C.C.'s Shining Moment

Technical skill isn't all there is to being a great guitarist. There are super-shredders with dizzying chops that used to blow my mind back in the day but whose names I can no longer remember. On the flip side, Johnny Ramone mostly played barre chords and never let lose with an eyebrow-singeing solo, and yet I'll never forget his contributions to The Ramones.

Skill isn't what matters. Making an emotional connection with the listener is.

That probably sounds funny coming from somebody who came up worshipping at the alters of fleet-fingered virtuosos like Alex Skolnick, Marty Friedman and Jake E. Lee. Hell, Vinnie Vincent's solo on Burn by the Vinnie Vincent Invasion is naught but an explosion of notes played really fucking fast, and I love every second of it.

But my taste has broadened. Maybe it was getting into the blues when I was in college, but hyperspeed shredding isn't the only thing that drops my jaw anymore.

This brings us to one C.C. DeVille, of Poison fame.

From the perspective of technique, C.C. is really quite a mediocre guitarist. He's the typical fast pentatonic player with a few other scales thrown in to flavor things. His phrasing is sometimes incredibly clumsy. 

Yet, C.C. wrote some killer riffs, from the punky Talk Dirty to Me to the hard rock bliss of Nothing but a Good Time to the busy but tasty Unskinny Bop. He even composed some memorable solos. And none of his solos were by more memorable, or better, than his lead break on Fallen Angel.

Fallen Angel is a stone-cold hard rock classic, riding astride a riff that exploits different voicings of an open G chord to stand out immediately from the rest of its power chord-laden brethren. The song tells a mournful tale of a beautiful young woman who leaves home to chase her dreams, only to be crushed by the realities of life in Hollywood. Bret Micheals gives one of his best performances, like he's singing this one with his heart and not just his dick.

And, of course, there's C.C.'s solo.

There are a couple of things that make the Fallen Angel so damn good. First, like so many great guitar solos, it's composed in a way that starts slow and builds to a crescendo. There's a serious building of tension and excitement before that's all released in a flurry of fast scale runs.

But what's truly brilliant about the solo is how it parallels and augments the story in the lyrics.

I'm not gonna break it down from a music theory standpoint. What do I look like, an actual musician? I know about as much about music theory as I do about quantum mechanics. Which is next do nothing. But I do know good storytelling when I experience it and that's what's going on in Fallen Angel.

The solo opens with some long whammy bar dips and vibratos, as if it's detailing the bucolic small-town life of the song's protagonist (we'll call her Angel). It begins to build, with a few faster passages, as Angel leaves home, sets out to live her dreams and arrives in H-Wood. Then she is discovered and is put to work and things get crazy and chaotic as C.C. breaks out the fast, shreddy stuff. The solo, and the story, resolve with some more slower, melodic stuff as Angel realizes maybe the Hollywood life isn't what it's all cracked up to be.

It's not that C.C. never laid down other emotional, moving solos. His solos on Something to Believe In and Every Rose Has Its Thorn are full of mournful, moving licks. But while they capture the weepy nature of Bret Michael's lyrics, they don't really tell a story the way the Fallen Angel solo does. 

So let's raise a glass (alcoholic or non-alcoholic) to C.C. Deville's shining moment. His Fallen Angel lead captures everything that awesome fucking awesome about hair metal in the 80s.   It's great storytelling, it sounds badass and when you're in the right mood, it makes you feel like you're flying.