The Guitarist Of The Year 2014: Scott Holiday Rival Sons are no longer a good live band or an act awash with potential; The Great Western Valkyrie cements their status as a great rock band, plain and simple.
“I’m not happy about that at all, it’s kind of ridiculous”. Those were the words ofScott Holiday back in 2012. Guitar Planet had just asked him how it felt to have the music he was making in the here and now labeled “Classic Rock”. He was right of course; it is ridiculous.
Rock bands are damned with grossly patronizing, feint praise for bearing even a passing resemblance to Led Zeppelin, while an R’n’B diva can openly pay homage to Aaliyah and be exalted as a modernist. Lady Gaga tips her cap to Madonna without anyone whispering the words “classic pop” and no brooding indie outfit aping Joy Division or Depeche Mode has ever been dubbed “ageing indie”. The closest comparison is the “record collector rock” moniker, sparingly used to describe acts like Primal Scream who curate the sounds of the past in order to conjure something new – but the emphasis still leans towards innovation instead of retrospection.
Rival Sons @ Bukta 2023
The hypocrisy may be unshakable at this point, but there were no cobwebs to be picked off “Manifest Destiny”. The two-part showpiece from Rivals Sons’ 2012 album Head Down force feeds the listener unconscionably potent LSD in an LA back alley before depositing the hallucinating recipient in the glare of the sanity-stripping-sun of the great plains in 1822. The potential glimpsed on that odyssey is fulfilled handsomely on 2014’s Great Western Valkyrie; an album of crunching lunges and triumphant gallops as well as insular delicacy and prowling sleaze.
Rival Sons manage to shoulder the gleeful peacocking of the album’s first third without undermining the down-and-out severity of “Where I’ve Been” or “Belle Star’s” perception corroding guitar work. The secret to stabilizing this confounding cocktail lies in the Rival Sons’ unshakable musicianship. The cheap thrills aren’t played for hedonistic laughs and no ironic wink threatens to undermine the dwindling lows or portentous highs.
Instead Scott Holiday exudes control as his solo slips between the shadows on “Destination On Course”, offering a perfect, almost insidious, counterpoint to Jay Buchanan’s tonsil-splintering cries. By the time the album has receded into a world of inverted atonal groans which simultaneously recall wall-rattling aircraft engines, gruesome mechanical saws and spectral interference seeping from a malfunctioning wireless, you won’t have the slightest clue how you’ve got here, but you will be on tenterhooks.
The Rival Sons Interview
Classic rock is meant to be dull and predictable, right? Well, whatever Rival Sons are supposed to be, they, emphatically, are not that. Great Western Valkyrie is the lithe, bestial, reactive and utterly unpredictable music of the moment. The living, breathing, seething, soaring, careening sound of the guitarist of the year: Scott Holiday.
Brutish, brazen and ungodly satisfying, Royal Blood rode a barrage of chugging bass grooves all the way to the top of the charts in 2014.
Guitar Planet has had a love/hate relationship with Slash since Velvet Revolver split, but it remains impossible to deny his freewheeling riffs and slippery solos. s and gear. If you’ve seen the multiple Grammy-nominated band play live – and if you haven’t, you should – you’ll doubtless have noticed the frequent changes, labyrinthine pedalboard and wall of Orange and Supro amps from which Holiday generates the colossal tones emanating from stage left.
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Last sat down with Scott Holiday and Sons’ frontman Jay Buchanan on a press tour in London, prior to the release of their 2019 LP,
When Scott was kind enough to invite us to his California home to get a forensic look at his collection, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. Holiday is based just a few blocks away from the spray of the surf on Huntington Beach, and he grew up nearby. Before we start digging into his outrageous array of boutique hot-rods, offsets and vintage pieces, it’s time to find out how his obsession with the began.
“There’s no musicians really in my family, but I had one uncle that played and recorded and stuff, ” Holiday recalls. “He was living with my grandma still, and I could hear a bunch of music going on. It was way too loud, all coming out of this bedroom. And I popped the door open – and this was the 80s ’cause I was a real little kid – and he had a whole electronic drum kit set up, big octagon pads. And he had like a full mixing console in there, and an eight-track or something, reel-to-reel. He had a on, he had the harmonica thing… he had a whole bunch of doodads!
I've Switched Out Every Pickup Known To Man
“I remember walking in and going, ‘Oh my gosh! What is all that? How do you use those things?’ And he explained it to me, and I remember being really mesmerised and really happy about it. I remember being like, ‘This is cool, I’m interested in this.’ I was really young, but it was a lasting impression.”
Holiday also attributes his wider fascination with music in general to his parents: “My family listened to music. My parents were really young parents and they partied a lot when I was young. They had friends over and every time they partied, or my aunties or uncles would party… the party revolved around music. Tonnes of rock ’n’ roll, tonnes of Van Halen and stuff like that around, tonnes of ZZ Top. It was just a fun time for music. Music was in a really good place. And I think I had a fascination with wanting to be at the source of their fun, because they had so much fun listening to it. I just became hellbent on playing music from a young age.”
Despite plenty of nagging, it was a few years until young Scott got a of his own. “I think I was maybe 11 when I got a classical given to me by my stepdad. I didn’t get too absolutely out of control on it, but I started to learn stuff on that and teach myself things, like
Guitar Player Magazine September 2023 Jake Kiszka Scott Holiday Grace Potter $29.95
“Then by 12 an uncle gave me a Hondo II Les Paul replica. Unfortunately, I’m such a dickhead that I took the whole thing apart. That was my first rig, that and a little tiny Fender solid-state amp and my first pedal was a DOD Supra Distortion given to me by my grandmother. My family always supported me – thank you guys – and although they had no clue where it was all coming from, they were into it, y’know.”
into it. “I took a handful of lessons, then I was self-taught from that point on. I just never put the down. You come right home from school and you pick it up. I’ve got the new Guns N’ Roses record and I’m learning every single song on there, or I’m learning old stuff, lots of soul and rock ’n’ roll – I was constantly having to pick new things up. I was addicted to magazines, which is why I love doing these interviews with good people like yourself! Those were my lifeline, a bible for me as a child; I just lived in and out of these magazines and kept ’em and had stacks of ’em around my room.
“And even the lessons in those magazines – being self taught that was a big thing for me. It’s different now because the internet is so immediate and overwhelming. I sound like the old man, ‘Get off my lawn!’ But I think there’s something romantic about the fact that when that magazine came, you were stoked off your ass when it was in your mailbox, you couldn’t get into it quick enough, that was all you had for the month so you had to really take it apart and get into every single section.”
Scott Holiday's 5 Essential Guitar Albums
As time went by, Scott began to be fascinated not just by the sounds s made, but also their anatomy and inner workings. Bad news for the aforementioned Hondo…
“Anything I could get my hands on, I’d try to mess with it, look inside of it, switch pickups out, mess with potentiometers, tremolos, anything, ” he remembers. “I didn’t paint so much, but I did pull the neck off that Hondo and I think I tried to put an Ibanez Roadstar neck on it – I don’t know why! It’s a stupid idea but I was going, ‘Oh! Let’s make some Frankenstein stuff!’
“You read enough about guys like Eddie Van Halen that took shit apart and really came up with their own thing… it just became part of my thing as a kid, too. I’ve switched out every pickup known to man by this point, but I started doing it then. But that ’s gone… it died… I think I had to open up the neck joint so the Ibanez neck would fit. I got it on there but what do you know? Things didn’t really line up right.
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