Joe Gore
Photo by Richie Leeds
Joe Gore will tell you that he has no real allegiance to the guitar, but the guitar has been very good to him. As a player, Joe’s imaginative approach has earned him credits on important records by visionaries like PJ Harvey, Tom Waits, Tracy Chapman, and John Cale. The diversity and quality of the artists that make up Joe’s discography should inspire any serious music fan, but Joe’s accolades as an unsung hero of outsider guitar are just one facet of an impressive career. Joe’s uncanny odyssey includes long stints editing Guitar Player magazine in its glory days, when insider magazines like GP actively shaped the culture and wielded real influence. Joe was a key figure in defining Guitar Player as the most progressive magazine of its kind.
More recently, Joe found himself at the intersection of guitar and technology as a consultant for Apple, where he was responsible for designing the digital guitar tools in GarageBand and Logic which have since been used by millions to make music. Joe’s experience recreating iconic classic guitar sounds in the digital realm would lead him back to analog gear and a venture designing a range of boutique guitar effects pedals with circuits that strive to provide new colors in a sea of rehashed ideas.
You might assume that versatility lies the core of Joe’s success when you look at the range of his career. From his perspective, it was embracing his unique voice that led to his remarkably charmed life as a discipline-hopping creative. Joe’s is a tale of talent and timing, but also one of authenticity. David Von Bader and Joe sat down to look back at his incredible career, unpack the lessons he’s learned from collaborating with uncompromising artists, and to clarify just what kind of knife he used to play his guitar with PJ Harvey at Glastonbury.
David: The range of people you’ve worked with is remarkable, but it’s the diversity of different disciplines you’ve explored that I find really interesting. It’s rare to meet someone that is not only good at a craft, but is also good at analyzing that craft as a journalist and developing tools used for it.
Joe: I’m the luckiest fucker ever to draw breath and I still occasionally get hired—which is amazing to me. That range was partly a matter of necessity; I'm really a classical musician gone bad. I came to Northern California from LA for college and you don't really make a living playing music there unless you're in the union with the symphony or you're in Metallica. So music-adjacent careers, like music journalism or sound design, were a necessity to survive. I've never made my living entirely by performing, it's always been this grab bag of teaching, consulting, guitar magazines, etc. You frame it in a very flattering way, but it’s partly just what I had to do to make a living.
I will say sometimes one pursuit can be an emotional bulwark against the other pursuit. If one thing is really frustrating, you can turn to something else and say “I'm doing really well at this, or I'm having some success here” and view all of the different types of work less as irrelevant work you do just to pay the bills.
David: It's really hard to trace a throughline between the people you've worked with. What do you think it is that’s made you a successful collaborator with such a diverse group of artists?
Joe: People tend to hire me for my unique voice, not as someone who can do it all. That’s limited the amount of work I’ve had, and my discography really isn't very big for being in the game as long as I have, but I'm proud of it. My number one most repeated interview cliche of all is that I play for the song—even if it just needs one note. The goal has always been the piece of music, not guitar glory. Playing for the greater good isn’t something I’ve had to discipline myself to think about, it’s just the way I view making art. I've been lucky to work with really good songwriters, and I think about what the emotional universe of a song is and what's going to suit that.
Part of that is that I benefited from an old school liberal arts and humanities education—the sort that has been systematically phased out of American education since I was young. Another cliche that’s high on the list of things that I’ve heard repeatedly in guitar interviews is that you need to look beyond your instrument for inspiration. The idea that if you want to be a great jazz guitar player, you should listen to horn players like Miles Davis and Coltrane—not just guitar gods. I would take that a step further and say you need to take influences from outside of music altogether, be it film or visual arts or literature.
Joe performs with PJ Harvey. Photo by Eric Drew Feldman.
David: You made a really interesting leap in coming from an orthodoxy like classical guitar to playing slide with a hunting knife on stage with PJ Harvey. I'm fascinated by people that learn everything by the books and still end up doing super subversive work.
Joe: Well, it was a kitchen filet knife and it was very dull—so it was far less edgy than it looked. I still have it! I started playing guitar when I was 11 and played rock songs, Crosby, Stills, & Nash acoustic stuff—whatever kids were playing in the ‘70s. When I started getting interested in classical music, it was partly just being a snob because it's important when you're that age to be into stuff that no one else is into so you can feel more knowledgeable and cool. That led to classical guitar and I focused on that heavily for a few years. As I learned more, I realized that the classical repertoire for guitar is pretty slim compared to other instruments. A lot of composers specialized in writing for guitar, but they weren't on the level of the greats like Debussy, Brahms, Beethoven, or Mozart who never composed for guitar. The guitar exists outside of the most important aspects of classical music, and realizing that frayed my alliance to guitar. I switched to being a composition major and I went to grad school for composition at Berkeley, but I dropped out of my PhD program to play in bands.
“I started trying to think of the things that made my playing a little unusual or special and started trying to be myself. That really helped and coincided directly with the beginning of my career getting hired to play with artists you've actually heard of.”
David: You were also an editor for Guitar Player when the magazine was at its most vital and played a real important role in building the culture around the instrument. What impact did that experience have on you and your identity as a guitarist?
Joe: I was in my twenties at the time and the band I was in at the time was regionally very popular, but never quite made the leap. That band had ended in tears and I was depressed about the breakup and desperately seeking a grownup job when I got hired at Guitar Player. I was also teaching guitar and working on all styles and techniques of playing and that all changed really fast after starting at GP. I was suddenly spending time with people like Jeff Beck and Bill Frisell—greater guitar players than I could be in several lifetimes. Sitting down with people like that made it really clear that I had to find my thing.
I stopped practicing for speed and I started to play electric guitar without a pick because I wanted to embrace my background in classical guitar, and it wasn’t the standard for electric players. I was looking for areas of differentiation. By giving up on trying to be everything as a player, I started trying to think of the things that made my playing a little unusual or special and started trying to be myself. That really helped and coincided directly with the beginning of my career getting hired to play with artists you've actually heard of.
Not everybody has the benefit of becoming a guitar magazine editor and being simultaneously inspired and discouraged by people like Jeff Beck, but it was the absolute most liberating thing for me as a musician.
David: Beyond finding your unique voice as a player, is there anything about your approach that you think has attracted such visionary songwriters to working with you?
Joe: A lot of it was a chain reaction from one stroke of luck. Les Claypool, who was still a teenager at the time, was the roadie for that regionally popular band I was in when I started at Guitar Player. Les already had his whole trip together and was a fantastic bass player, but he was playing tiny club gigs with the first version of Primus, which was called Primate.
Primus obviously went on to have great success, and Les invited Tom Waits to play on the second Primus record. They became pals and they both lived north of San Francisco after Tom decamped from New York. Tom was looking for players out here and Les recommended me. My audition tape was a guitar version of a movement from a Béla Bartók string quartet, which is really dissonant and confrontational. Tom thought that was interesting and then he hired me to play a lot. Polly [PJ Harvey] definitely invited me to play with her because she liked my stuff with Tom Waits, and I've been riding the Tom and Polly coattails for much of my adult life.
David: You couldn't write a film script where a guitar arrangement of a Béla Bartók piece gets someone the Tom Waits gig because it'd be too on-the-nose. Did you learn a lot from working with Tom?
Joe: Tom is a great influence on the people he works with. Tom's trip with musicians is that he usually works with people who are very good, but he systematically undermines their virtuosity. For example, he once asked me if I could “make it sound more poor.”
David: That's such a great bit of direction.
Joe: That's part of his genius. On The Black Rider, we were playing from a chart a little bit, but Tom never sings you a specific melody or asks you to play a specific note; he stands with you and says “A little more like this, a little more like that.” Tom won’t tell you what to play, but he’ll guide you with feelings and ideas until it sounds like Tom Wait's guitar. A really extreme example of that I saw happened during a session I did with Tom and Stewart Copeland. Obviously Stewart is one of the greatest drummers of his era, but by the time Tom finished with him, it just sounded like a Tom Waits circus drum part–nothing like what you’d associate as the Stewart’s sound. But it worked brilliantly. Tom is a genius at molding performances through words and gestures. So technically I made up all of my parts when I worked with him, but they were parts I wouldn’t have played in a million years without Tom's direction.
“Thinking about things like “What is the point of this piece of art? What is it trying to communicate? What is the emotion behind it?” Playing in a way that answers those questions is much more important than trying to think of a clever guitar idea.”
David: You touched on something there that I think is hugely important for doing good work across mediums, which is the idea of trying to evoke a feeling, rather than trying to execute something super specific technically.
Joe: Yes. I've been super lucky that the songwriters I’ve worked with—Tracy Chapman, E [Mark Oliver Everett] from Eels, Tom Waits, and Polly—all write really powerful stuff and the challenge with them has always been to preserve or magnify the emotional world of the music. That's always felt natural to me, and I think that’s maybe why I get hired by a lot of really good songwriters.
It’s funny, but I have a reputation as the guitar guy who hates solos. My argument is that (strictly in the realm of songs with lyrics that mean something) the listener is brought into the songwriter’s world and engaged in the story or the sheer emotion of the delivery. Then in the middle of the story, they say “I'm going to take a break now and bring up my trained monkey to play some notes on the guitar.” Solos always felt like bad drama to me. Think of how much less effective the sad cowboy story in Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” would be if it was stopped for a guitar showcase halfway through it. It has beautiful Grady Martin guitar playing throughout and it's a genius guitar performance, but it's all little call-and-response parts to the vocal that accentuate that story.
So I have a healthy distrust of solos, and that comes back to thinking about things like “What is the point of this piece of art? What is it trying to communicate? What is the emotion behind it?” Playing in a way that answers those questions is much more important than trying to think of a clever guitar idea.
Sometimes it's weird and you do have to think about parts a little differently. With Polly, both of the records that I’ve played on were in the last stages of recording when I was brought in. Flood [producer/engineer] and Polly both said “We're really happy with this album as it is. Can you add anything that makes it special?” If you listen to the records, it sounds like I nailed it every time, but for the ones I nailed, there were nine that were laughed out of the room.
“I’ve found the people who are super successful in that sense are incredibly thick-skinned. They're incredibly malleable.”
David: That has to be a really humbling experience. I can only imagine what having parts rejected in-the-moment by PJ Harvey and Flood feels like.
Joe: The Polly albums were the two most stressful albums I ever worked on, but also two things that I'm incredibly grateful to have been involved with and proud of.
David: What’s the most profound thing you took away from recording with someone as direct as PJ Harvey?
Joe: With Polly, it was just the uncompromising nature of what she does. She has her vision and she's 10,000% committed to it. She sees it through from beginning to end with no bullshit and it's dead serious. It's all about the emotion of the music. It’s part of why my favorite records she's released are the four track demos, because they’re her in her essence. There's emotional meaning and weight there, and you have no option but to try to play into it and augment it. She has this ineffable genius, and maybe it's just the intensity and sincerity of what she does.
David: Do you have any advice for working through a difficult collaborative partnership?
Joe: I’m probably too stubborn to exist on that major level and I've never had that type of egoless collaboration—at least in the way people that have thousands of records in their discography have. I’ve found the people who are super successful in that sense are incredibly thick-skinned. They're incredibly malleable. If you're a film composer and you’ve written something you think is a work of genius and the director says “I just don't like it” you can't really argue about it. You throw it out and you go back to square one. The people I know who are mega successful don’t take that too seriously. They don't fight for something that doesn't fit.
Joe plays a prepared guitar with a filet knife while backing PJ Harvey on Later With Jools Holland
David: As a player that’s shaped a unique voice for themselves and as someone that’s spent a lot of time exploring the instrument’s range as a journalist, do you have any advice for people looking to shape their unique voice as a player?
Joe: My advice for guitar players who are serious about developing a voice is to literally make a list of stuff you do well and rank them according to how unique they are to you. Then systematically go through that list and ask yourself what would happen if you deemphasized the more common aspects of your playing and then tried to magnify the idiosyncratic things on that list. In my case, I did it in a very literal and self-conscious way.
From the first time I started writing music reviews, I always placed enormous emphasis on originality. Something that was new and creative always interested me more than something that was masterful, but familiar. That's just my personal bias and I'm not arguing that's how it should be, but that's just the way my mind is.
David: As someone that enjoys a lot of stuff that reminds me of other stuff, I do think that doing something well within an idiom is valid, but should maybe be categorized differently than wildly unique things that progress an art form.
Joe: I've known Kirk Hammett since the days when Metallica was just a successful local band and he said something to me once along the lines of “My goal when I create is that it’s original, but connects to things that people are familiar with.” He thought of what he did as a marriage of innovation and familiarity, and that makes a lot of sense if you're trying to speak to a very large audience and nobody on earth has a larger audience than Metallica.
That said, Metallica was blisteringly original when they came out. I was just out of school and teaching guitar and my 13-year-old guitar students would come in with Kill 'Em All and ask me to teach them “Seek & Destroy” and it felt like a whole different genre from what I thought of as hard rock at the time. It definitely had that “shock of the new” quality.
David: You’ve been credited with “audio development” for your work on the guitar sounds in Logic and GarageBand. Can you put a finer point on what you actually did with that project?
Joe: I couldn't say what I actually did for years. Being an Apple contractor is like working for the NSA. I worked on the guitar components and it was a strict sound design job. When Apple started doing virtual amps and effects, I consulted on which effects to include and spent a year doing all of the sound designing. I bragged about it a lot more in the past, but the technology has advanced so far beyond it now. When the work I did first came out, it was one of the Best in Show. Today it's not. Apple hasn’t put much emphasis on guitar stuff since because that’s not how most people make music anymore, and there’s also a huge market of third party products for guitarists, so the guitar stuff that's in Logic and GarageBand today is almost exactly how we left it when I finished the work in 2009.
David: It's really hard to fight the tide with technology at this point. Are you an optimist about tech solving problems for creatives, or do you think it's problematic in how much it’s crept into the process?
Joe: I have two very contradictory beliefs. I think we live in era where the arts are fucked on many levels and Spotify is Satan. I think the music industry is responsible for killing the music industry—but it's pretty fucking dire. At the same time, I have a very profound belief that human expression and creativity is limitless and that we’ll always find a way to express ourselves. I don't have an allegiance to the guitar; I play guitar and it's a beautiful instrument, but that's just the hammer you’re pulling out of the toolbox. I'm more interested in evolution and creativity and new ideas. For most of my lifetime, you can attribute a lot more of that evolution and new creativity to hip hop than you can to rock. Rock went from being the most radical experimental form of music to being the most formulaic, in-the-box.
Yet, for all these adverse conditions, you can still go to YouTube and find a million mind-blowing things that inspire you—and some people can still find a way to make a living being creative. The overemphasis of STEM to the exclusion of arts and the humanities is a huge problem, because the arts and humanities teach you how to think and teach history and they put things into context. The way that’s been systematically deemphasized in education is a horror. I think there are a lot of social and economic forces that are related to all the ills in our society, mostly having to do with consolidating more wealth into fewer hands. On the other hand, I think we as a species are unbeatable.
The Apple project was kind of the opposite of creativity because I was trying to recreate sounds, not make new ones, but that project inspired me to dig deeper into how the real effects I was modeling digitally actually worked. Before that project, I didn't know anything about electronics or building pedals. After it, I picked up a soldering iron and learned how to build them and it became an obsessive hobby. I made over a hundred pedals that were clones of other circuits just because I wanted to see how they worked, and that evolved into a pedal business that is creative. Love them or hate them, the pedals I make aren’t clones of any other circuit and the pedal industry is 90% clones of old circuits being repackaged. Trying to replicate the work of others with clones eventually led me to stumble upon a few things that were—as far as I know—not done before with my own pedals. This technically challenging, but not necessarily creative Apple project led to a creative act at that point. To me, it was the same as listening to Debussy or reading Dickens, where you absorb great things that people have created and–if you're lucky–all of that input will give birth to something else. If there's anything I'm doing creatively in any sphere, it's been from consuming mass amounts of other people's creations, seeing what's possible, and being humbled by people who have skills I’ll never have. If you're lucky, all of that helps you stumble into some creative back alley where you might find something original and meaningful.
