Whats everyone's thoughts about Mark St. John?

What is everyone here’s thoughts on Mark St. John. he made one lone album with KISS in 1984. In my opinion he was a great jazz shredder that doesn’t get enough attention.

Just check out these tracks:

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Heres some more tracks:

“Burn Bitch Burn”

“Magic Bullet Theory”

“AWOL”

“The Lone Gunman”

The Keep demos with Peter Criss

“Rock Warriors”

FYI the reason this got flagged is because of the multiple posts all linking to the same site (YouTube), and the fact of it being posted by a new user. Not a problem, I can see it’s not spam and I restored the thread. If you want, edit the first post to include all those links, and we’ll delete the other posts. Just to clean things up a bit.

Re: Mark St. John, I thought Animalize was a great album and this was actually the first concert I went to on my own with friends. I believe we saw Bruce Kulick though. I read about this all recently. Mark traveled with the band but wasn’t actually playing during the US leg of the tour. I believe he had some type of degenerative arthritic disease that impacted his playing. Bruce of course ended up staying on and was their main guitarist for the next decade or so.

I went down this rabbit hole specifically because I remember Mark’s playing was more picking-oriented than was typical for the time, but I didn’t remember much else about it. Listening back now, and watching some video, it looks like he had good hand speed but wasn’t really aware of the string switching / accuracy issues that players like Eric Johnson and Yngwie had somehow figured out by feel. So to be honest, Mark’s playing sounds a little sloppy by comparison. He was basically trying to do lines with single escape technique, like scales, that you really can’t do with those kinds of motions.

Recall that other single escape players, like Eric and Yngwie, play lines that stick to picking patterns their motions can do, and avoid many of the things we used to think of as basic — again, like scales. A three-note-per-string scale really isn’t that basic after all, and requires more complicated mechanics. And that turned out to be the glass ceiling that separated Eric and Yngwie, and earlier players like McLaughlin, from the large number of other players who always sounded a little off when they got going quickly with picked passages.

Still, these were still the dark ages, and attacking lines that required you to “pick every note” was not that common. So props to Mark for his fearlessness.

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ok sounds good thank you

it says i can only put two links per post

That could be! I don’t recall if I’ve ever put more than two. It could also be a limitation of having just signed up. I know the forum is a little stricter in the very beginning, but some of those things go away after you read X number of posts, and post X number of posts. Something like that, I forget which.

Also, one other thing, when you post links to YT videos, you can just paste the link on a line by itself without using the link button. The forum will embed the video directly and it shows up right in the thread so you can just hit “play”. I edited the first post just so you can see how this works.

For now, I’d say just go with the two videos per post limit. Or just choose a couple that represent Mark’s playing.

I feel like if he would’ve done one of those guitar lesson videos he would’ve been more revered. Is there any licks in particular that you like by him?