I speak to Chuck Hammer about his work on David Bowie’s Scary Monsters And Super Creeps album, playing live with Lou Reed and his pioneering use of the guitar-synth.
Adam Steiner: How did you first meet David Bowie?
Chuck Hammer: I was playing with Lou Reed at Hammersmith Odeon in London, October 1979 and Bowie happened to be there. Lou was quite high that night, he called me on to play and I just soloed away, I was using a 1977 Roland GR-500 guitar synth as my main instrument at that time.
Anyway, so I met Bowie coming offstage and the first thing I said to him was: ‘your music has really influenced my guitar playing’ and quick as anything he replied: ‘Well, Chuck, perhaps we might end up working together.’
Not long after this, I sent along a cassette to his office with four experimental Guitarchitecture tracks, some of the more ambient instrumental things I’d been doing. I do remember there was a piece called “Guitargraphy” which had a descending chord structure that I think influenced tracks like “Ashes To Ashes”.
AS: What happened next?
CH: Bowie was still kind of underground and off the grid at that time, especially in New York. So he looked me up and found me, there in the RCA studio, and his assistant, Coco, rang me up: ‘David heard your tape, he liked it very much, he wanted to know if you want to record on his next album.’ So, of course—I said yes!
Arriving at the studio I found Bowie had grown a mustache and was dressed in a full-length leather coat with these open-toed, Japanese kind of sandals, wearing a big wooden cross round his neck, drinking a quart of milk in one hand and holding a clipboard in the other. He was warm and friendly, as always, he said: ‘Chuck, how nice to see you again. Your tape is all I listen to.’
The session was done privately with just David, Tony Visconti, an assistant tape-op, and myself in the studio, everyone was tight and on top of things. Very fast managing the console, by the time I finished my tracks they were already putting together sub mixes in the booth. Throughout the session, David and Tony were intensely focused—there was no time for a photo opp or anything like that – we were just artists working together.
Silhouettes And Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps
AS: How familiar were you with Bowie and his music?
CH: I was a big fan, I listened to everything from Hunky Dory, Ziggy and onwards. Aladdin Sane was a huge influence just because it was so avant-garde. After Ziggy, Bowie didn’t quite know what to do next, Aladdin Sane is an off-the-cuff thing along with Mike Garson’s abstract polytonal sound on the piano, and that was what I was interested in. David was great at deploying musicians and having an idea of where they might go sonically; and that’s where my head was at.
In truth, it was Bowie’s last three records before 1980 [Low, ‘’Heroes’’ and Lodger] which really influenced my playing. And despite that weight of influence, the age gap between us differentiated how we worked together. I was reflecting upon the state of art of where he was at that time, post-Berlin, and looking for a way to develop more texture through guitars. So I felt I immediately knew where to pick this up and where to move on from his previous music.
AS: How was it working with one of your musical heroes?
CH: After working with Lou Reed, Bowie was so polite, super nice and complimentary, Lou was the opposite, he put you on the back foot, constantly challenging you. One of the key insights I gained from working with Bowie was to always follow your own instincts. I wasn’t thinking about music, I was thinking about Subterraneans [from Low], a long sculpted piece. I was trying to take it past the trilogy — where Eno had left off.
“One of the key insights I gained from working with Bowie was to always follow your own instincts“
Also, when you have musicians at the level of Carlos Alomar, George Murray, and Dennis Davis at the heart of a basic track [the DAM Trio], their musicianship brings the recording up to such a high level that it becomes essential to reach for something new in your own playing – something beyond what you might normally play. Otherwise, quite simply, your own track won’t cut it.
Bowie was such a visionary, it’s hard to understand how he was able to extrapolate what another artist was about and return it back to you in a new form that was all its own thing—that was his gift.
AS: How would you explain a guitar synth to someone, what makes it different from a normal guitar?
CH: What makes the guitar-synth, especially the GR-500 unique – and notoriously difficult to play – is that it has huge sustain as the frets are grounded. So whenever you fret a note it can instantly create a feedback loop that just keeps going, constantly evolving in real-time. As a guitarist, this really forced me to rethink and modify my technique—making me think more as a composer in terms of layers and stacking textures rather than linear lines.
AS: You mention, the guitar synth is tricky to master, is it still the same playing one today?
CH: The tech hasn’t changed much, but it was spontaneous. The GR-500 was pre-digital, you had to create sounds and styles on the spot, and you couldn’t store your sound as a preset- so like an analog synth it was very organic, which reminds me again of the sounds from Low.
The GR-500 had tracking issues, and the notes arrived slightly delayed, so there was this lag that you had to anticipate and work around. The sustain was difficult on and off, you could create very long notes like a choir — no-one else was doing this with guitar at that time. But from improvising onstage with Lou I learned how to respond to that; he was very disruptive, tried to catch you out a lot, I had to try and stay ahead.
AS: In a 2016 interview, Tony Visconti said about you: “The man showed us the first guitar synth we had ever seen and knew how to play the damn thing! We thought we were in the future the day he played the lush strings on “Ashes To Ashes.” [Guitar Player April 2016, Michael Molenda] Why do you think Bowie took a chance to work with you, a relative unknown in his early twenties, bringing together these wild, outlandish sounds?
CH: Bowie had a deep interest in new sonic terrains and experimental guitar textures. He also had a deeply keen understanding of how these tones could work within the wider context of his own music. I think after Lodger David was getting a little tired, ragged even, looking for a new energy—he certainly found it in New York!
I think it’s important to note, that in choosing to work with me on Scary Monsters, this was one of the first times that Bowie had invited someone much younger, from the next generation, to play on his records. Guitarchitecture was a break from Jimi Hendrix, Mick Ronson and Jeff Beck—the future of guitar was textural, layering and non-real-time—stuff that didn’t have to be played right there live, that was the way forward, that’s what was new.
AS: Let’s talk about “Ashes To Ashes” a seminal track for Bowie, a new number one hit [in the UK, at least] and an anthem for the ages. Where did you fit into this?
CH: They let me run through the songs and I focused on choruses. I was using a lot of chord inversions. Using a harmonizer and a tape delay – I would take the chorus Bflat chord and play it in different positions on the guitar, different octaves up and down the fretboard.
Tony and David worked quickly, very efficient and very keen, overall I think I did like eight takes and by the second playback of “Ashes To Ashes”, Tony had already sub-grouped the guitar-synth tracks on the studio console so that he could test a fade across all of the guitar tracks simultaneously, treating it as one track. I was stunned when I heard the playback. It was an ethereal wall of guitar—we all looked at each other and realized that we had something very special.
AS: I always find the outro of “Ashes To Ashes” deeply moving, more like a piece of classical music that just shimmers away from the main song, it’s really something else.
CH: Yes, those washes of guitar synth – Tony did a lot of processing, like Eno, treating raw sound like clay. I thought Eno was maybe a bit of colonialist, borrowing, sampling, tasting; I wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before. Bowie and Tony were desperate for new sounds and ideas – anything they could do to move past the Eno period.
Tony had pulled this big orchestral thing into a pop song. I think “Ashes” set the whole London scene on fire for the rest of the decade, there were times when Bowie seemed to steer the future direction of art, fashion and culture, always ahead of the curve
“It was an ethereal wall of guitar—we all looked at each other and realized that we had something very special.“
AS: You also appear on “Teenage Wildlife” It’s a huge track, full of big sounds, but your synth-guitar seems to blend so well along with Robert Fripp’s parts—how did you find that balance?
CH: Everything needed its own space – i knew enough not to ask too many questions; not to get too involved. As a session musician you’re hired to play on tracks, not to write them. Tony and Bowie played me very raw basic rhythm tracks, with a click track behind it and chord charts and I responded intuitively.
The slower parts are me – the wildfire guitar was Robert [Fripp], though I never knew what he was going to do, as I think he recorded after me, and I didn’t hear him in the mix—I was following David’s lead–-where he was looking for more emotional colour. Fripp is one of the greats but still coming out of that overdriven guitar of the Hendrix-era
There’s a point in the song where Bowie voice peaks: ‘I miss you/I should go’ and you can hear my high harmonised guitars, what Tony called “the piglets”, rise along with it. There’s this very high guitar string bend – I feel Bowie was responding to that – a very emotional part and it was more of a lead guitar thing, he worked with it and it just kept going from there.
AS: You also played on “Up The Hill Backwards”?
CH: I wasn’t credited –there’s maybe something of me in those first few seconds, when the faders come up– like eight backwards guitars. They had that title already—and I was responding to that, in synth language through a volume envelope. My guess is that despite all the electronic production going on, those were still the days of recording to tape, and they were simply running out of tracks!
AS: People always like to use the phrase “Bowie’s best album since Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)”, looking back on it after more than forty years – what’s your view now?
CH: It’s not so much that it’s his last great album, as people used to say, but it was his last album before he himself got swamped by doing so many other things and becoming too famous, after that he literally became David Bowie; no more masks, or personas,
Bowie was trying to be grounded, meaningful and real, to become a real person, but it wasn’t the imaginary character and fiction that we all wanted, Scary Monsters is perhaps the culmination of all that, it wasn’t about selling the album visually.
AS: Did any tracks on the finished album really jump out for you when you heard it?
CH: Not in the way you might think. Tom Verlaine is one of my favourite artists, partly for his minimalist guitar sound, his solo album [Tom Verlaine, 1979] is one of my favourite albums. “Kingdom Come” speaks to me of both desperation and hope; disenfranchised joy. I had no idea David was going to cover it. And I think they missed the spirit of the song, it’s one of my least favourites, it wasn’t quite the band’s place.
“Guitarchitecture is my life’s work“
AS: Do you hear much of your sound in new generations of musicians that followed after you?
CH: A lot of people were influenced by the tech, but I was not a spotlight artist, I was a very underground musician; I was never pushing for notoriety or fame. When I started investigating Guitarchitecture I was anxious to get off from touring and flying. I loved working with Lou Reed, but I wanted to record in my own right.
AS: When did you last see Bowie?
CH: In 1980, David invited me to listen to a playback of Ashes at his office in New york, they had a little vinyl, he gave the first test pressing as a gift. After that, I bumped into him in the 90s in the hallway of the MOMA in New York–a fleeting glimpse.
AS: You’ve described your sound in the songs as orchestral, cathedral — a continuation of the guitarchitecture project?
Yes, it’s an ongoing project—its my life’s work.
Find out more about Chuck Hammer’s Guitarchitecture work on his Bandcamp page:
https://chuckhammer.bandcamp.com
Adam Steiner is the author of Silhouettes And Shadows, a deep dive into the making of Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) he will appear as a co-moderator at The David Bowie Convention with video editor, Nacho in discussion about the album with Carlos Alomar and George Murray.
Silhouettes And Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)
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