My ears perked up five minutes and 18 seconds into “Bodhidharma,” the eighth track on Agriculture’s second album The Spiritual Sound. 

After a delicately plucked passage in which an electric guitar sounds like a piano, drums pound, the song’s epic riff returns, and Richard Chowenhill’s guitar solo explodes from the speakers. 

Chowenhill starts at full blast, his arpeggios scooting higher and higher up the fretboard. Then he hits us with a series of bends, yanking at the strings as they’re holding back an attacking dog. 

After riding an elevator of tremolo picking, he brings us to the next plateau for another series of diagonal arpeggios. 

Then he combines the two approaches, grabbing chord tones and tremolo picking them individually. This is where it starts sounding inhuman: insectoid and reptilian. He gives us a breather with some more hammer-ons and pull-offs before doing the special thing. 

I think it’s a tremolo pick tap combined with a downward slide. (It is! He teaches you how to play the solo here). It’s amazing Chowenhill’s able to pick so cleanly because he’s really making that string move. It’s the coolest sound on a record not lacking cool sounds. 

Chowenhill dances out of the solo with another elevator up, but he has already made his point. That slide down is the climax of the song. 

What makes Chowenhill a special guitarist is that people who can play like that tend to want to play like that all the time. On The Spiritual Sound, he only does it once. 

Sure, Chowenhill rips off some tasty solos here and there (check out “Flea”), but at no point does his own virtuosity overtake the music. He knows implicitly what some other great technical guitarists do not: when you play to please the Premier Guitar magazine subscribers in the audience, you turn off everyone else.

Because, let’s be honest, a guitar solo is kind’ve like a dick pic. In the right context it can be hot and energizing, but outside of that, it’s pretty gross. 

All of this is preamble to say that I’ve been taking a lot of dick pics late– I mean, playing a lot of guitar solos lately. And I’ve been trying to decide what they mean to me, how I can improve them, and how can ensure that it doesn’t feel like I’m just waving my dick at an audience when I attempt them.

If Chowenhill’s chops were a dick (this metaphor is really getting brutal, innit?), it would be a jumbo. Alas, my gifts are much less ample. While all the cool kids were in their rooms practicing sweep picking, finger tapping, and pinch harmonics, I was talking to girls, so I didn’t get my 10,000 hours in, and thus never developed into a shred-god. 

But, as someone with a only modestly luminescent still set, I know that if you showcase it in the right light, it’ll still shines. (There’s another dick joke here, but, c’mon, grow up.) 

– – 

Many rock & rollers, especially in the ‘70s and ‘80, built songs that climaxed with their guitar solos. “Stairway to Heaven” really speeds up when Jimmy Page stops dicking around with his 12-string guitar, and starts wrangling his 6-. 

But, I dunno, man, that seems a little ostentatious to me. You have to remember, I got into guitar via punk rock, and a lot of those bands (though not necessarily the best of them) eschewed the solo all together), so I’m predisposed to pooh-pooh its dramatics. 

That said, I do love playing a guitar solo, even if I don’t consider it the pinnacle of rock & rolling. 

I’ve typically employed them as either as a coda to a slow song or a bridge to a fast one. Lately, since beginning the garage rock band THIC MASC, they’ve mostly been fast ones. 

Garage rock thrives on repetition even more than other forms of guitar rock, but that can wear down an audience (and a singer) pretty quickly. That’s where the guitar solo comes in.

Let’s put it in baseball terminology. I’ve two verses with our singer belting their guts out. That’s the fastball. Then, to keep the audience off center, I slip in over the same chords with a guitar solo. That’s the change-up pitch. 

(For the record: a bass solo is an eephus and a drum solo is a rain delay/smoke break). 

I feel this is a perfectly acceptable use of my moderate sill set. My solos don’t bring the heat like the “Stairway to Heaven” and “Bodhidharma,”  but they give me another avenue to express myself while giving my singer a breather. 

Next time I’ll do a full feminist reading of the guitar solo as the ejaculating phallus, and why it’s probably time to cut it off completely, lest we all become covered in its notes.