Guitarists grimace a whole lot when they bend strings. I think about this. This phenomenon received some attention in 2005 as something called “guitar face.” As early as 1992, my friends and I referred to the act of expressive facial scrunching as “making a chops face.”
My friend Ron had a website devoted to chops faces (the appropriately titled www.chopsfaces.com. I remember he wrote, “You want to better define chops face? You’d have to put ‘rock’ into words.” Ron’s point was similar to the classic definition of swing by Dizzy Gillespie: “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”
According to whatever dictionary I’m looking at right now (Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate, Mr. Picky), the earliest use of the word “chops” in literature dates back to 1589. It meant the fleshy covering of the jaws, as in “a dog licks its chops.” In the jazz age, “chops” became a slang term for a musician’s embouchure (a fancy word for, well, “chops”). Working on one’s “chops” meant working on the technique of one’s “chops,” or mouth. Since then, the term has been broadly used to denote the technical facility of a musical performer.
Another meaning came out of rock music lingo. A “chop” (singular) is a musical figure (or a “lick”) that is physically difficult and therefore require years of practice, but it’s rarely used in the singular form. We hear “chops” all the time. A rock-guy who is “working on chops,” then, in addition to working on his/her general technique, is practicing specific “licks.” The point of practicing your chops is to get them so engrained in your muscle memory that your can recall them without thought, so that when you are self-indulgently “jamming” you will not be hindered by the constraints of your fingers. This results in some pretty horrible music much of the time.
In the nineteenth century, Niccolo Paganini and Franz Liszt had chops. Naturally, they had chops faces too. Paganini and Liszt unleashed their chops and chops faces on the public. Naturally, the press characterized these two giants as though they were “transfigured” by the music into a state of intoxication. I once wrote a whole dissertation about it (not really).
In Bible stories, Saint Cecilia was given entrance to the heavenly choir and was transfigured. The downside to receiving chops from the Lord, however, as St. Ceci’s story tells us, is that you are not able to share your chops with anyone. Therefore, if your transfiguration is at all visible to anyone but yourself (i.e. if you flail around wildly like a spaz), you get locked up. Some listeners perceived this transfiguration as the ability of virtuosos to channel Satan through their fingers. Blues legend Robert Johnson is a more recent example of a virtuoso musician who sold his soul to the devil in order to gain chops.
Crossroads (1986) stars guitarist Steve Vai as a shredder who sold his soul to the devil in order to shred – and also Ralph Macchio. Macchio plays Eugene, a conservatory student guitarist facing down a tough jury of music professors. Eugene performs a boring classical guitar composition, full of the requisite arpeggios, sweeps, and rest-stroke/finger style techniques. His face remains vacant and unexpressive. The judges are impressed up to the last second, when Eugene rips into a bluesy run concludes the piece. This makes them sad. Fittingly, Eugene sneers as the blues licks roll effortlessly from his fingers because, well, he feels it. The jury chides him for serving two Lords: blues guys and old, dead Italian guitar-music composers. Silliness. The remainder of the film, as everyone reading this knows (right?), involves Ralphie’s transformation from spoiled conservatory guy to road-weary bluesman as he guides an elderly friend, Willie, a true bluesman, back home to the Delta to renege on his deal with the devil. To complete this “short sale,” so to speak, he must pit young Ralphie against the devil’s shredder, Jack Butler, played by Steve Vai. This is good casting because Vai can play the guitar well. Not only that, he’s a virtuoso chops-face maker. He belongs in the Chops Faces Hall of Fame.
Vai always had chops faces in his arsenal. He once famously won friends by miming Jimmy Page’s guitar break in “Heartbreaker,” and since breaking into the music business in the late ’70s as Frank Zappa’s “stunt guitarist” he has continuously broken new ground in chops faces. During the Crossroads battle, Ralphie himself unleashes some of the acting chops that won him fame in The Karate Kid (1984). Crossroads, in fact, is Karate Kid, The Musical, featuring young Ralph trying to add meaning to his life by practicing the blues, a tradition largely invented, perfected, and maintained by people of color. I do wonder how many takes were needed to capture the right facial expressions for the music scenes.
Pat Metheny deserves special recognition for his role in claiming chops faces for the jazz community. Of course, it is not surprising that the top chops-face practitioner in the jazz world happens to be a guitarist, because it’s hard to make chops faces with a sax or trumpet jammed in your mouth. I’d venture to say that he has greater chops than anyone currently practicing chops faces. See, for example, the video he and his band made for the 1992 album Secret Story. (The real Secret Story, I would argue, is the chops face extravaganza witnessed by the select few who bought the video, which not only gave us Pat in pure grimacing form, it introduced many of us young aspiring players to the freakishly long fingers of pianist Lyle Mays.)
Compare Metheny’s faces to those of John Scofield, whose playing is just as high on the technical scale. Sco’s pose is that of an aging hipster, a bearded, blazered, stoic figure, a professor of angular six-string wizardry. Naturally, his playing style, so different from that of Metheny, is reflected in his chops faces.
Some Live Attitude:
Album Info: Flex-Able (1984)
