I love hair metal – I often find myself wishing I could’ve been born thirty years earlier, in Los Angeles, so I might have been able to join a band and make a huge amount of money from shredding, wearing tight clothes and having a lot of hair. But there would have been a notable downside of being involved in that scene – the cold, gut-wrenching dread of knowing that one day, my band might end up sharing a bill with Autograph, and I would therefore leave myself vulnerable to being totally upstaged by their astonishing guitarist, Steve Lynch.
Steve Lynch doesn’t seem to get the attention that many of his contemporaries do, possibly because Autograph never quite had the success of Motley Crue, Poison, Ratt and so on. That’s despite having a bunch of good tunes too. But if you want to hear a guitarist who could shred with precious few equals on the Sunset Strip, with not a single duff solo in his entire back catalogue, here’s your man. Oh, and he’s no relation to George, if you were wondering. Everyone assumes I mean George Lynch when I’m talking about Steve. I’m sick of people “correcting” me like some human equivalent of Google’s smug “did you mean…?” function. SHUT UP! WATCH STEVE!
Really, you need to watch him as much as you need to listen to him. I was introduced to his playing, unexpectedly, by hearing Autograph’s biggest hit ‘Turn Up the Radio’ on Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and being so mesmerised by the solo that I was actually compelled to stop the pixellated Lamborghini Countach clone that I’d stolen – and put on hold my requirement to go and extort money from a strip club owner, or something.
I heard a whole string of classically-inspired tapped arpeggios, the sort of post-Van Halen rock guitar idea that was everywhere in the mid-80s, but somehow a cut above. Further research led me to YouTube, whereupon I found a whole load of clips of Lynch, hairsprayed to the nines, demonstrating his own solos on his 80s instructional video The Two-Handed Guitarist. This title is no exaggeration, as his soloing makes more inventive use of both hands than just about anyone else who was recording at the time.
Forget your EVH-spec arpeggios with a single right-hand finger. Lynch’s solos almost always involve all eight fingers somewhere – whether crossing strings to create devilishly complex arpeggiated sequences which sound more like keyboard parts than guitar, or throwing in a load of picking-hand fingers across one string in a manner that is still rarely matched to this day. And of course, many of the other common 80s tricks are in there – take a drink every time you hear a dive bomb on a harmonic…
There are also lots of fantastic, not to mention challenging, picking-based ideas throughout his lead playing – the solo from Autograph’s ‘Crazy World’ being a notable example. Lynch certainly has a keen melodic ear but, perhaps unsurprisingly, his solos are hard to get right – his licks are often quite left-field in terms of the positioning required to play them, and that’s before even considering his astonishing tapping technique. Naturally, on the second Autograph album, That’s the Stuff, Lynch gets a minute-long unaccompanied solo spot, ‘Hammerhead’, which makes Eddie Van Halen’s ‘Eruption’ sound about as technically challenging as ‘Seven Nation Army’.
Autograph reformed and brought a new album out not long ago, but Lynch had already been keeping himself busy through the post-hair metal days with numerous other bands and solo projects, and now also devotes a large amount of time to teaching. He’s used various guitars over the years, although the one I associate with him is the awesome custom-painted Jackson used in The Two-Handed Guitarist video. I once saw something purporting to be one of his old guitars for sale online, a V-shaped Carvin with his usual choice of Kahler vibrato, and even the same “EKG” graphic (which is on most or all of his old guitars, and looks inarguably badass). I wish I’d bought it somehow. I’m quite sure it would have made me sound and play just like him…
Where to start:
Autograph – ‘Turn Up the Radio’ from Sign In Please (1984)
Autograph – ‘That’s the Stuff’ from That’s the Stuff (1985) – plus the video of Steve playing it!
Autograph – ‘Crazy World’ from That’s the Stuff (1985) – there’s a playthrough of this too.
Autograph – ‘Loud and Clear’ from Loud and Clear (1987) – and this!
Autograph – ‘She Never Looked That Good For Me’ from Loud and Clear (1987)