While perusing the All Movies list on Paramount+ I spotted a Smithsonian Channel episode from 2010 titled Electrified: The Guitar Revolution which looked to be an overview of the development of the electric guitar. It was and being a guitarist with a small arsenal of axes and a fairly broad knowledge of the history of the instrument combined with its concise 46-minute length, figured I'd see if I'd learn something.
I didn't learn much I didn't already know, but if you're a rock fan with curiosity as to how the iconic instruments slung by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eddie Van Halen and others evolved through the 20th Century, Electrified is a decent primer if somewhat superficial.
Combining talking head Smithsonian historians, luthier Paul Reed Smith (whose eponymously-named company is said to be the third largest guitar maker in America behind the Coke and Pepsi of Gibson and Fender), and demos of each evolutionary step by former Saturday Night Live bandleader G.E. Smith, we're given a history of the necessities for guitarists that became the mothers of invention (not the Frank Zappa band) for the technology.
Beginning with the need to amplify guitars so they could be heard over big bands to the development of solid body guitars to tame the howling feedback amplified acoustics were prone to, familiar names like Rickenbacker, Les Paul, and Leo Fender are discussed and their contributions to the form. The one big surprise was that the first commercially sold solid body electric may've predated Fender's Telecaster by decades as Slingerland briefly marketed a guitar and amp combo that then disappeared from cultural memory as the brand shifted to it's claim to fame, drums.
By ending in the 1960s with effects pedals, especially fuzz, which fueled Hendrix's freakout stylings, they omit advancements like locking vibrato systems like Floyd Roses which allowed for Van Halen's dive-bomb pyrotechnics while remaining in tune (I own 17 electrics and all but four have locking systems), active electronics like EMG or Fishman pickups, synth guitars from Roland, or how amplifiers have shifted from tubes to transistors to digital modeling where one unit can mimic dozens of amps, speaker cabinets, and stomp boxes (to be fair, the real movement in that field post-dates this show), or the wild shapes that sprang up in the 1980s for heavy metal bands courtesy of brands like B.C. Rich, Charvel/Jackson et al.
But those quibbles borne of my own pre-knowledge of the subject aside, Electrified: The Guitar Revolution is a concise and fairly comprehensive trip down the six-string highway of history and may be of interest even to players who never studied the lore.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Paramount+)
No trailer available, but here's an version of the closing history of guitar jam with extra voiceovers.
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