Playing slide guitar was a secondary evolution in my playing. Simply, it was not crucial to becoming a competent player, unlike learning chords, power chords, and scales. Slide crept through the back door, something that I heard admired players do, often with great skill. Only in spare moments would a bottleneck or metal slide be tried. Only after a quarter century of playing did I take up the slide guitar seriously, and then only as a favor.
Duane Allman, Robby Kreiger, Johnny Winter and Rory Gallagher were among the really great slide players who influenced me way back when. Clapton, Beck and Page really didn't do that much slide, and Hendrix barely touched it. It was a Blues thing mostly, although it could show up in strange places, such as the way Jeff Beck used it to coax weird noises out of his guitar. There was also the matter of how you tuned the instrument; when you only have a guitar or two, they tend to stay in standard tuning.
When I lived in Hickory there was a friend who had a CD store (remember them?); he rented the back to an old hippie who sold guitars. I got to know the guy well enough; when he wound up in the hospital for many months with peritonitis. The owner had a party and everyone pitched in, buying his inventory up so there was some money for his family. He was already a charity case and his wife needed to feed the family.
There was a dobro - technically a resonafonic guitar, with the metal pie plate in the body to really make it clang. It was purchased on a whim, it was a knock off, but it sounds good enough, even if the action is a little brutal. But for that type of guitar, and the really heavy metal slide that you need to use (I swear the thing weighs a pound), high action means you don't hit the frets and get a clicking noise. And once I had the damned thing, I tuned it to open 'E' and started taking slide seriously.
It is a completely different way to approach the guitar, but then any alternate tuning is, even the relatively minor modification of 'dropped D'. You need to really swoop your entire wrist up and down the neck vigorously, and the picking can be just as complex as a banjo player, with even some of the claw hammer licks being the same. It has come in handy, and I've used it around 20 or so times in my recordings, sometimes in straight Blues, sometimes in country settings, sometimes in ways that surprise even me.
Since so many of the songs are traditional Blues or even a few gospel tunes, I haven't created music videos for them. To give you an example of my dobro playing, I have made a special video of the song 'Mystery Train', written by Junior Parker, made most famous by Elvis Presley but covered by many artists. This is my second attempt at the song; the first was, pardon the pun, a train wreck because I tried to get too Avant Garde and instead screwed the pooch. This time around, done in 2014, I play complicated picking patterns somewhere between Blues and Country, keeping the song rootsy, to much better effect.
The real wild card came when I saw a Sears Silvertone 1316 lap steel guitar at the NC state fairgrounds flea market and purchased it as a lark around 2003. It's just a plank of Masonite, slightly odd shaped, with some really gnarly old school electronics. I even did a little research and found out that the guy selling it to me was telling the truth. It WAS a 1948 model, sold by Sears but manufactured by Harmony. There are no frets, just painted lines on a totally smooth and flat plank of processed wood.
I had never even played a lap steel, but I knew that David Gilmour and Steve Howe had used them for color and sometimes even more, so I was intrigued and the price was right. I don't use it that often; like the dobro, I sometimes have to consciously dig it out during a project just to find a place to fit it in. It does, however, make a beautiful sound once you get it under control, which took some practice at the beginning. It truly is not the type of instrument that you play in isolation, like a regular guitar; it needs an application, form following function. A lap steel as primitive as that, with old style pickups that howl like banshees, needs a reason to be used. Even the dobro can be played quite easily for accompaniment.
Once I started recording in 2006, the lap steel quickly became a valuable tool. There was a great deal of experimentation, but the Silvertone showed its best qualities when I used it for a specific purpose, like in the next video. I found a drum beat that was rather like Led Zeppelin's 'When the Levee Breaks', so I created something similar. There was a very early version that had a different guitar part, recorded at work, used in a video. I recorded a better sounding one - all one take, even the stuff that sounds backwards but is not. A year later I put a bass on there, but it's pretty low key. This is another video done specifically for this blog.
I kept finding ways to use the Silvertone, but I can't always remember if I used another electric guitar to do slide on some songs, especially before I kept a detailed diary of my recording sessions around 2010. The following song, 'Whack a Mole', from 2008, definitely has the lap steel, since it is the best instrument to do octave leaps. You can also play way above the top fret since there is no metal at all, just painted lines on the neck. When I first played it, the opening sound of the Looney Tunes song came to mind immediately. They were sold more as Hawaiian guitars that country lap steels, although used for the later application much more often. There is now a collector's market for them, mostly out of nostalgia, although it does sound good when properly amplified.
Here's another song from 2009, 'The Crawl', my very early drumming in the mix, some strange harpsichord and a very aggressive bass. Here you can definitely notice the novelty-a-go-go quality of the instrument; all I'm doing is adding a layer of slide noise over an already finished song. Later, in 2016, I remixed both 'Whack a Mole' and 'The Crawl' as part of 'The Big Addendum', and each was treated very differently. In 'Whack a Mole', I did an underscore, removing the slide entirely, not to replace the original but to highlight the very intricate interplay between the drums, bass, and organ, which I had forgotten about and was impressed with. With 'The Crawl', I mixed out the slide except in the break, where I phased the shit out of it, making it sound like a weird synth.
I still play electric slide on regular guitars, and I have tried them all at least once. The Stratocaster has really low action, making slide difficult to play cleanly; you're more than likely to hit the frets and generate unwanted noise. I also tried my Gibson SG, since Derek Truck, one of the most amazing current slide players, uses that model. The Godin semi-acoustic, with a simple and somewhat primitive pickup that can be overdriven easily to get that great slide crunch, has become the guitar of choice. The string action is slightly higher, making it perfect. I play an electric slide song or two on every Blues album that I've done, usually in open tuning, but sometimes I use standard Spanish as well, like Warren Haynes of Gov't Mule.
This last song is a mixture of the Godin, where I can fret with my fingers as well as use a slide, usually a glass one, then switching over to the Silvertone in the free breaks for the dive bombing section. Keeping your notes in tune on the lap steel is tricky, and I often have to go back and fix just a line or two because it's not quite there, but it is a fun instrument to play. This instrumental, 'Kit Shicker', is actually from a rock album. I keep the one section very funky, then explode into radical octave swoops. There is some studio trickery involved, but I really liked the way this one turned out, and I have received good feedback on this particular song.
Even the world of slide guitar, as I interpret it, can accommodate acoustic and electric, as well as a variety of different instruments and an infinite amount of different applications. There is something unique about the sound of an unfretted note that can bend in all kinds of crazy directions. I've used the Silvertone in a jazz version of a Beatles song as the lead instrument, a completely different type of sound, very relaxed and spacey. Sometimes it is added as just a touch of texture. I have tried to get experimental with it, especially in the early days. But most often, it gets used in any of its variations the most in the Blues, and that's all right with me.
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