Ray was 21 and from Berwyn, had a clear, angelic complexion and sported a tufty head of black hair that made him look a little like Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. He’d been playing electric guitar for years and thought he was good, but still didn’t really have a band–with him was a pal named Brian, who was a drummer, but not the drummer, if you get the distinction. Ray had been practicing for this night at Limelight, this potentially momentous night, for some time. “For something like this I wanted to set something up,” he said. “You want to touch all the bases.”
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Jamie was a defending champion, of sorts–he hadn’t placed last June but had run away with the joint the previous September. He said he liked Eddie Van Halen, a statement that, in a room full of young heavy metal guitarists, reverberated with all the meaningfulness of an “I heart Reagan” button in New Orleans last month. He added that he also liked the melodic work of pure popster Todd Rundgren. Jamie was as cute as or cuter than Ray, in a funky heartthrob kind of way, and actually has his own gigging band, Eden. The Todd influence counted: “I don’t go out and blaze,” he said. “A lot of the guys here are faster than me, I’m sure. I’m just a little more tasteful.” Guitar solos, he noted, went through a long period of disuse. “In the early 80s, when there was a lot of new wave and dance music, solos became outdated; people thought they were self-indulgent.” Now, he allows, they might be coming back, a little tamed. “A good solo is a song within a song, a different way of expressing the same thing.”
Ray from Berwyn was on first. He climbed up onstage, doing a good imitation of a kid who’d never been up on a stage in front of anybody before. He plugged his guitar into the Marshall stack provided by Limelight, fiddled with its knobs, tuned a string, essayed a quick run, turned up the distortion, tuned another string or two, ran a scale.
Jamie–with the possible exception of the guy who played his solo on a bass–was the most imaginative musician there. A few light chords quickly blossomed into an extremely melodic and highly dramatic cascade of guitar pyrotechnics. He finished to rousing cheers.
