I saw AC/DC in concert on Saturday for my second time (first was in 1994). Love the band, love their live performance - they embody energy.
I am curious what Angus is doing with his mouth when he’s playing though. He’s not singing lyrics - mostly he’s doing it when there are no words. If he’s saying something, my lip-reading skill isn’t getting it.
The big screen often shows his hands on the guitar, or his face while he’s playing, and his mouth is moving … almost like he’s chomping or gnoshing om something.
Lots of people will do odd things with their mouth when they’re concentrating on something… I notice it a lot when people are playing video games or music.
Can’t speak for Angus, but the guitarist John Abercrombie looks to be chewing serious fat while hitting the licks. I thinks he’s counting time or sounding intervals internally.
It does sound like you are describing “Guitar Face” or “Guitar Orgasm Face” which has countless other nicknames. Pretty much every musician does it under the right circumstances, but lead guitarists need to cultivate their repetoire of Guitar Faces.
I am on BBerry right but I bet if you Googled Guitar Face you’d get links to photo contests, archives of famous players’ best faces, etc.
There is a well-known classical pianist, Andre Watts, who I saw play at the Kennedy Center years ago. During extremely rapid playing, his lips would flap up in down, seemingly with every key he struck on the piano. It was a thing to behold.
Well, first realize that I’m a major lead guitar fanatic, and have been for years. Can’t play for a damn, but I have idolized shredders since I was an early teen.
Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, Jimmy Page, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Eric Johnson, Yngwie Malmsteen, etc. Believe me, I’ve seen guitar faces in all shapes and sizes.
Angus does something kind of different from all of them, though. Not like he’s gulping the way a human would, somewhere between gnoshing and gulping the way a fish does. Perhaps it is Guitar Face™ and I hadn’t considered that before. I’m sure he knows he’s doing it, because the guy at the camera zooms on his face often while he does it.
He’s got other faces that he does at the camera and audience during other parts of the songs, but frequently when he’s watching his left hand slide up and down the frets, he’s doing the Angus Gnosh™.
I found a few that show the “pose” I’m talking about, but of course you can’t see the gnoshing activity in these stills:
and especially this one:
and this: http://www.everyguitarist.com/Angus_Young.jpg
He’s running around like a lunatic playing hard rock for tens of thousands of screaming fans. As Joe Perry from Aerosmith once said, Angus looks like he’s plugged into a totally different dimension.
Here’s clip from Live At Donnington showing plenty of what the OP is talking about. Notice that every time they show the drummer, Chris Slade, he’s doing very much the same thing.
I think part of it is just his style, part of it is what Troy and Rancid said. When I’m playing Guitar Hero with friends and it’s getting fast and furious we’re doing the same kind of thing. It seems to happen a lot when people are doing something athletic.
Oh yeah, good video with lots of gnoshing. Between :20 and :45 there’s some of it. Up to 1:00 there’s more head nodding and facial expressions, but watch between :20 and :45 for some good example.
I’d watch the rest now but I gotta head to work - great freaking guitar player, <3 Angus Young.
I think Angus is just doing his version of GF - no different than famous jazz pianist Earl “Fatha” Hines who would hum to himself while playing - but so loud and atonally awful that it could be a distraction.
When I play some leads, I have habits - darn near Tourette’s-like tics that I do with no real explanation. Actually, that’s not true - a BIG deal when playing leads is to…breathe. Seriously. You aren’t playing a wind instrument, but breathing helps you pace your leads and think a LOT more about phrasing and slowing down. So stopping, positioning yourself, and figuring out how to work a comfortable breathing rhythm into what you are doing needs to happen - I am pretty good at it now, but while trying to consciously slow down and breathe normally, I often make the stupidest faces and shift my position. For completely different and unexplainable reasons, for certain difficult licks, I uncontrollably kick like a girl :rolleyes:. For this one lick, my left heel pops back and up like I am being kissed by a returning WW2 soldier in the 40’s. For this other lick, I kick my right leg forward in a stupid, “is he doing the hokey pokey dance?!” sort of way. At this point in my playing career, I have learned to value the fact that I pull the lick off correctly and hide my secret shame of looking totally uncool from others. Until now - sigh, I need a drink…
This must be it - he was practicing breathing, concentrating, focusing on his guitar playing, and someone said, “Dude, that face you make is awesome. It’s unique. It’s unlike any others. Don’t change it - work it, baby, work it! Give me some love!” And it’s stuck since then.
Good thing for him, too - we’re sitting here talking about it, so it’s obviously not a drawback in his career
You sound like Yngwie Malmsteen. He does these kicks towards the audience, like a first-session martial arts student who was told to do a kick. He also does these weird toe raises and postures - far beyond guitar face, he’s got guitar body. He also throws his guitar in a way that (while still attached to his body with the guitar strap) it flies around him in a circle, and he catches it and keeps playing. When I saw him at G3, one of his flips had it go around him two times before he caught it and kept playing.
Trust me. I don’t look or play like Yngwie. And Yngwie would be the first to tell you that if he knew or cared about my existence.
The guitar-spinny thing - of which Steve Vai is a great practitioner as well - is not the same as Guitar Face or Guitar Body, as you refer to it. Either of those things start by being involuntary - and either stay that way (my goofy-ass kicks) or get incorporated into something cooler (most rockstars’ guitar faces, where they consciously try to shift from distracted squints and mouth-breathing to “ooh, I am so bitchin’ and cool” looks - see Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls for great examples of that…
But fancy kicks, guitar-spinning, playing with your hand over the neck, not under - that’s all part of your on-stage moves - right up there with playing behind your back or with your teeth…
I’d say he’s either breathing (gulping up air just to keep from passing out), or singing along. A friend of mine played keyboards in a jazz combo back at school, and would break out into absolutely mind-blowing solos which she would sing along to, exactly, matching the notes perfectly. It was great to watch, but just for kicks they had her try not doing it in a few rehearsals (to see what would happened). She tried a solo where she didn’t sing, and it literally fell apart; she just couldn’t do it. Her brain needed to be singing along in order to “hear” it right. Everybody has their own way in, I guess; another possibility for Angus is that he just drinks so much before a show that he loses facial muscle control.
Trust me - Angus doesn’t drink before he plays. I have NO first-hand, “Insider” knowledge about this - but, as a player, I can tell you he wouldn’t last 10 minutes playing the way he does and running around like a nut the way he does drunk. Eddie Van Halen used to drink like a fish and run around and play like a madman, but not with the energy Angus does, and was kaput after 10 - 15 years…
And Yngwie would be the first to tell you that if he knew or cared about my existence.