Don't break out the doubleneck unless you're serious

Posted: Monday, June 18, 2007 2:50 PM by John Roderick

Wolfmother
When Wolfmother took the stage, I was jazzed. Right out of the gate their riffs and tones landed close to my heart, conjuring a young Black Sabbath with just a hint of pop. I love old Black Sabbath, so I settled in with the expectation that I’d be happily heavy metalled for an hour in the hot sun.

A few songs in, however, my enthusiasm morphed into incredulity. Were these guys serious? They sounded EXACTLY like a young Black Sabbath, same Ozzy vocals, same half-step modulations and even clunkier Toni Iommi solos. Was I missing something? Isn’t that illegal? Can you really DO that?

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I tried to check myself. Look, I said, you’re being a real grump about all these bands. Isn’t it OK for music to just be fun? Wolf Mother is a damn decent hard rock band, the crowd is loving them, and if you were super-stoned they would probably sound like the real deal. Lighten up. It’s no different than when the Stones copied Muddy Waters, or the Stray Cats copied Carl Perkins.

So I stood there in my new frame of mind, trying to get hep, when all of a sudden the guitar player busted out a white Jimmy Page doubleneck guitar. This is a serious statement, this is the "Stairway to Heaven" guitar, so I figured we were about to hear their epic number. Instead, the kid plays the whole song on one neck of the guitar and doesn’t even touch the 12-string. Sacrilege! Travesty! You can’t just bring a guitar like that out as a GAG! Boo!