One of the issues with living in the USA is that occasionally you find out about events in the UK way too long after they occur.
So it was that today, I found out that one of the great and criminally underrated British guitar players, Mick Green, died in January at the age of 65.
I first heard and saw Mick Green when The Pirates (without Johnny Kidd, who had died in a road accident in 1966) reformed in 1977 as the punk-rock era blossomed in the UK. Several bands who could actually play their instruments sailed for a while under the flag of convenience provided by the punk era. Among them were The Police, XTC and The Pirates.
Reading about The Pirates' stage show, a friend and myself went along to a concert at the ICA in London. As a hammed-up piece of swashbuckling orchestral music played, the three-piece band hit the stage dressed in pirate outfits, and launched into their classic set opener "Please Don't Touch".
For the next hour or so, my friend and I both stared intently at Mick Green as he relentlessly and accurately produced what sounded like the sound of two guitars from a Fender Telecaster Custom guitar patched almost directly into a Marshall stack. I had seen Wilko Johnson play live, and he was reckoned to be a great exponent of playing rhythm and lead guitar simultaneously, but this was something else. Like men against boys, Green's playing simply blew Johnson into the weeds. He effortlessly sounded like two separate guitar players on "Lonesome Train", and created a wall of sound on "Gibson Martin Fender" that still pins my ears back to this day.
I later discovered via home experimentation that, like many seemingly mysterious guitar techniques, there was nothing that clever about Mick Green's guitar technique. However, I couldn't play like him (and I still can't) because his style relied on two devices that I have never mastered - the fast chop full string pick, and a massively heavy gauge set of strings on the guitar.
Most of the lead-rhythm duality was obtained by selective blocking of strings with the left hand. The classic example of this is the riff to "Gibson Martin Fender", which is an A major chord shape played above the 12th fret.
At a later Pirates concert, I wandered down the front to inspect Mick's primary guitar as it sat on its stand. The top string was probably a 15 or 16 gauge, and the bottom E was more like a 58 gauge - almost the size of piano wire. This massive string mass, coupled with the humbucker pickup on the Telecaster, gave Mick Green his trademark fat growling guitar sound, somewhat different to the sound that you normally get with lighter gauge strings on a Telecaster, which tends to be the more rattly jangling sound beloved of country music.
Mick Green's solos were not fast or long, and were not in the slightest bit flashy, but they were excitingly effective. I regard him and Steve Stevens as primary exponents of the "short sharp shock" school of guitar solos - short but exciting elaborations totally in keeping withe the fundamental spirit of Rock'n'Roll. Green's solo on the lead-out section of the live Pirates version of "Johnny B Goode" on "Skull Wars" is one of the great solo guitar figures, as exciting as Steve Stevens' solo on "Rebel Yell".
After several years of late 70's success, The Pirates went on hiatus for a while. I went to see a newer incarnation of the band at The Cricketers pub next to the Oval cricket ground in 1984, but that version of the band was disappointing - Johnny Spence and Frank Farley had been replaced by better players (including former Wings drummer Jeff Britton) and singers, eliminating the rough raw edge that is essential for this type of rock trio music. The band was too slick and precise, and Green's raw-edged playing, while as a effective as ever, could not bring the overall sound back from "too smooth" territory.
More recently, Mick had been getting much overdue recognition from fellow artists such as Paul McCartney, Van Morrison and Bryan Ferry, all of whom hired him to play on their albums and tours. He had been in poor health for a while, so his passing was not totally unexpected. But it is always sad when a criminally underrated musician leaves us.