Guybrush

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DESTROY ALL MONSTERS
Guitar Player Magazine 1996
(thanks to T for making this available to the Shred Like Hell team)

Krraaaccckkkkk! Shaaboooommmm! Thunder and lightning rip through the
foyer of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion, flashing a terrible light on the domed
ceiling and the corpse that dangles from it on the end of a noose. Everyone
present lets out a bloodcurdling scream - almost everyone that is. A six-foot-
plus, long-haired, guitar-wielding robot wearing a white mask and a fried-
chicken bucket on his head - Buckethead - alone stands unfazed. But then, he's
probably been on this ride at least 500 times, mostly at night, then he can slip
past the guards and enter the mansion undetected to sit in with the haunted
mansion house band. (Buckethead claims their invisible pianist taught him how
to play Chopin's "Funeral March.") From Haunted Mansion to Pirates of the
Caribbean, Buckethead likes weird places and strange people. Maybe that's
why his virtuosic post-metal psycho-shred has been tapped by ecentric
collaborators from Bootsy Collins to John Zorn to Bill Laswell to Jnas Hellborg
to Iggy Pop. Or maybe they're just really scared of Buckethead and will do
anything he tells them to.

On this particular day, it's Buckethead's alter-ego, mild-mannered Brian Carroll,
who roams the dark corridors of the haunted mansion. Like Peter Parker to
Spider Man or Bruce Banner to the Hulk, Caroll is the flipside of his freakish
creation. A likable, guileless, extremely self-effacing 27-year old, Carroll molded
his childhood fascination with hardcore horror movies, martial arts, Michael
Jackson, Disneyland, and heavy metal guitar into a playing style and onstage
persona that shatters the stereotype of the babe-snaggin' guitar-jock cool guy
with the same force that it explodes the harmonic and textural possibilities of the
guitar. Like Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, he's on a super hero's mission not to
harm, but to help. He dreams of constructing his own version of Disneyland for
the children of the world - Bucketheadland.

With two new records on the shelves - jungle beat driven "The Day of the
Robot" on Sub-Meta and "Giant Robot" on NTT (2633 Lincoln Blvd., Suite
405, Santa Monica CA 90405), plus an album with jazz drummer Tony
Williams featuring Ornette Coleman and Pharoah Sanders, an upcoming project
with fellow guitar virtuoso Shawn Lane, and an all-Disney theme album for
Zorn's Avant label, Buckethead is poised at the guillotine edge of progressive
rock guitar. Inspired by forward thinking buddies like Laswell, Praxis drummer
Brain and the DJ outfit Invisible Scratch Pickles, he's genetically mutating metal
guitar into bizarre hybrids with hip hop, jungle and ambient music. Sprawling
metropoli and thatched villages beware: the time has come to destroy all
monsters.

The suburban room where Carroll grew up near Los Angeles (about a half-hour
from Disneyland) say it all: Bruce Lee, Michael Jackson and Leatherface
posters adorn the walls. On the ample bookshelf, works on Paganini, Slonimsky
and Glenn Gould are slipped between magic books, martial arts material and
slasher flick compendiums. Robot toys with laser eyes stare from every corner
and there is a futuristic rack of CDs boasting titles from hip hoppers the Wu-
Tang clan, techno-trip-hop buddies the Chemical Brothers, Yngwie's Rising
Force and the soundtracks to Godzilla and War of the Gargantuans.

It's clear that visual stimulation is every bit as important to Buckethead's guitar
playing as the music he listen to and the theory he has absorbed.

Onstage with Praxis - with Brain and bassist Laswell or with his band Giant
Robot, Buckethead moves with robotic precision, but he imagines pictures in
his head as he plays. "It's just more fun that way", he explains, fiddling
nervously with a Giant Robot doll. "For the most part, I think in terms of
amusement park rides and monster and robot movies. I'll watch a movie
without the sound and play to the picture. I would watch the death scene in
Texas Chainsaw Massacre where Leatherface slams the steel door, and a low
and creepy drone comes in. I would use that drone to solo over, the sound of
that guy's death. I guess that's kind of bad, but I was into it. The whole scene is
so vicious and powerful, it gives me a certain feeling. When I put myself in that
position, I like to tape what I'm playing and feeling, because of what it brings
out in me."

As a kid, Brian's mom nicknamed him "Boo" because of his obsession with
monsters and robots, and he took karate lessons from the age of ten. By the
time he was 13, he'd picked up guitar under the spell of Angus Young and
Randy Rhoads, whose classic "Crazy Train" riff and 32nd note pull off runs are
echoed on Bucketheadland's "Park Theme" (The Japan-only release is available
through Avant/Disc Union, 2-13-1 Iidabashi Chiyoda-Ky, Tokyo 102, Japan, or
direct from Buckethead). "I was really into sports, but I liked guitar because it
was something you could do all by yourself," he recalls. Yngwie Malmsteen's
early recordings, some of them only available as Japanese imports - like many
of Bucket's albums - were a major revelation.

"When Yngwie came out he was totally in your face; you can tell he just
wanted to destroy," Caroll raves. "It's so dramatic, and that aspect of it was as
cool as the speed. Plenty of people play fast but they don't set it up like he
does. Like the way "Far Beyond the Sun" builds and builds until there's a
break, and then the guitar rips into it - the payoff is so great. Yngwie had that
fire and even now I'm trying to use that to motivate me. The fact that he hasn't
changed is pretty rad too. He doesn't care what people think and I admire that."

Sitting across from Buckethead as he fires off four-fingered diminished-scale
tapping licks at breakneck speed is humbling. But he makes it look incredibly
easy, as if technical wizardry were second nature. It's partly the result of keen
observation. "I can usually understand what someone's doing pretty quickly,"
he nods. "In martial arts, I can see why Bruce Lee was so much better than
everyone else, because of the way he moved his body. It was in the way he
held his arms and all those little details. When I saw Yngwie or Paul Gilbert or
Shawn Lane, I could see quickly HOW they did it, even though it took a lot of
time to actually play it. I looked at Shawn Lane's hands to see how he picks,
because technically I've never seen anyone more efficient. Of course, the real
ideas are in his head. When he plays, he's always looking out into space,
because he's going for the sound. But I still had to ask myself "What is he doing
to get that sound?"".

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Something Completely Different