In Memoriam: Keith Levene (The Clash, Public Image Limited)

5 minute read

Yesterday I learned one of my favorite guitar players is gone: Keith Levene, founding member of The Clash and Public Image Ltd, just died of liver cancer, at age 65. While I'm old enough to already have my share of dead heroes, I find myself strangely affected by his death. Strange since it's not like Levene has been on my mind constantly. I don't have his poster on the wall. I don't think of him every time I pick up the guitar. I hadn't even known he was a founding member of The Clash.

No, for years I've known Levene as the brilliant, abrasive guitarist for Public Image Limited (PiL), the band he co-founded with John Lydon (fka Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols) in 1978. Way more people know the Sex Pistols, and a few might only know PiL as Johnny Rotten's other band. But I'm certainly not alone in my belief that of the two, Public Image Ltd was the one artistically worth a damn. As a few YouTube commentators have pointed out: Public Image Ltd, at their early peak before Levene left the band, sounded like the future. And I think Levene is the reason why.

A note about the electric guitar: While revolutionary upon arrival, over the decades the electric guitar has become nearly as ossified an instrument as the violin or the cello. At first electric guitar players were breaking all the rules, or rather making up new rules as they went along: Slicing their speaker cones, using thinner strings to bend notes, abusing tremolo bars. Think Hendrix.

But that's no longer the case. There is now the inevitable established canon of tracks and styles to learn. There are agreed-upon rules for approaching the guitar. Every time you play most people listening already have a set of pre-conceived notions of how the guitar should sound, and by extensions how you should sound. While it's especially bad now, this was already the case in the 70s, after rock music had spent over a decade as a dominant commercial force.

So to pick up the guitar and do something truly unique is a difficult artistic feat. It's the Jackson Pollock thing: Anyone can splash paint on a canvass, but only Pollock could make it work like he did, developing an artistic language all his own.

I've been playing guitar for almost twenty years now. I'll let you in on a secret: Playing conventional classic rock guitar isn't hard at all. It's actually very fucking easy to learn the minor pentatonic scale and scribble within the lines over any anonymous backing track on YouTube. You can learn AC/DC riffs, Led Zeppelin, whatever, and impress someone. Gratification is never far off. It's amusing for a while, and if you're really good, you can become a street performer, or join a bar band, or even tour with Wolfmother. But you're not going to become Jackson Pollock. And at this point, you're even further away from being an artist than before you learned to play guitar in the first place.

Keith Levene, though, could do something different with the guitar. No small feat. To use this instrument to make sounds that are fresh and mind-bending requires a degree of individualism, perseverance, and discernment that I think is nearly extinct in the guitar-playing masses of today and was always in short supply to begin with. The sounds Levene made with the guitar were haunting, frightening, visceral. His tone was ice-pick sharp, metallic. It's not technically difficult to play the chords he played, but it's extremely difficult to play outside the lines like he did. Levene chose the wrong notes on purpose, something that guitar players like me spend a whole lifetime running away from. And upon hearing him play many people, maybe even most people, would frown. But it gives a few of us an enormous smile.

Ok, so Levene played weird. Who cares? What good is it to try to play the guitar differently, anyway? Indeed I think 90% of people would be thrilled to play like Slash or John Frusciante. I think it comes down to a fundamental choice: Do you want to be an entertainer? Or do you want to be an artist? You can be both, of course. But which comes first?

I think the early Public Image Ltd albums rose to the level of art. And truly unique art will reach into your heart and resonate with you in ways you didn't know were even possible. This was the case for me when I first discovered Public Image Ltd and Keith Levene's playing. It was the winter of 2014. I was already out of college, and I had flown to Poland to care for my dying grandfather. I couldn't tell you how I felt in my own words. But you could hear how I felt if you listened to 'Annalisa', the driving, desperate fourth track on PiL's debut album 'First Issue'.

Listen to the track once, and then listen to it again paying special attention to the guitar. It's never in the 'right' place. The note choices are seemingly arbitrary. It sounds like Levene doesn't care. And maybe on some level he didn't, at least not the way Jimmy Page would. But clearly, Levene cared that he sounded like that. And thirty-five years later it meant a hell of a lot to me, scared and bewildered in the middle of the Polish winter. There are some experiences so uniquely difficult that you're bound to feel alone, even if you're surrounded by people you love. In my life, I've found that only art can close that gap. So I owe Levene a debt of gratitude. Levene's tenure in the spotlight was relatively brief. Like so many great artists he couldn't seem to have gotten out of his own way. I hope he's at peace now.

Here are a few of my favorite Public Image Ltd tracks and clips:

'Public Image', from First Edition

U2's The Edge took the chiming, expansive guitar sound from this track and used it to build a global rock empire.

'Poptones', 'Careering', shot for The Old Grey Whistle Test

Hendrix pioneered the effect you hear on the guitar here, the flanger. Of course its use in a psychedelic context was trippy and ethereal. Here, Levene turns his arpeggios into clouds that float by while you're cradled by the bass and rhythm, until your attention is stolen by Lydon's wailing.

'The Flower of Romance', from The Flowers of Romance

Levene wasn't only a guitar player. PiL's last album with Levene, The Flowers of Romance, hardly had any guitar at all. Instead Levene and Lydon went nuts with synths, stringed instruments, and tribal percussion. The result is one of the strangest albums put out by a major label. One of my favorites.