Instruments of Desire

In a striking display of cultural-technological interaction, Bob Dylan picked up an electric guitar at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1965, and forever changed his position in popular culture. It was then, Steve Waksman says, that the electric guitar was defined "as an object invested with deep significance" (p. 2). The goal of his study is to explain that significance. Technology is backgrounded; foregrounded are key individuals in the history of the electric guitar: Charlie Christian, Les Paul, Chet Atkins, Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, MC5, Led Zeppelin. Within this framework, the significance of the guitar with relation to certain cultural issues--race, sex, and politics--is considered in Waksman's interesting and well-written narrative. Finally, he gives us a discography and a nontechnical "guide to listening" for each of his featured individuals, both useful supplements to the text. Little academic work has been done on the electric guitar, and this book is a pioneering effort. This is not a technological history, but historians of technology may well find it worth reading as the first major scholarly commentary on a prominent twentieth-century technological phenomenon

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