CINCINNATTI CITY BEAT - February 1998 Wreck of the '70s - Big Wreck guitarist Ian Thornley doesn't mind his role as the Ghost of Rock & Roll Past and Future by Brian Baker Ian Thornley is clearly itching for a fight. When I declare my disgust for the long-standing chic toward dissing music from the 1970s, Thornley bristles audibly. "Who's been slagging '70s music?" he demands, like an older brother asking a sibling to pick out the bully on the playground. His defensive posture is justifiable. Thornley's band, Big Wreck, has taken a fair amount of heat since its first album was released last fall for a marriage of the essence of '70s Hard Rock to brainy, contemporary guitar shredding. And he understands all too well the tendency of critics, industry drones and other bands to deconstruct any new sound for traces of the past. "I can pick every single thing apart," Thornley says with more than a little authority. "I can pick apart Led Zeppelin. I can pick apart Pink Floyd. I can pick apart Supertramp. But what's the point? You don't look at that. You look at the beauty of it." Thornley's understanding and ability come primarily from his years at Boston's Berklee College of Music, where he met the friends who would coalesce into Big Wreck. The Toronto native wasn't particularly interested in receiving a formal musical education when he entered Berklee. "I just wanted to go someplace where I could jam all the time," he says. It wasn't merely all the time that Thornley wanted to jam but at any time as well, sometimes in the pre-dawn hours and always turned up to 10. That inclination cost him a couple of roommates -- "I guess they didn't see the humor in what I was doing," he says -- leaving him with a triple room to himself and a school-record number of noise violations from the Berklee administration. He was forced into a smaller room, and his new neighbors on the floor, guitarist Brian Doherty and bassist Dave Henning, were a little more tolerant of his early morning inspirations. Thornley shared an arranging class with drummer Forrest Williams, and a few introductions later the Wreck began to ramble. The band's evolution was not without its problems. Only Doherty actually finished his Berklee program, as the others dropped out to make time for their increasingly impressive practices. Williams left the band entirely for nearly a year when he dropped out of Berklee. And Thornley became an illegal alien when he left school, which resulted in a 1994 border bust as the band traveled between Toronto and Boston. They had recorded a couple of demo tapes, but it wasn't until they sent out the third incarnation that the labels began sniffing around. Atlantic Records ultimately signed the band, allowing them to self-produce their debut, In Loving Memory ofÉ, with some capable help from Jack Joseph Puig (Jellyfish, Bee Gees, Verve Pipe) and Matt De Matteo. Big Wreck is the latest in a long string of new young bands -- such as Collective Soul, Kula Shaker and Brad -- to plunder 1970s AOR for inspiration while retaining a unique identity by crafting classically contemporary material. Thornley resolutely refuses to apologize for his taste in music or how it is (or isn't) reflected in his own. "None of it really winds up in my thought process," Thornley says of his perceived influences. "And that's the only sort of conscious effort that I apply to the writing process. As we were doing (the record's successful first single) 'The Oaf,' which in my mind had a Zeppelin-tinged rock riff with a Robert Johnson vocal line, all of a sudden this Who thing came out. There is no formula for me for writing. It happens all different ways. They are all sort of realizations that come out. While I'm jamming away on something, Brian will start stumbling around like Jimmy Page, and I'll think, 'Wow, that is a Page riff.' "Nothing's a direct rip-off, it just has that vibe. Which is, for me, cool, because I think it's coming from the right place, and I hope it's going to the right place. That's why we can wear our influences on our sleeves." One of the ways that Thornley processes his guitar influences is an interesting practice exercise. He spends several months listening to one particular guitarist and learning how to mimic everything that guitarist plays. Then the process begins anew with a different player, perhaps in a different style, perhaps in a different genre altogether. The resulting juxtapositions that occur during Big Wreck's writing and recording phase are reminiscent of the source material but, having been filtered through Thornley's own experience and execution, become uniquely his. While he recounts a litany of the names one would expect to hear in a Rock guitarist's pantheon -- Mark Knopfler, Jimmy Page, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Johnny Winter and all the Kings, Albert, Freddie and B.B. -- Thornley invokes the name of a fellow Canadian as an unexpected guitar influence. "It started with Bruce Cockburn as the first person who knocked me out as a guitar player," Thornley confesses. "His album Circles in the Stream was just huge on me. 'Deer Dancing Around a Broken Mirror' was one of the first tunes I had to learn. I already had the dexterity in my hands from playing the piano forever, so picking up the fingerstyle was pretty easy." Most things have been relatively easy for Thornley and his cohorts, other than living with the name they hung upon themselves. Early press on Big Wreck noted that they were still not completely satisfied with the band's christening, originally a term that Doherty came up with to describe their sound and their way of working. In retrospect, Thornley sees the issue of the band's moniker a little more philosophically now, as opposed to Big Wreck's earlier exposure. "I'm not adamantly against it, because I don't think it really matters," Thornley says of the previously unappreciated name. "If we had one good song and the rest of the album was just filler shit, then, yeah, I would want the right name. I would want the right look, I would want to shake my head in that 'I'm intense' way and sing with the right underbite. I'd want all those things. "In our situation, though, it's sort of like 'That's the name, here's the music.' This is what I do. I don't think of names. I do music." click here for the original article