When Baroness’ Gina Gleason plays her guitar, you listen. She’s the coolest and the best. Hardly surprising, when she’s looking up to icons as rad as these…
Who is Gina Gleason absolutely obsessed with, and why? The Baroness shredder picks out her musical heroes and explains why she admires them – from the way they play, to artistic reinvention, to just being straight-up icons. Fuck yeah!
“The way that he could play and sing was insane. I had never seen anyone like Chuck when I was first getting into guitar and figuring out what type of playing I liked. The more I dove in and became a fan, the more it got me. I really loved the way he carried himself. He had a positive spin on life but could also create this poetic, dark stuff – that’s rad.”
“With his approach to constant reinvention and never playing to what people’s expectations are for you as an artist, I think he just nailed it. The legacy that he’s left behind as an artist could be one of the greatest of all time. I just think he’s extremely profound and never played to what he thought people would want to hear, or what he thought people would want from him. He was able to ignore all of that and focus fully on his art form.”
“He solidified the tropes of heavy metal, which is awesome, but he’s also a big icon for who he is as well. He has what he’s singing about and the presentation of it, balanced with his internal struggles and whatever he had going on as a queer person in a metal band. There’s the masculinity of the lyrics and how people probably perceived that, balanced by the true meanings behind them. I think that’s just awesome.”
“I obviously never got to see him live or anything like that because I was too young, but he seemed like a person who was full of life. He had that real fire inside of him, and that came out through his guitar playing. I just think that’s so impressive, you know? There was nothing pretentious about him or his playing at all. Everything he did was all done like, ‘This is awesome, it’s going to be rad, and everyone’s going to have a great time.’ I really love that, and he’s definitely a big inspiration for me.”
“He only did a handful of things [before he died in 1982], but he cemented his legacy into the history of music and guitar playing. He really did something special on those Ozzy albums. I’m obsessed with legacies and asking, ‘How long did it take this person to leave this thing behind?’ For someone like Randy, he was so talented and such a pointed player that he was able to make that impact, unfortunately, in way too short a period of time.”
Baroness play ArcTanGent on August 15. This article originally appeared in the summer print issue of the magazine.
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