Cracking the Code Episode 7: “Lix Et Veritas” — Nuno Bettencourt & Extreme

When it came to music, Yale was a unique place.

Almost everyone had taken piano lessons, but that's just what overachievers do.

Like being on the yearbook staff or in the National Honor Society.

And there were more than a few serious violinists, cellists and upright bassists.

But when the lights went down, there was no competing with the main event.

Live music was dominated by student-run acapella troops that delivered everything from Cole Porter.

To favorite radio hits, hijacked from the dance club and rerouted to the country club.

They held a near monopoly on campus music entertainment and their attendant parties made them even more visible than fraternities.

Singing groups were competitive and they had distinct social personalities.

There were even singing groups that recruited exclusively from other singing groups, creating a kind of tuxedo-clad special forces of singing.

Fresh from the land of shopping malls and Aquanet, this was all very strange.

But what was stranger still is that there were almost no bands.

I can remember maybe four, and they were interesting.

When it came to hard rock, Elvis had definitely left the building.

This was an unusual inflection point between the decades, a kind of time warp with two distinctly opposing crosscurrents.

It was no longer the 80s, but it was only just barely the 90s.

On the one hand, bands like Jane's Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers returned organic instrumentation and a psychedelic, spiritual vibe to popular music.

This raw and eclectic amalgam of old and new would have been unthinkably weird for Top 40 only a few years prior.

Stepping even more explicitly into the time machine, the Black Crowes and Lenny Kravitz effected a completely atavistic reimagining of the present into a polyester and corduroy swathe division of the past.

Even in mainstream pop culture, elements of retro style were grafted quite conspicuously into otherwise familiar surroundings.

The sudden reemergence of the sideburn on the cast of 90210 threw entire segments of the male population into instant coiffure crisis: to shave or not to shave, that was the question.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this was Guns N' Roses, when they released their highly anticipated double album, Use Your Illusion 1 and 2, the snarling standard bearers of Los Angeles Glam had unexpectedly evolved to epic nine-minute piano-driven rock theater.

Clearly, changes were afoot, but not everyone was on board.

The remaining stalwarts doubled down on the 80s, like Davy Crockett at the Alamo.

In the face of this sudden retrograde undertow in popular culture, that there were still bands cranking out thunderous anthems set to smoke machines and light beams was actually kind of amazing, and I for one, wasn't complaining.

Of these, Boston-based Extreme was the perfect expression of my guitar hero fetishism and raised on radio musical tastes.

The band had a particular penchant for catchy hooks and big choruses.

And their second album, Pornograffitti, produced a mega success story.

But it was actually an anomaly, More Than Words may have been a global hit, but Extreme was really a pop metal band.

The most recent product of a lineage that ran from Kiss and Queen through Van Halen to Def Leppard and Ratt.I remember thinking that legions of teen girls who bought Pornograffitti expecting more weepy baladeering were going to be pretty disappointed when nine out of 13 tracks on the album were face-melting funk metal.

Empowering these hermetically tight grooves was the fastest and most high-tech version of the guitar hero CPU, at the click of a metronome, Nuno Bettencourt could transition from slippery funk to spiral galaxies of tapping.

Like Steve Vai before him, Nuno had assimilated each of the previous decades' technical advances into a playing style that covered every possible mode of expression.

But where Vai was a new age searcher, an artist soul who had graduated from his stint with Roth to launch a hugely successful career as an instrumental solo artist.

Nuno, on the other hand, was more like Eddie, a guy in a band, driven to craft three-minute fist pumpers.Nuno's obvious Top 40 sensibilities even led to the occasional impressive vocal turn.

With such a complete complement of musical abilities, if the genetic lottery hadn't already been won, there was yet one other quality that set him apart.

Nuno's runway-ready looks were immediately noticed by female fans and emblazoned on loose-leaf binders and the insides of locker doors everywhere.

Nuno looked like someone who could be winning on American Gladiators.

His pumped-up physicality was also a perfect reflection of his style.

His athletic grooves were punctuated by sneaky syncopation.

And enhancing this punching power was Nuno's liberal use of muting.

Nuno's almost gymnastic ability to instantly switch gears from legato to staccato and back again highlighted his total command of modern lead playing.

This kind of muting seemed to have its roots in Eddie's playing.

As the lone lead player in a three-piece band, Eddie used the contrast of muted notes as a critical control of a song's energy level.

He could begin a part tightly wound and intense, then wind it up even more, and then gradually open up the bass notes until they were wide open and loose as energy level peaked.

In Eddie's lead playing, muting provided sinister attack for aggressive phrases.

As the 80s progressed, this aggressively muted lead sound became a key component of the buffed-up, hyper-masculine guitar vogue.The stark contrast between open notes and the utterly dead staccato of muting was like a one-armed push-up display of power.

By eliminating everything except the very audible sound of the pick attack, you were flaunting your precision and accuracy.

Some players took the fetishization of muted textures to such an extreme that you couldn't even tell what the underlying notes were.

But because this style was so pervasive, it never struck me as an affectation; this is simply what guitar playing sounded like.

And that was why, when I saw this commercial,

I immediately understood that who they were calling was me.

This was Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

A time travel farce with a rock theme.

And that blast of minor key speed in the film's trailer was a neoclassical interpretation of Mozart's familiar Turkish March.

And it was actually the intro to an Extreme song called Play With Me.

The trailers were in heavy rotation on network TV.

And the clarity of Nuno's picking in the intro, as well as the almost rococo level of muting that accompanied it, announced itself very clearly as an example of totally cutting-edge guitar work.

In the movie itself, Play With Me was used as the score for a scene in which a motley crew of historical personages runs amok in a California shopping mall.

Genghis Khan terrorizing a sporting goods store was scary, but not nearly as scary as the solo that bait, well, Nuno played behind him.

Here was Yngwie-level scale and arpeggio work, seasoned with Nuno's trademark staccato flavors, inside of a mainstream rock song.

It used to be that you could only find this level of picking precision in the work of hardcore purists like Yngwie or Al Di Meola in fusion.

But now, more than a decade past Eddie, it seemed only natural that technical advances in guitar playing would make hyper-performance possible for Top 40 rockers as well.

Nuno's almost bionic blend of speed, precision, cleverness, and songwriting ability, all wrapped up in a mainstream package, made him the ultimate modern guitar warrior.

So when the opportunity arose to actually see Extreme in person,

my roommate and I jumped at the chance.

We walked down the street to Toad's,

a New Haven rock club with a solid reputation.

It wasn't large, but somehow managed to pull in name-brand touring acts.

Okay, now this was weird.

The opening act was a band from Seattle that we've never heard of.

They were scrawny-looking street punks who played some kind of alternative rock.

There weren't any big choruses, there were hardly any solos.

In fact, I couldn't really figure out how these guys, who were called Alice in Chains,

even got this gig.

At the very least, Extreme didn't have to worry about getting upstaged by the opening band.

The lead singer was mingling in the crowd after their set.

At one point he stood right next to me.

But everyone was paying more attention to what was coming up next.

Two guys in front of me were busy discussing Paganini.

Of course, I knew why.

Suddenly, it was like ringside at a Tyson fight.

The lights dimmed.

And Extreme came bounding out to the thumping hustle of It's a Monster.

This was one of their trademark blends of funk and sonorous pop.

But it was just a warm-up.

Then Nuno launched into the steroid-all barrage of Play With Me.

It was like a rock video come to life.

I'd never been this close to this much power before, and it was scary.

And it just made me wanna practice.

Back in Long Island, one of my friends had found out about a guitar contest down at a local rock club.

But this wasn't just any club.

This was Spit.

The legendary Levittown hangout of former high school football stars turned rock and roll Lotharios.

And it wasn't just any guitar contest.

The weekly event would send winners to the finals at the end of the summer, which would be presided over by none other than Steve Vai.

Steve was also from Long Island.

And was superseded only by Brian Setzer and Billy Joel in terms of Nassau County celebrity hit points.

There was, of course, Joe Satriani, but in my tiger beat tabulation of guitar pomposity, Steve's connection to David Lee Roth put him over the top.

I didn't know about contests, but the prospect of being validated by guitar royalty was ineluctable.

This would be my own personal crossroads.

If the devil would have me, I was ready to deal.

I picked up the tape of the backing tracks we were supposed to solo over.

There was a slow song in A.

It was like a homemade version of Prince's Purple Rain.

The fast song was in E.

After thinking about what I'd play over this, I realized I had just the trick.

Stand back, Long Island, because I'm taking what's mine.

When we pulled up to the club,

I was girded for battle.

Self-conscious about my Michael J. Fox Honors classes hair, I went with the Axl Rose approved coverall, the bandana.

I wasn't sure what kind of shirt fit the bill,

but I figured, hot pink tank top ought to do it.

Oh man, the place was packed.

Every rock fan within a 10-mile radius was here.

That was when it first hit me.

Fear.

I ran track in high school, so I was familiar with that empty pit feeling in your stomach as you size up the competition.

Towing the line before the pistol goes off,

you have no way of knowing who you're standing next to.

One-minute miler.

Six-minute straggler.

You could always ask.

But what's the point?

Because four minutes later, you'll know the answer.

When the dust settled, there was a light that had shown brighter than the rest.

And that light was very handsome.

There had been no ringer, nobody with the muscular picking technique that would slay the rest of us.

As it turned out, it didn't matter.

I'd been in such a state of denial, I'd placed so much of my self-confidence on being good at guitar that I'd entered this contest not so much because I believed I could walk away with it,

but because I had to.

This was a wake-up call.

In the throws of defeat, I had to admit that I wasn't quite the player I thought I was.