Category: Music

Tom Sawyer is perhaps the best known Rush song. It was the Canadian power trio’s breakthrough hit in terms of sales and popular appeal and was the opener on their 1981 album Moving Pictures. I remember listening to it on vinyl the day it came out and wondering how on earth I was going to work out what Lifeson was playing in terms of chords.

Lyrically, the song strikes out as the eponymous rebel with words by Rush drummer/lyricist Neil Peart and Pye Dubois who wrote lyrics for fellow Canadian rockers Max Webster. The opening power chords that share Le Studio space with Geddy Lee’s Moog synths and a spaced out backbeat from Peart are not your common or garden no-third power chords as you’d imagine, nor were they anything like the open, up-the-neck chords he’d been using in the previous decade (cf The Hemispheres chord).

If they were standard power chords, it would probably just be a big E-major followed by a D and an A and then jumping down to the C. But, Lifeson, who pleads ignorance of most of the chord names in the video tutorial he recorded for the song in 2007, is playing some interesting variations on the power chord idea. In them, an open top E string rings out in the intro on three of four chord variations that give us the progression.

There is (admittedly) a massive E-major power chord at the seventh fret (although by definition because it’s got the third note of the scale of E major (G#) it’s not really a proper power chord). Open bottom E string leads the riff into the sustained power chord. The second chord is an Asus4 (but with the open top E string to add chorus-like resonance to the E fretted on the B string, that too kicks off with an open E string for the riff. The third chord starts with the open A string instead and sustains an A7sus4, which lifts that almost jazzy-sounding second chord, the As4. And, finally kicking with the bass E string open again we move two frets down from the second chord shape to give us a hybrid chord a Cadd2 (basically a C major chord with the second note of the scale of C major, the D, added, you might also called it a Cadd9).

I remember the chords in the Rush music book I had as a kid, they had it as E, Dsus4, A, and then C. It was wrong…well…it was simplifed if not wrong. Any tab and chord sites that talk of E, D, A and C major power chords as being the chords in Tom Sawyer are just plain wrong too. Some seem to get it half right, but Alex himself shows you exactly what he plays here and that’s how I’m playing it on this snippet:

Elbow are a magnificent band, their proto-musical roots perhaps lie in singer Guy Garvey’s admiration of Genesis-era Peter Gabriel although the early elbow song Newborn was, he told interviewers, modelled on a song from “A Trick of the Tail”, namely Ripples, which was post-Gabriel Genesis. Nevertheless, they continue to write and play enigmatic and evocative music of which the song The Bones of You is a fine example.

Now, the ubiquitous guitar tab sites have all sorts of versions of the chords guitarist Mark Potter is purportedly playing on this song. Weird, twisted things that are almost impossible to move between without a lot of digital contortions and attendant noise. Moreover, none of the versions I saw sounded even remotely like the harmonies Potter is producing with six strings on the album or live.

So, I took a quick look at a clip of the band playing the song with the BBC Orchestra. One thing is immediately obvious, Potter, as many guitarists, is efficient. He’s not contorting, it’s just him shuttling between two simple chord shapes. Of course, it’s in an odd time signature against the main beat, as you often expect with this genre and there are some of the same open strings ringing the same notes in both chords.

The two chords which fill the song are a D6/9 chord and A minor-9, the latter with an added D (there’s an implied F# with the bass and vocal melody, giving an Am6/9. The song implies the D6/9 has an added A implying an E7sus4. However, that’s not the end of it Potter is playing with a capo at fret three, so the above discussion is up three semitones: the main chords are thus F6/9and Cm9, with their attendant passing notes C on top of the F6/9 and an A on the Cm9.

Here’s a quick snippet of me playing the two chords with capo 3, not exactly the rhythm Potter plays on The Bones of You but close enough for a demonstration.

More Classic Chords here.

Strictly speaking this classic chord isn’t a chord at all, it’s an interval, the gap between just two notes rather than at least three different notes played together. The interval in question is often described in Western music as “dissonant” and perhaps because of the beating of the harmonics of the two notes against each other (constructive and destructive interference) it has been various labelled the devil’s interval, or more archaically, diabolus in musica. Moreover, it’s often been banned and at the very least lambasted over the centuries in many different realms of music.

The devil’s interval is two bits of what technically we refer to as a tritone. A jump from a root note, up a whole tone and then up a whole tone again, so F to G, G to A, and finally A to B. The leap from F to B is quite dissonant.

In the right hands, it can add an electric frisson to a piece of music. Think of the intro to the Rush instrumental YYZ from the 1981 Moving Pictures album. The guitar pattern played staccato in 5/4 time oscillates between F# and C (the tritone being F#-G#, G#-A#, A#-C) and represents the Morse Code for YYZ (Toronto Airport’s call sign). Similarly, the Blue Oyster Cult song Workshop of the Telescopes from their eponymous 1972 debut album, uses the devil’s interval A-D#.

Although odd, almost occult, importance has been attached to this interval, fundamentally (pardon the pun), it’s just an augmented fourth or a diminished fifth. Picture the scale of C major:

Where would rock and blues be without the 7ths (which of course are flat relative to the major scale. Look at CDEFGABC again, 7th note would be a B, but it’s down a semitone, so flat, in the (dominant) 7th. In the chor of C major 7, it stays as a B and has a much softer, almost summery sound, relative to the grittier dominant 7th with its devil’s interval.

Rush use the clash of a tritone in several songs, the intro to Between the Wheels has one with a F#11 chord resolving to an Am (both have a D note in the bass, so they’re more correctly, Dm13 and Am(add4), respectively.

Neither Rush nor BOC were being original in using this interval it had been around music for centuries, stirring passions and summoning the devil. Wikipedia has more details and more examples from musical history. In pop and rock music George Harrison uses tritones on the downbeats of the opening phrases of The Beatles’ songs “The Inner Light”, “Blue Jay Way” and “Within You Without You”, to create musical suspense resolution and of course, the opening riff of that most classic of heavy rock songs, Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze uses the very same interval before leaping into the Hendrix Chord (Classic Chord #3). The opening of Maria, from West Side Story too.

Oh, almost forgot, here’s the interval in action, with me playing a version of the YYZ intro:

For the 20th rock Classic Chord in the series, I thought I’d go for Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones. Now, as you guitarists will mostly likely know, “Keef” (as in Keith Richards) does not play in standard EADGBE tuning, he (usually) plays in open G tuning, (D)GBDGD. The parentheses around his bottom string, because if I remember rightly he takes that string off to give him a more authentic Mississippi Delta sound than he’d get with that rumbling bass note.

Anyway, in open G tuning, the opening chords to Brown Sugar sound so much better than the inefficient way many of us have played it in standard tuning over the years. It kicks off with a C and G chords at the 12th fret. Barre the five strings with the index finger at this fret and rapidly hammer-on as you hit the chord with second and third finger on frets 13 and 14 on the B string and the D string respectively to give the C (which looks like a 12th fret Am7 with the top string muted). A lift off those two fingers takes us back to the G, then you dash down the fret board to do roughly the same thing again at the fifth fret (shuttling C and F major with the same shapes) and then up and down again for a repeat of the whole measure. The second guitar flicks in the pentatonic fill, although you can squeeze that in on your own if you need to.

The second riff is then similar but at the 8th fret (G and D chords) then down to the 5th again. Then full barre of the five strings at fret 1 (A major) and then fret 3 (B major) and on to the 5th with the hammer/pulls as required. Have a listen to my rough-and-ready demo of the intro.

This style of playing open-G tuning and fretting chords without needing to use your pinkie seems to be the foundation of a lot of Keef’s harmonies. Ad lib a few things with these basic chords and you’ll end up stumbling upon several Stones’ riffs, Start me up, for instance.

Ironically though, Brown Sugar is a Mick jagger song written in standard tuning and given the Keef flavour with his open-G tuning, his picking style, his string muting, the bandana, the leathered and weathered skin, and the ubiquitous ciggie to make it all authentic when you see the band playing live. (Been there, done that, didn’t waste money on the tee-shirt, St James Park, Newcastle, 23rd June 1982).

Credits: Brown sugar crystals by Genesis12, lip-bite by Lucy Burrluck

James Taylor has written many classic songs, they’re the archetypal singer-songwriter songs you might say. Wonderful melodies, intriguing lyrics and when you’re listening to the originals, wonderful guitar tone and fingerstyle playing. One of the things you quickly learn in attempting to play and sing these simple-seeming songs is that they’re not at all simple, in fact they’re quite tricksy. Taylor does not always use the standard fingering even on the simple “CAGED” major chords like D and G.

Ring finger at D on the B-string and the F# is usually played with the second finger fretting the E-string at the second fret. Taylor prefers to twist that around, so that his index finger is doing the fretting on the highest string and so he can then use it to bring in bass notes on the lower strings. Presumably to toggle between the D major, a D(addE) and Dsus4, he lifts off the index finger and uses his pinkie to get the G on the high E-string.

Anyway, Fire and Rain…one of the best songs ever written, evocative and autobiographical and particularly poignant in being partly about a friend of Taylor’s Suzanne Schnerr, a childhood friend who committed suicide while he was recording in London. There’s lots of fingerstyle tricks in this. It’s usually played with at capo 3, but for simplicity let’s forget the capo. The intro has some little slides and movements back and forth from a G to an A at the fifth fret and back and then jumps to a D, the open position A, with various hammer-ons, pull-offs and trills an E and then a bass run to the G major.

Well, I say G major, what he does is arpeggiate what you’d think of as a conventional G-major but with the ring finger giving us an extra D note on the second string at the third fret (remember capo free in this key). The pinkie lifts off the G note on the top E-string to give us a G6, but the index finger also jumps off the bass B note on the A-string and comes down on the F# on the top E-string to give us a Gmaj7 (well, actually if you keep that D fretted on the B-string it’s a D9Add4), but if you lift that off to give us a B again, it’s the Gmaj7.

Rather than a simple sample of this issue’s Classic Chord, I’ve got a complete cover of the song I recorded a few months ago and I’ve made a lyric video.

Of course, if you want to watch the great man playing it with his interesting fingerings, feel free.