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Cynthetiq · 09-03-2008, 09:56 AM

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View: Six-String Legend
Source: American Way Magazine
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Six-String Legend
Six-String Legend

That’s the title you get when you’re the guitar in Guitar Hero. By Larry Dobrow

For all but the most nimble-fingered guitarists, mastering the gazillion-note behemoth that is Megadeth’s “Hangar 18” is a pipe dream, one that requires time, diligence, and almost superhuman dexterity. For Marcus Henderson, it’s a job.

And because Henderson is so good at his job, millions of would-be shredders get to experience the sensation of re-creating “Hangar 18” from the comfort of their living rooms. Henderson, you see, was the first musician tapped to replicate the guitar parts for music featured in the wildly successful Guitar Hero series of video games. He has thumped his way through “Iron Man” and tangled himself in the “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’ ” squeals. He might just be the most listened-to guitar player on the planet who isn’t a household name.

He may also be one of the most underrated. “What he does [in Guitar Hero] is a lot more than just getting the notes right,” says Outworld guitarist and online-lesson guru Rusty Cooley. “When I first heard Guitar Hero, I didn’t realize somebody else had re-recorded all the parts. That’s incredible.” Henderson, 35, dismisses the hype. “I feel like I’m contributing in some small way to the music scene, I guess,” he shrugs. “I don’t need an award. I just need to know that I didn’t suck.”

Like many would-be six-stringers’, Henderson’s road to guitar glory began with a tennis racket— a Don Budge wooden model, to be precise. He played it with a “pick” popped off the top of a milk jug and eventually smashed it to bits, à la Paul Stanley from KISS. He received his fi rst guitar — “an Explorer-shaped knockoff with a whammy bar and a complete indignation toward staying in tune” — for his 14th birthday.

Early influences included AC/DC’s Angus Young and Joe Satriani, though “Yesterday” is the first song Henderson recalls plucking out on his own. He was 16 when his fi rst band, Square Meal, played its first gig, at the legendary 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, California. He bought a hamburger with the $5 he received for his night’s work. He made a name for himself quickly, as much for his playing as for his warmth and generosity in a business populated by many a swelled head. His various bands found themselves on bills with Bay Area punk mainstays like Operation Ivy and Sweet Children, which eventually morphed into Green Day. While Henderson did what he calls “the struggling musician” thing for some time — he semi-fondly recalls serving coffee to 49ers legend Jerry Rice at 5:30 a.m. — he achieved a degree of success with Marginal Prophets, which won a California Music Award in 2004, and he did session work with acts like En Vogue.

HENDERSON’S JOURNEY to Guitar Hero heroics began innocuously enough with “a call from a friend of a friend of a friend who I met at a beach party.” The friend-thrice-removed asked him if he could learn Megadeth’s “Symphony of Destruction” for a proposed video game and shared few details beyond that. The clip debuted at the 2005 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) trade show to rave reviews, prompting publisher RedOctane and developer Harmonix to fast-track Guitar Hero into stores. It was released in the United States on November 8, 2005. Chances are you’ve heard of it since then, if only because it’s nearly impossible to ignore a runaway success that has $1 billion in retail sales to its credit.

Henderson believes that he got the gig owing as much to his “propensity to show up on time” as anything else, but RedOctane associate producer Ted Lange remembers things differently. “Everything about Marcus basically screams rock and roll, and we needed that authenticity,” he says. “He’s phenomenal [on the guitar]. He even looks like a character from the game.”

Henderson replicated the guitar parts on 20 of Guitar Hero’s 30 songs, which range from straightforward tracks like the Ramones’s “I Wanna Be Sedated” to intricate, harder-edged cuts like Pantera’s “Cowboys from Hell.” Despite the E3 embrace, however, he kept his expectations in check. “We thought that if we attained cult status, we’d have done our job,” he says. “I mean, we were released by a small publisher to little fanfare. We had this enormous box with the guitar in it taking up all the [retail] shelf space. This thing could’ve sucked so quickly.”

Guitar Hero clearly avoided that fate, as witnessed by the euphoric reviews — “Writers and editors did a lot of the work for us,” Henderson admits — and subsequent popculture infestation. Guitar Hero Night has elbowed aside karaoke in big-city bars; last summer’s Family Values concert tour featured a second-stage competition pitting the best Guitar Hero II players in each market against one another. As of the end of January, more than 16 million copies of Guitar Hero games had been sold worldwide.

Looking back, Henderson isn’t surprised that the game evolved into a phenomenon. “The music sounded great. It was executed with love and care. There was no blood and no fatalities, so moms could get into it,” he says. The speed with which it happened, on the other hand, blew him away. The defining moment? When he opened up a magazine to see a spread showcasing sitcom legend Jason Alexander with the Guitar Hero ax and his comments about how much he loved the game. “I thought, ‘I’ve rocked George Costanza’s world!’ We went into a whole other dimension of coolness after that,” Henderson recalls almost giddily.

The game — and Henderson’s standing both in the guitar-freak and virtual-guitarfreak communities — exploded with the release of Guitar Hero II in November 2006. Henderson played roughly one third of the 64 tracks, becoming the series’ go-to guy for what he calls “the black-diamond songs, the degree-of-difficulty songs.” He played on downloadable content and worked on song selection for Guitar Hero III, and he says he’s “waiting for the set list to come down” for the three Guitar Hero installments due out this year.

HENDERSON SEEMS at ease with the fact that his celebrity stems from his videogame work as opposed to from the myriad bands he has backstopped over the course of his 21-year career. His closest brush with mainstream stardom ended, following a private showcase for a major label, with these words: “We just don’t hear a single.” Still, he took the rejection in stride.

“I used to believe that every band I was in would sign a huge recording deal and live in a house made of guitars,” he quips. “Luckily, the more experienced you get, the more the subtle balance of talent and commerce can be attained while still filling your soul with the feeling that you’re doing something for the world.”

Those who question whether Henderson has truly achieved that balance might not be so cavalier if they knew the effort that goes into every Guitar Hero track. Upon receiving an MP3 of the song he’s being asked to deconstruct from WaveGroup Sound, the company charged with producing the music for the games, Henderson gets to work determining the guitars, pickups, amplifiers, and effects used on the track. His perfectionist streak occasionally gets him in trouble: He has been known to throw down thousands of dollars for gear that enables him to capture a specific tone, and to obsess for hours over a phrasing that he can’t quite nail down. For example, he wasn’t satisfied with his work on “Who Was in My Room Last Night?” until he found a polishedstone guitar pick that gave his playing the needed heft.

From there, Henderson breaks down the track into sections: verse one, chorus one, solo one, etc. He creates a road map of sorts as he learns each of the sections; then he spends as many as two or three days committing them to memory. “You have to learn each player’s tendencies. It’s like identifying a speech pattern,” he explains.

Once Henderson enters the studio to record the guitar track, he’s all business: “You get there at nine a.m. and have your Red Bull and a McMuffin; then it’s metal in the morning, dude.” He’s knocked out tracks in as little as 22 minutes (Wolfmother’s “Woman”) and taken as long as two and a half days (“Hangar 18,” natch). Henderson declines — apologetically — to disclose how much money he has received for his Guitar Hero riffery, other than to say that the amount varies between “a few hundred dollars” and “around a thousand” per song, based on the performer’s experience and ability.

His playing has been given the thumbs-up by the toughest critics: the artists themselves. While Henderson allows that he has received thanks from guitarists like Lamb of God’s Mark Morton for doing right by their work, Die-cast guitarist Jon Kita believes Henderson understates the game’s influence within the music community. “I have witnessed people who have played on those songs completely manhandle every note,” he says. “They love it.”

Henderson himself isn’t much of a Guitar Hero guitar hero — he describes his ability at the game as “fair to middling” — but he’s grateful to the game for opening doors that might otherwise have remained shut. His instructional video, tentatively dubbed Rock Guitar Heroics with Marcus Henderson, will arrive in stores this fall, as will his signature model Epiphone guitar. He recently received a call from Jim Henke, the vice president of exhibitions and curatorial affairs for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, who asked Henderson for the Gibson Flying V used on several Guitar Hero II songs; he happily gave it, and the ax is now on permanent display. As for recognition, he receives considerably more than he did during his days toiling in rock clubs. “I’m not one of these ego guys, but it’s great when people come up and say hello. It happens more in places that are specific, like a video-game store or a Guitar Center,” he says.

If nothing else, Henderson and Guitar Hero have opened young gamers’ ears to a host of music from yesteryear they rarely hear on the radio. If that proves to be his legacy, he’s okay with it. “The most satisfying aspect of my work on the Guitar Hero series is knowing maybe, just maybe, the next great songwriter or guitarist will emerge from the Guitar Hero generation,” he says. It may not be a line of platinum records on the wall, but it’s not half bad.

It must be really cool to have worked on these games and been the guy to pull it all off. I tought I'd like to share this article.

Anyone a guitar hero fan?