehan’s East Coast workhorse Talas. They formed a friendship and when the guitarist relocated to Los Angeles, Sheehan became a regular at Racer X shows.
“Billy didn’t come up and say, ‘Join my band right now,” Gilbert recalls. “But our friendship did plant a seed and a few years later he did ask me to join a band with him. It was that gradual stepping through the door where the pros are playing. Certainly the music business is not like being a dentist where you go through a process and get a plaque to hang on your wall. I was lucky enough to go to a guitar school that was in Los Angeles and that really opened a lot of doors.” Gilbert was teaching guitar at Guitar Institute of Technology in Hollywood well into the early days of Mr. Big. He continues his role as an educator to this day with clinics, with his annual Great Guitar Escape, and via his own online school which allows him to connect with fellow guitarists via video lessons.
“The online school is really nice because I can listen to people,” he says. “There’s a lot of situations where you can teach and never hear anybody. If you do a big seminar or if you do an instructional DVD, then you’re sort of spouting out ideas that may or may not be useful. But if you can listen to someone, you can pinpoint areas they can work on that will make them sound better.” His online school puts him in touch with players at all skill levels. “In a way the most difficult thing is teaching professionals,” he says. “Sometimes guys who are touring musicians will call me up and they’ll come over for a lesson and I’ll listen and say, ‘You’re fine. There’s nothing to fix here.’ Teaching is a lot like being a doctor. You’re looking for what to cure. Sometimes it’s much easier if there’s something wrong.”
Teaching often places Gilbert face-to-face with his own legacy. “It’s like somebody holding up a giant mirror. It can be frightening,” he says. “I imagine that many of my students come to my online school because they know me. When I listen to those students play I hear the things that they’ve taken from what they’ve heard me do. It’s sort of like if you’re a chef at a restaurant and you’ve been serving the same beautiful meal for 25 years and people never eat the Brussels sprouts. You might say, ‘I think these Brussels sprouts are great!’ But nobody ever touches them. They’re all eating the steak and the dessert. In a way, I find that to be true of many of my students. They want to learn a specific lick from an instructional video that I’ve done and they’re not interested in vibrato or rhythm of phrasing or dynamics, this stuff that I think is so important.” In the end, he says, “They’re the boss. I want to give them what they want. At the same time, I want to continue the legacy of this music that I love.”
The music he loves best, he says, is the guitar rock of the 1970s. Listening to I Can Destroy one gets a sense that Gilbert is more influenced by the blues than some might suspect. Then again he did release a blues record with his uncle, Jimi Kidd, in 2002 and the players that Gilbert cut his teeth on, a list that includes Jimmy Page, Eddie Van Halen, Mick Ralphs, Mick Ronson, Angus Young, Gary Moore, and Brian May have at least one thing in common.
“They were all listening to blues guys,” he says. “Later on, when I started listening more to traditional blues, I would have that moment where I’d say, ‘Ah! This is where Jimmy Page got that lick. This is where Clapton got that little trill.’ It started to make sense.”
He also points to Ted Nugent, whose “Great White Buffalo” he covers on I Can Destroy. “Ted was one of my heroes. The first song I ever played live was ‘Cat Scratch Fever.’ When I was a kid I didn’t play ‘Great White Buffalo’ because it’s too hard,” he says. “There’s some ferocious guitar playing in that song. I still don’t think I did it as well as Ted did it. But I’m working on it.”
I Can Destroy is out now. You can learn more about Paul Gilbert at http://www.paulgilbert.com/
