https://democraticunderground.com/103471502
I'm glad you mentioned Belew in the thread title, since he wasn't with Byrne that long.
He did amazing work with Bowie, too.
I bookmarked a blog a while back because of this anecdote about Belew:
https://musicaficionado.blog/2020/02/20/adrian-belew-part-1-1976-1980/
Virtually no time elapsed between the end of Zappa’s tour and rehearsals for Bowie’s tour. Adrian Belew joined Carlos Alomar (rhythm guitar), Dennis Davis (drums), Simon House (electric violin), Sean Mayes (piano), George Murray (bass) and Roger Powell (keyboards) on a tour that would take him to 15 countries and 78 performances.
During the tour Belew was required to play guitar on the song Heroes. Stories abound about how that song was originally recorded in the studio, with David Bowie and Brian Eno asking Robert Fripp to play his guitar parts upon hearing the song for the first time. Fripp recorded three parts, each time without hearing what he already recorded. Producer Toni Visconti continues: “I said ‘Look, let me just hear what it sounds like with the other two tracks. You never know.’ We played it, all three tracks together, and you know, I must reiterate Fripp did not hear the other two tracks when he was doing the third one so he had no way of being in sync. But he was strangely in sync. And all his little out-of-tune wiggles suddenly worked with the other previously recorded guitars. It seemed to tune up. It got a quality that none of us anticipated. It was this dreamy, wailing quality, almost crying sound in the background. And we were just flabbergasted.”
Adrian Belew knew none of this, he was simply asked to come up with a suitable guitar part for the live performance of the song. He tells the story: “They believed it was impossible to play Robert’s parts. No one ever told me, so I figured out how to play them. One day I came in the studio in Lake Geneva and Brian and David were having a laugh and I said, ‘What’s so funny?’ They said, ‘You’re so stupid. You didn’t know you can’t play those impossible guitar parts so you played them.’” And play them he did, as in the brilliant performance here captured live on that tour. Belew plays some of the tastiest notes of his career on this version.
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I'm sure there must be other stories of musicians who had to recreate a recorded song's sound managing somehow to replicate a double-tracked part, but I'm not sure if there are any other stories about triple-tracked lead guitar.
= new reply since forum marked as read
