A Sliding Slope

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.

Devil at My Heels

Here we go - another white guy making a confession about the Blues. It is sincere, yet another suburban spud telling you how the Blues saved his life. Well, maybe not that extreme; I wasn't on the edge ready to jump off when I first heard Blind Lemon Pie. But the Blues definitely changed my outlook on life. And I am here to tell you about it - sorry.

I didn't grow up with the Blues; my first experience might have been something as both mundane and sublime as 'Porgy & Bess', then 'House of the Rising Sun' by the Animals. It was groups like the Rolling Stones and individuals like Eric Clapton who introduced me to the Blues, white guys teaching a white guy. But it wasn't that simple. There was also this jazz thing, creeping along the fringes, where you could hear an obvious overlap between the styles. Blues doesn't have to be served straight up; it can be a spice added to some other genre and have just as much of an effect.

Some people think that the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and all the other white people who appropriated the Blues harmed the genre. I think that they saved it, pure and simple. The African-American community had largely moved on to Soul and R & B, and it was the younger generation of kids outside the entire Black experience who, for whatever reason, embraced it and made it their own. And the good ones did two things; first, they always acknowledged where the songs came from (I'm looking at you, Led Zeppelin, the group most notorious from ripping off others, black or white, of musical ideas), and they realized the the Blues is really about singing the song, not playing the guitar.

Clapton learned this lesson in a particularly painful way. As early as 1966 the audiences were declaring him 'God', yet no matter how esteemed a guitarist that he was, he always seemed hollow. During the 70's and 80's he learned to sing like a Bluesman, and it showed in his music. He developed a set of lungs and could really deliver beyond the reedy squeak that he managed in 'Crossroads' decades earlier in Cream. His music, IMHO, on albums like 'From the Cradle' was much more convincing and better for it.

So perversely, I am going to feature three Blues instrumentals in this blog posting. There is a simple reason for that; I am reluctant to create or post any music videos of songs written by other people. I am sensitive to copy-write infringement, although I have posted one Blues cover earlier, 'Mother Earth'. It took me a while to write lyrics to Blues songs. Instead, I did strange instrumentals pushing the definition of the Blues. Those are featured here.

When I finished my first solo recording project back in 2006, the thing that struck me the most was how jazzy the whole thing sounded. Not necessarily jazz, but in the genre blending and sampling that I did, largely improvisational and loose, traits that I associate with the jazz idiom.  When I took over the drum duties as well, making my music completely self-sufficient, I immediately started doing more Blues-based material, as much to steady my beat and for the discipline. Trust me, the Blues are definitely a discipline, more so the looser you get. It is the dichotomy that makes it art.

I almost did a Blues album in 2009, 'Sloppy Seconds', a strange hybrid album carrying over some earlier songs with nine new pieces that were mostly up-tempo. In 2011, by which time I was singing a great deal more, the first of five Blues albums came out, 'Blues Askew'. My vocals were another reason to head to that genre, as it was a good place to learn how to have the right attitude when singing. I am a reluctant vocalist, and I will write about that later, but the human voice is and always will be the greatest instrument, simply because of the emotional response it triggers at a deeply psychological level, similar to hearing a baby cry.

Blues albums are different in another way, as they are likely to be full of cover songs. There are thousands of great songs to choose from, and I have made more than one playlist of potential candidates. Originals don't show up as often, although two of my songs, both with lyrics, have been featured on this blog; 'MIA in Miami' and 'Kelly Devine'. While both could be considered rock, they show how my Blues album constantly stretch the boundaries of that genre.

"Backdoor' was from that first blues album, and it is an unusual sleazy instrumental with lots of sliding chords and choppy riffs. Obviously, this is the jazzy side of things, but keep in mind how Miles Davis' best selling album was 'Kind of Blue', which mined similar territory. I had just purchased a semi-acoustic f-hole Godin guitar with a beautiful black satin finish. It had a funky plunky sound, and this piece came out of fooling around with it. The organ works as a support instrument, and unusually I am playing acoustic drums here. Using brushes even, not my normal style but for whatever reason I am more comfortable as a jazz drummer - more instinctual - than as a rock drummer banging away a 4/4 beat.

For whatever reason, I found myself gravitating towards f-hole style guitars in the last decade. I only buy guitars that I want to use, not being a collector, and I always wanted something that could get a decent acoustic sound yet had a pickup, while also being able to be plugged in and get a nasty primitive overdrive sound. That instrument was perfect, and the song was built around it, as have a handful of other pieces since. I will also tune the guitar to open 'E" and use it for slide, since the sound goes well with that style.

The next example of a Blues instrumental is very different. This was a hard number done in 7/4 time, hence the title 'Raging Sevens'. It was an exercise for my drumming and bass playing as much as the wailing guitar solo that I build to various climaxes. By now my drumming was getting flexible enough to not sound stilted even in a challenging time signature, so there is a decent groove going on here. It is obviously my Stratocaster that I am ripping away on, and much fun is had playing with the effects pedal board.

While most of the videos that accompany these songs are quite secondary to the actual music, this particular one is different, having an interesting back story. We were on a vacation on the Riviera Maya as the guests of another couple. The first morning, while everyone else slept late from the travel, I got up first and went outside to look around. There was a triathlon happening on the grounds, which were very nice and included three rivers coming out of the ground and meeting at a spot in the Caribbean.

 I tried rousing the others but they could not be bothered. So I grabbed my little video camera and ran out, following the crowds and contestants, getting some good footage. In particular, there was a stone jetty, and the athletes were swimming along side to get up the river and begin the next stage of the race. This formed the basis for the video that accompanied the song, which was a good thing, since a hard drive melt down a couple of years later made that footage go away. I also created another couple of videos from that vacation and named a song in honor of the beautiful resort that we stayed at, 'Tres Rios', but not being a Blues, I'll leave that for another day.

The last video that I will feature is from my latest Blues album, 'Down in the Bottom' from 2017. After three straight years with an album in that genre, I stopped in 2013, waiting four years to go back. It was simply getting too easy, and I always want to think of fresh ways to approach the genre. Surprisingly, the year that I did sixty songs, while there was a fair amount of rock, only one song could be considered a Blues, and that was rather Avant Garde jazz as well. Maybe I should do a video of that; it would be weird.

'Down in the Bottom' from 2017 was mostly cover songs done in a British Blues Invasion style (a year before Joe Bonamassa's new album, mind you). There were a couple of originals, one of which, 'MIA in Miami', I have talked about and posted on this blog previously. There was one instrumental, just to shake things up, and it was a particularly good one, called 'Devil at My Heels.' Like much of the album, it was uptempo, almost frantic, and a bit non-stop. By coincidence it was also done of the Godin, which my wife named 'Blackie'.

The concept was simple; how about doing a Blues in dropped 'D' tuning. Guitarists will know that just slightly changing the tuning of one string can significantly alter the way to approach chords, and I wanted something that was going to hit the low strings hard. Another goal was to give enough space for both the drums and bass to get a little attention, and that worked. I borrowed some patterns from slide and translated into the tuning, added some riffs, and a monster song emerged, one of my best surprises of the 2017 project.

The video uses a couple of old train promos from the Prelinger Archives because, well, trains just seem to go with both the Blues as well as the constant feeling of motion in this song. I just piled up the visuals until I got a nice sense of overload. The music on this one is powerful enough, and unique enough, to carry the piece to the finish. That's why I love the Blues; it is a seemingly simple form that can be manipulated to express the individual's personality. That one has a big hunk of me in it.