Lead guitar: Boys rule

Where are all the guitar heroines?

Where are all the female guitarists who can light it up in some original, groundbreaking and influential way? Can you name any? Have you even heard the phrase “guitar heroine”?

Probably not, and for good reason. This won’t win you friends, but here’s the hard truth: Fifty years after Elvis Presley recorded “That’s All Right Mama,” the grand total of pantheon-worthy female rock guitarists is zero.

What about Bonnie Raitt? you say. (Everyone over 35 says, What about Bonnie Raitt?) Raitt is a fine player, but she didn’t pioneer a style or push the instrument to places it hadn’t been, feats required for a seat on the varsity squad. She proved that a woman can play beautifully -- many women, let’s be clear, can play beautifully -- but if she were a dude, she’d never be mentioned in the same company with Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen.

That might sound sexist, but if anything it’s conventional wisdom. Last year Rolling Stone magazine published a list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time, and just two women made the cut: Joan Jett and Joni Mitchell. The weird part is how un-outrageous it seemed. Any list of the greatest actors or singers or novelists that was so male-dominated would be ridiculed.

Even Jett and Mitchell, frankly, are a stretch. Jett is a fabulous rhythm guitarist, and she brought glorious tough-chick leather and swagger to rock, but that isn’t the same thing as chops. Mitchell is a songwriting heroine and she mastered tunings so exotic that after just a chord or two, you knew it was her. But she’s an acoustic guitarist and the category today is rock guitar, which is electric.

Reasonable people can argue about whether there are any guitar heroines, but what’s beyond dispute is a stunning gender-related imbalance when it comes to this particular craft and every other job in a rock band -- drummer, keyboardist, bass player -- except singer. The only interesting question is why.

Let’s focus on guitarists, just to keep our inquiry to manageable size and because the conclusions for one instrument pretty much work for them all.

And let’s quickly ditch one possibility: Women aren’t great electric guitarists because they lack innate talent or discipline or musical intuition. That’s silly. Any list of the greatest living violinists of the world would include at least 50 women. And the violin is far more difficult than the guitar. Violins terrify guitar players the way trigonometry scares high school freshmen. So all you chuckleheads out there who were thinking, This is simple: Chicks can’t rock because, you know, they can’t rock, try again.

One thing is obvious: Women basically sat out, or were sidelined during, the first 20 years of the development of the rock guitar. There is a limit to the number of different sounds and styles that can be wrung from any instrument, and by the time women like Raitt arrived in the early ‘70s, many had been staked out. More than 60% of the names on the Rolling Stone list earned their reputation well before Woodstock. It’s as though there was a gold rush and the women started panning after all the good lodes were claimed.

But this just reframes the question. Why didn’t more women push toward the frontier of the guitar back when the frontier had plenty of acres in it? And why have so few been pushing since? I called female guitar players and sociologists for some theories. Here’s what they said.

First, female guitarists have long had to navigate an obstacle course that includes morons, hecklers and skeptics. Most had a story like this one, told by Morgan Lander of the formidable all-girl Canadian metal band Kittie:

It’s 1998, at a high school talent show in London, Ontario. Lander, 16, and her band mates are two songs into their set when a teacher shuts them down midsong, calling the performance “inappropriate.”

“He also said he feared for our health,” says Lander, speaking during a recent stop on Kittie’s current tour. (The single from Kittie’s debut album, which went gold, was “Brackish” -- which the group performed at the talent show.) “I don’t know if it was because we were screaming our heads off or what, but it became a real issue at school.”

There were boy metal bands performing that day, and one of those Spice Girls imitator groups, and nobody fretted about their health.

“We had quite a struggle, being females in a metal band,” Lander says. “We heard a lot of ... ‘Girls can’t play guitar.’ ”

This is key. “Take off your shirt” is one of the more benign taunts that an aspiring female guitarist is likely to hear onstage.

“From other bands you’d hear things like ‘I can’t believe we have to open for [her],’ ” recalls Jett. She and her band mates in the Runaways, one of the original all-girl punk bands, were called things that nice newspapers don’t print. And when Jett went solo in 1980, record executives told her she’d never make it.

“It didn’t make me feel hopeless. It steeled me, but I can understand why a lot of girls just say, ‘[The heck with] this. I’ll just do something that doesn’t take such a toll on my self-esteem.’ ”

A reasonable conclusion might be that men are just mastodon brutes who have kept women away from guitars, and that’s not entirely wrong. Neither, though, is it the full story. Jett proved the industry wrong every time she slayed an audience. But she was an exception, which suggests the problem is bigger than a bunch of satin-jacket dummies who mind the gates at the major labels. Those dummies are usually good at meeting demand, and even though they can be blindsided by truly original talents, they don’t stay blindsided for long. If there was a fortune to be earned from Joan Jett clones, there’d be a swarm of them out there.

The market for guitar-wielding women has never been huge, particularly among girls. The gender divide at live concerts is often pretty stark. After a Metallica show a few thousand lads are pining for their very own black ESP Explorer with the deer skull inlay. Has anybody ever watched a Hilary Duff show and then gone shopping for a guitar?

Women buy just 7% of all the electric guitars in this country, according to Music Trades Magazine, and you can’t explain that figure without confronting a glaring truth: The electric guitar, at least when it’s played at full and distorted blaze, is considered unladylike.

The logic of this is just as circular as the role-model problem -- girls don’t see women play the guitar, which stigmatizes the instrument a bit, further discouraging girls from taking up guitar, and so on. But it’s also unladylike because the electric guitar is traditionally an almost cartoonishly macho instrument. The paradigmatic rock pose belongs to Chuck Berry: legs apart, the instrument pointed straight at the crowd. Symbols don’t get more phallic.

“Rock is a male form,” says Camille Paglia, a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. “For an adolescent boy, your guitar speaks for you, it says what you can’t say in real life, it’s the pain you can’t express, it’s rage, hormones pumping. Women can be strangers and all of a sudden have an intimate conversation. Boys can’t do that. The guitar for a boy speaks to an aggressive sexual impulse and suppressed emotionality, the things that boys can’t share, even with other members of the band. It’s a combination of rage and reserve and ego.”

That’s a combination rare among women, even women who are famous because of their guitars, such as Nancy Wilson of the classic-rock act Heart.

“Women are the support players in life,” Wilson says from San Diego, where Heart is promoting its latest album, “Jupiter’s Darling.” “I think we nurture, we support, we make the canvas for everyone else to shine on. For me it’s always been more about songwriting. Playing lead is really fun, I really get off on playing lead, but that feels more like an ego pose to me.”

Sociologists will tell you that sex, as opposed to gender, is key, too. Boys learn guitar to meet girls.

“Boys are raised to attract women through their accomplishments,” said John Ryan, head of the sociology department at Virginia Tech. “When women do get into display, it’s more along the lines of Britney Spears. You don’t hear a lot of critics raving about her music, or even her great voice. It’s about her physical appearance.... Some of the [male] guitarists you can admire independent of their looks, whether they have looks or not.”

“Onstage, women seek a place of comfort -- which is usually being the singer, where they can trade on their beauty rather than compete with instrumentalists,” says Richard Peterson, professor emeritus of sociology at Vanderbilt University. “The 9-year-old girl isn’t badgering her daddy to buy her a guitar. She’s in her room fantasizing about the clothes her band will wear while she’s leading it.”

Which brings us to the Great Kat, a.k.a. Katherine Thomas, who in publicity stills wears a star-spangled bikini and onstage plays six-note-per-second metal with a crazed look. Talk to her on the phone and you get the sense that if a Cape buffalo could speak and it were really angry, it would sound something like this.

“Any idiot off the street can play the guitar,” she sort of yells. “But you have to have attitude, you’ve got to know the basics, and women, unfortunately, whether in music or politics, they don’t have the mind-set to practice and work .... Not letting guys take over. ‘Get ... out of my way, now! I’m going to stomp all over you!’ ”

At 4, Kat saw something that changed her life: a little girl playing violin on TV.

“I said, OK, I’m doing that,” she recalls. She practiced for hours, attended Juilliard, and later began transposing the work of composers like Wagner and Beethoven for the electric guitar, sped up and distorted.

I wouldn’t say this to her face -- actually, I wouldn’t say it to her on the phone either -- but it’s unlikely Kat will be on a list of history’s greatest rock guitarists. Playing super-fast is neat-o, but not the same as writing and performing “Purple Haze.” Still, you can spot all the elements needed to build a great guitar player: a role model, an early start, discipline and an indefatigable urge to show off and dominate. Once the world is crawling with Great Kats, there’s no telling what could happen.

“I consider myself a god,” Kat says.

All guitarists should. Guys like Beethoven don’t roll over for mortals.