E-Mail This Article to a Friend Back to the future New Van Halen, Santana, Johnny Winter, and Living Coloür collections trace the evolution of guitar heroics BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Depeche Mode tried to kill it. So, in their own way, did the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. Prodigy, more intelligent electronica torchbearers, and a generation of loopers, turntablists, and samplers likewise gave it their best shot. But the tradition of the rock-guitar hero — a musician driven by virtuosity, pride, and faith in the need for evolution — will not die.

There has, however, been a shift in the cut of guitar heroics. The blues-based soaring and experimentalism that giants like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton plied back in the decades when rock was pop have been replaced with a sleek, textural approach. Today’s guitar-hero rockers are interested in wedding popular music with an evolutionary ideal that’s all about sound and texture. Think Interpol or, on the rougher side, Built To Spill. Even Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock fits the bill as he plays sustained, needling notes and tugs shards of noise from his steel strings while flogging out the hit "Float On" — especially on stage, where his parts become edgier and less identifiable as guitar lines on a weekly basis.

Of course, evolution is the mandate that all true guitar heroes have shared since Hubert Sumlin and Buddy Guy head-butted their way into the early 1960s Chicago blues scene — and maybe earlier, if players like the ’50s noisemaker Link Wray and the speed-picking surf guitar king Dick Dale are given their due. Current reissues plucked from the vaults of Johnny Winter, Santana, Van Halen, and Living Coloür — old-school guitar heroes all — reveal that common thread as they beg a nostalgic look back at the days when swagger rather than mesmerized swaying was the stock of master six-string blasters.

Winter’s Second Winter (Columbia/Legacy) started out as the three-sided, 11-song LP sequel to his debut. Both came out in 1969, and they showed Winter to be a player who could stand toe-to-toe with Clapton, Hendrix, and Jimmy Page — the era’s most electrifying blues-rockers — and retain his dignity, grace, and reputation. His tone was more blues-thentic, cleaner than the roar that came from the others’ Marshall and Hiwatt amps. So he relied on speed, repetition, and flashes of chromatic playing — that is, hitting all 12 notes in an octave instead of the eight that major and minor scales use — to create walls of sound.

At its most gentle, and with the application of an echo device and overdubbing on Second Winter’s "I’m Not Sure," his deft picking created showers of small, warm sonic raindrops. Winter also played straight boogie-woogies, and he applied a slide with the clean, grinding ease of unvarnished bluesmen like his fellow Texan and influence Lightnin’ Hopkins on tunes like "I Love Everybody" and "Hustled Down in Texas."

Clapton, Page, and Hendrix loved and played the blues with soul, but their innovations lay in using the style as a springboard for interstellar sonic explorations like Cream’s "Crossroads," Zeppelin’s "Dazed and Confused," and Hendrix’s "Voodoo Chile" and "Machine Gun." Winter flipped the proposition, bringing the whacked sounds of the modern age back into the tradition. That’s clearest on "Fast Life Rider," which weds wah-wah-saturated, fuzzbox-driven guitar to the martial drumbeat of an African-American fife-and-drum band — a pairing that wouldn’t be recorded again for more than two decades.

The buffed-up version of Second Winter includes all of this plus a pair of studio outtakes on disc one. Disc two is a transcendent April 1970 concert at Royal Albert Hall where Winter’s commitment to authentic blues comes through in numbers like "It’s My Own Fault." That’s something he would lose over time to speed-demonology yet would eventually regain. The live set also includes a tame, formative version of the instrumental "Frankenstein," which became a #1 hit for his brother and keyboardist Edgar two years later.

Both Carlos Santana and Winter played primarily American-made Fender amps in those days. Whereas British amp makers engineered their gear to overload and distort readily as volume knobs were turned up, it required hellaciously loud playing to make the speakers in a Fender howl. To achieve a creamy, supple tone on numbers like "Black Magic Woman" and the instrumental "Soul Sacrifice" — two of the classics on Santana’s debut, which has been reissued with a raft of outtakes plus his group Santana’s entire seven-song 1969 Woodstock performance on two CDs — Carlos played at fierce volumes and used heavy Gibson guitars with glued-on necks as well as humbucking pick-ups to boost power and sustain the vibrations of his notes.