The Devil Goes Down to Second Life

Back in the 1979, the Charlie Daniels Band came out with a song called “The Devil Goes Down to Georgia.” I remember it hit all the rock music stations (this was before the term “classic rock”), and probably all the country stations too (I don’t listen to country).

It was a classic good vs. evil theme. The devil plays the fiddle. Johnnie plays the fiddle. The devil bets he can play better than Johnnie. The stakes are a gold fiddle (presumably worth enough to make Johnnie very rich) vs. Johnnie’s soul. How does it turn out??

(Spoiler below)

Johnnie wins. You knew that, right?!? The song has only been part of mainstream culture for 28 steenkin’ years!

Anyways, last night I saw something like this in Second Life. One guy had an electric guitar plugged in to an amplifier, with a “shred” distortion. You could easily hear the sound of the pick hitting the strings, something you don’t normally hear when someone plays loud. I assume this was because his microphone was much closer to his guitar than his amp, which was probably off a few feet to the side and certainly not set to ear-shattering levels.

He started playing some riffs, and then did a major part of “Eruption” by Eddie Van Halen, then segued into “Since I Been Loving You” by Led Zeppelin. Damn, he was good! It’s motivating me to start practicing again…

Then another guy plugged his guitar in. He played some really interesting music that was more like ZZ Top (in the old days when they were a hard-rockin’ Texas Blues band before MTV). He was good also.

I didn’t have time to stick around to see how it played out (no pun intended), but it had all the makings of a “dueling guitarists” event. I hope to see more of this!

Now I am going to dust off my guitar, to see if I can remember the solo to “Heartbreaker”.