In the 1960s, a rock ‘n’ roll power trio was a band with three musicians: guitar, bass, and drums. Plus, if all three band members could sing on key, the band could have up to three voices, which I suppose you might count as three more instruments. The lone guitarist often had to switch between rhythm guitar (strumming chords) and lead guitar (playing individual notes in solos). But even a great guitarist needed a pretty good bassist and drummer, too.
Follow your ears under the fold for more.
Power trio? Three musicians? With only three band members, you could take two routes: 1) Turn up the quality (which means you find someone exceptional like Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix to play guitar,) or 2) Turn up the quantity (play everything really loud – which I will demonstrate shortly).
The Wikipedia article (Power Trio) has a pretty good definition of a power trio, with examples:
A power trio is a rock and roll band format popularized in the 1960s. The traditional power trio has a lineup of guitar, bass and drums, leaving out the rhythm guitar or keyboard that are used in other rock music to fill out the sound with chords. While one or more band members may sing, power trios usually emphasize instrumental performance and overall impact over vocals and lyrics.
The rise of the power trio in the 1960s was made possible in part by developments in amplifier technology that greatly enhanced the volume of the electric guitar and bass. The prototypical power trios were exemplified by late 1960s-era blues-rock/ hard rock bands The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, and The James Gang. Blue Cheer, in its most popular configuration as a power trio, was said to have adopted that format after seeing Jimi Hendrix perform at the Monterey Pop Festival. Well-known 1970s-era power trios include the Canadian prog rock group Rush; the British heavy metal band Motörhead; The Jam and The Police. Keyboard-oriented power trios using electronic organ (or synthesizer in the 1970s) also emerged, such as Atomic Rooster, the guitar-less incarnations of Soft Machine and The Nice, and progressive rock band Emerson Lake & Palmer.
Although power trios fell out of fashion in mainstream rock during the early 1980s, the rise of post-punk and indie rock in the later 1980s and throughout the 1990s featured many trios, such as grunge-rockers Nirvana and pop-punk bands such as Green Day and Blink-182. In more recent years, the term has become generally applied to any sort of three-person band.
Let’s travel back in history.
Power Trios from the 1960s
Jimi Hendrix didn’t just drop out of nowhere. Before he became famous (as Jimi Hendrix), he served his apprenticeship playing guitar with Little Richard, The Isley Brothers, John Hammond, Jr., and others. Then Linda Keith (ex-girlfriend of Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones) noticed him and told Chas Chandler (from the Animals) about him. Chandler brought him to England, where the English discovered Jimi Hendrix and made him a star.
Here’s what Jeff Beck (from the Yardbirds) said about the first time he saw Hendrix play (from an article in the Telegraph):
The one guitarist who really put him off his stride is Jimi Hendrix. "The thing I noticed when I saw him was not only his amazing blues but his physical assault on the guitar. His actions were all of one accord, an explosive package. Me [Jeff Beck], Eric [Clapton] and Jimmy [Page], we were cursed because we were from Surrey. We all looked like we’d walked out of a Burton’s shop window. There was Jimi with his military jacket, his hair about 14 feet in the air, playing with his teeth. We would have loved to have done that.
"He hit me like an earthquake when he arrived. I had to think long and hard about what I did next. The wounds were quite deep, actually, and I had to lick them on my own. I was constantly looking for other things to do on the guitar, new places to take it. I’ve got to feel that this is mine. If I don’t feel special, I don’t do it."
Beck and Clapton and Page were already famous, but all three of them were blown away by the genius of Jimi Hendrix.
Without further ado, here’s Jimi Hendrix (with Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums) doing "Purple Haze":
I wanted to find a live version of one of my favorites, "Crosstown Traffic," but YouTube let me down. You can hear the song here (with still pictures of Jimi, but no live video).
And let’s go immediately to Cream. Eric Clapton (the other guitar god of the 60s), with Jack Bruce (bass) and Ginger Baker (drums). The song is "Strange Brew."
And now my third song from the ‘60s: "Summertime Blues" by Blue Cheer. Remember what I said about quality and quantity? This song is quantity. Turn the volume up to eleven. The guitarist might not be as good as Hendrix or Clapton, but the song sounds pretty good when you turn the volume up. Leigh Stevens on guitar, Dickie Peterson on bass and vocals, and Paul Whaley on drums. I’m not sure if they were the last psychedelic band or the first heavy metal band. But I love Blue Cheer’s "Summertime Blues" almost as much as the Eddie Cochran version or the Who version.
You can’t even see their faces behind the hair. In the original, the words are this:
I called my congressman and he said, quote,
"I’d like to help you son but you’re too young to vote."
But in the Blue Cheer version, the congressman doesn’t say anything, he just gets a guitar riff. Which is so great.
What counts as a power trio?
I think a power trio is three musicians. Guitar, bass, and drums. No more and no less. But Wikipedia posits a variation:
During the late 1960s, many groups used power trio instrumentation while adding a vocalist. These include The Who, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Queen (even though Freddie Mercury, too, was an instrumentalist, some of the band's songs follow this format). Although none of these were ever particularly identified as such, the music that they created is influenced by, and follows the same musical format as, many of the pioneering power trios. Likewise, Mountain is often erroneously referred to as a power trio, even though there were four instrumentalists (guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards) in the band. Many punk rock bands, for example the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, would follow the power trio plus vocalist model, which was also used by proto-punk band The Stooges.
Bullshit. A power trio plus a vocalist isn’t a power trio. Trio means "three." If you have four people in the band, it’s not a trio. In this diary, I’ll ignore all of the trio+singer bands.
Another form of cheating involves recording studios, which allow three musicians to record multiple vocal tracks from one person. Or maybe one musician plays multiple instruments. I really wanted to include the Violent Femmes song "Gone Daddy Gone," but the bass player played both bass and xylophone on the studio album. The live versions of them playing the song don’t have the xylophone. So I took them off the list. (But here’s the link: Gone Daddy Gone. Listen to that heavenly xylophone! It’s a great song, but I can’t call them a power trio.
Power Trios from the 1970s and 1980s
Here are two bands from the late 70s and 80s:
First, ZZ Top. Billy Gibbons (vocals and guitar). Dusty Hill (vocals, bass, and keyboard), and Frank Beard (drums). Frank Beard is the one without a beard! Is that ironic or what?
Here’s "La Grange" by ZZ Top. What a great song:
Another one of my favorites by them is "Jesus Just Left Chicago (and he’s bound for New Orleans)."
And now another power trio, The Police. Supposedly this video was one of their first performances. And if you watch it all the way through, you can see a young Sting shirtless at the end of the video, if that sort of thing heats your radiator. Sting (bass and vocals), Stewart Copeland (guitar and vocals), and Andy Summers (drums), doing "Roxanne" in 1979:
You can hear a definite reggae/ska beat in the song – emphasis on the 2 and 4 beats, instead of the 1 and 3. The reggae influence was obvious in lots of other punk/new wave bands from that time: The Pretenders, Elvis Costello, Blondie, and REM, to name a few.
Power Trios of the 1990s
The one power trio that was the most influential in this decade was Nirvana. Kurt Cobain (guitar), Krist Novoselic (bass), and Dave Grohl (drums). Here they are in "About A Girl":
Here’s another amazing Nirvana video, "In Bloom" (ignore the ad). Black and white, like an old TV show from the 50s or 60s.
Another band from WA state (my home) was Sleater-Kinney. They were three women from Olympia who were in on the beginnings of the "riot grrl" wave. They named their band after an I-5 freeway off-ramp. They opened for, and collaborated with, Pearl Jam. The band lasted from about 1995 to 2005. Corin Tucker (guitar and vocals), Carrie Brownstein (guitar and vocals), and Janet Weiss (drums). Not a live version, but a pretty good video of "Jumpers":
If you want more Sleater-Kinney, here’s a live version of I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone.
Power Trios of the 2000s
I’m just gonna give you one:
Green Day’s "American Idiot." Billie Joe Armstrong (guitar, vocals), Mike Dirnt (bass), and Tre Cool (drums). Before you hit play, turn it up to 11 because it should be played loud.
They remind me a bit of the Ramones or the Clash. And the words are fantastic. Here are the first few stanzas:
Don't want to be an American idiot.
Don't want a nation under the new media
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mind fuck America.
Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Where everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow.
For that's enough to argue.
Well maybe I'm the faggot America.
I'm not a part of a redneck agenda.
Now everybody do the propaganda.
And sing along to the age of paranoia.
OK, maybe just one more video. Three sexy women called The Alice Band singing "Don’t Fear The Reaper" (originally by Blue Oyster Cult). But there’s no cowbell. And you can’t call it a power trio, because there’s obviously a fourth person playing drums somewhere. But what the heck. One more video:
It’s a great song and the video is fun to watch. I especially like the woman with blue hair.
Thus ends my screed about power trios.