Back to the future New Van Halen, Santana, Johnny Winter, and Living Coloür collections trace the evolution of guitar heroics BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Depeche Mode tried to kill it. So, in their own way, did the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. Prodigy, more intelligent electronica torchbearers, and a generation of loopers, turntablists, and samplers likewise gave it their best shot. But the tradition of the rock-guitar hero — a musician driven by virtuosity, pride, and faith in the need for evolution — will not die.

There has, however, been a shift in the cut of guitar heroics. The blues-based soaring and experimentalism that giants like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton plied back in the decades when rock was pop have been replaced with a sleek, textural approach. Today’s guitar-hero rockers are interested in wedding popular music with an evolutionary ideal that’s all about sound and texture. Think Interpol or, on the rougher side, Built To Spill. Even Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock fits the bill as he plays sustained, needling notes and tugs shards of noise from his steel strings while flogging out the hit "Float On" — especially on stage, where his parts become edgier and less identifiable as guitar lines on a weekly basis.

Of course, evolution is the mandate that all true guitar heroes have shared since Hubert Sumlin and Buddy Guy head-butted their way into the early 1960s Chicago blues scene — and maybe earlier, if players like the ’50s noisemaker Link Wray and the speed-picking surf guitar king Dick Dale are given their due. Current reissues plucked from the vaults of Johnny Winter, Santana, Van Halen, and Living Coloür — old-school guitar heroes all — reveal that common thread as they beg a nostalgic look back at the days when swagger rather than mesmerized swaying was the stock of master six-string blasters.

Winter’s Second Winter (Columbia/Legacy) started out as the three-sided, 11-song LP sequel to his debut. Both came out in 1969, and they showed Winter to be a player who could stand toe-to-toe with Clapton, Hendrix, and Jimmy Page — the era’s most electrifying blues-rockers — and retain his dignity, grace, and reputation. His tone was more blues-thentic, cleaner than the roar that came from the others’ Marshall and Hiwatt amps. So he relied on speed, repetition, and flashes of chromatic playing — that is, hitting all 12 notes in an octave instead of the eight that major and minor scales use — to create walls of sound.

At its most gentle, and with the application of an echo device and overdubbing on Second Winter’s "I’m Not Sure," his deft picking created showers of small, warm sonic raindrops. Winter also played straight boogie-woogies, and he applied a slide with the clean, grinding ease of unvarnished bluesmen like his fellow Texan and influence Lightnin’ Hopkins on tunes like "I Love Everybody" and "Hustled Down in Texas."

Clapton, Page, and Hendrix loved and played the blues with soul, but their innovations lay in using the style as a springboard for interstellar sonic explorations like Cream’s "Crossroads," Zeppelin’s "Dazed and Confused," and Hendrix’s "Voodoo Chile" and "Machine Gun." Winter flipped the proposition, bringing the whacked sounds of the modern age back into the tradition. That’s clearest on "Fast Life Rider," which weds wah-wah-saturated, fuzzbox-driven guitar to the martial drumbeat of an African-American fife-and-drum band — a pairing that wouldn’t be recorded again for more than two decades.

The buffed-up version of Second Winter includes all of this plus a pair of studio outtakes on disc one. Disc two is a transcendent April 1970 concert at Royal Albert Hall where Winter’s commitment to authentic blues comes through in numbers like "It’s My Own Fault." That’s something he would lose over time to speed-demonology yet would eventually regain. The live set also includes a tame, formative version of the instrumental "Frankenstein," which became a #1 hit for his brother and keyboardist Edgar two years later.

Both Carlos Santana and Winter played primarily American-made Fender amps in those days. Whereas British amp makers engineered their gear to overload and distort readily as volume knobs were turned up, it required hellaciously loud playing to make the speakers in a Fender howl. To achieve a creamy, supple tone on numbers like "Black Magic Woman" and the instrumental "Soul Sacrifice" — two of the classics on Santana’s debut, which has been reissued with a raft of outtakes plus his group Santana’s entire seven-song 1969 Woodstock performance on two CDs — Carlos played at fierce volumes and used heavy Gibson guitars with glued-on necks as well as humbucking pick-ups to boost power and sustain the vibrations of his notes.

On Revisiting Santana (Columbia/Legacy) and the Woodstock performance — really any of Carlos Santana’s early work — his genius echoes in the perfection of his chiseled tone and technique, which he borrowed from the great bluesman B.B. King and inflated to ’60s rock proportions. But his innovation was their fusion with his Latino roots, which bear on his phrasing, the notes he accents in scales, and, of course, his band’s monster percussion arrangements. The resulting sound moved rock toward a more diverse and adventurous future. The biggest kick here, though, is listening to the entire Woodstock set, which the group played for $1500 while Carlos labored under the effects of drugged wine he’d been given backstage. By the time the set concludes, with "Fried Neckbones," the chemicals seem to have worked their way to his fingers, which deliver some blunted notes and imprecise bends. But what the hell, it’s history. And history is change.

Through the fog of decades — the decade of low-tuned grunge guitars, the roar of the Ramones, the thrum of early Metallica, the crunch of Limp Bizkit rap-metal frat-boy kitsch, and the hubris of David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar — it’s hard to remember how distinctly Van Halen sounded like both history and change when they arrived in the winter of 1978. Especially if you weren’t born yet. But the group seemed to be major-label metal’s response to punk rock — proof there was still life in the beast that Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath built. The sheer, rambunctious surprise of Eddie Van Halen’s tapped notes and wide-torn tone — as big as anything since Hendrix — on the flagellate solo "Eruption" and the scalding, mean-spirited "Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love" sent thousands of guitarists back into their woodsheds and even more wanna-bes into music shops, where the nattering notes of two-handed tapping became as irritating as the rodents who chewed the speaker cables at night.

Hand it to Eddie, whose guitar heroism sparks life in the recently issued Van Halen double-disc retrospective The Best of Both Worlds (Warner Bros.). On his own, he discovered the same two-hands-on-the-neck technique that avant-gardists like Fred Frith and Derek Bailey had been perfecting for years, cranked up the speed and volume, and made it palatable and exciting for Jane and Joe rocker. He also modified his guitar into a one-of-a-kind monster that helped him achieve his gigantic sound, and he radicalized the use of the vibrato arm with his dive-bombing downward swoops. Sure, the repercussion was a lot of bad music by less gifted imitators, but that ain’t Eddie’s fault. If his total output had been as durable and continuously inventive as Hendrix’s, and his taste as trustworthy, Van Halen instead might today be considered the electric rock guitar’s most brilliant advocate.

Then again, Vernon Reid might be the better musician. He’s certainly better versed in overall guitarology. Reid came up playing rock, R&B, and jazz and listening to virtually everything, from Mahler to Varèse to Josh White. He emerged as the loose wire in drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society in the early ’80s; by the end of the decade, he was the sparkplug for Living Coloür’s #6 album Vivid and its Top 20 single "Cult of Personality." But compare that song title with "Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love." Rock school is the only place where someone can be held back for being too smart, and that’s what happened to Living Coloür, who could outsing and outplay Van Halen but wrote songs about urban problems and the color line. Oh, and did I mention that they were black and they weren’t playing funk or doing steps? (Sorry, Prince.)

Actually, they’re still black and still writing smart songs. The band re-formed a few years ago, and between occasional concerts, they seem to be at work on a new album. Meanwhile, the new Living Coloür Live from CBGB’s (Sony/Legacy) is a good tide-over. It captures the group, with Reid playing full-bore, on the New York club’s small stage a year after the release of 1988’s Vivid. Reid sounds like a distillation of every guitarist mentioned above. He has the funky blues soul and dynamic attack of Hendrix, the sensitivity and vibrato of Clapton, the ripping sensibility of early Page, the chromatic intensity of Winter, Santana-like sustain, and phrasing that exceeds the breach between B.B. King’s tastefulness and Van Halen’s charge toward purgatory. Add to that a knack for dropping rich jazz chords into surprising places as well as an extended technique that includes two-handed tapping (sweetened by the judicious use of effects on the unreleased "Fight the Fight") and atonality. Like Hendrix, Reid is not afraid to create sheer noise if it speaks eloquently enough, and his playing all over Live from CBGB’s is both raw and unflaggingly eloquent. There are times when his sonic elocution translates like a blueprint for the future that few other musicians seem to have read.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the past. Hell, some of the most enjoyable git rock around, from the Strokes to new-millennium Metallica, wallows in it. But as Hendrix noted in song, the real heroes "keep on pushing straight ahead."