Empty Nights and Excess Knives*

Don't know how much I have to add to the geetar-solo compendium, and fuck me if Wayne hadn't already knocked out two of my top contenders via his outboard aside. Me? I'd add a couple more for the early punk years to that same stack.

As far as Bob Quine goes, it's tricky (and perhaps a bit unfair) to single out one single moment from the Voidoids' discog. Still, "Liars Beware" has always stayed with me in terms of its sheer batshittery and unflagging deftness. While it may rate as Hell's most frantic studio performance, Quine responds in kind with a mad scramble of a solo that yanks everything this way and that, strips its gears, and even manages to throw a few seconds' worth of hyperspeed hotsauce blues-boogie blisteroo into the works...




Likewise I have a difficult time with Radio Birdman's Radios Appear, in terms of how singled out one peak or another seems somewhat arbitrary. But I'll still call it for "Aloha, Steve and Danno"...




...for the way it takes the "Hawaii Five-O" theme that's been lurking in the wings and finally runs with it, then compresses the tune's energy by way of through some Dick Dale-styled picking. It'd be about another decade or so before surf-rock would see any sort of a revival, so in the middle of the now-/fashion-obsessed '70s, this meant reaching back to an oft-forgotten dustbin, making it that much more of an alien and arcane move.

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* And right, I know this latter part amounts to a misheard lyric from the Hell tune, but I've always preferred it that way.