Thank you for reading my blog! As of January, 2019 I've moved this blog onto my own site. All of my previous posts and all new posts can be found at:
I hope to see you there!
New? | Title | Time | |
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Bones of Gilead
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4 minutes | |
*
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Her Love Was Meant For Me
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5 minutes | |
Take Care The Road You Choose
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7 minutes
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Tale in Hard Time
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4 minutes | ||
Guitar Heroes
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7 minutes | ||
*
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The Storm Won't Come
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7 minutes | |
They Tore The Hippodrome Down
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acoustic | 6 minutes | |
Drown My Tears And Move On
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acoustic | 4 minutes | |
1952 Vincent Black Lightning
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solo acoustic | 5 minutes | |
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The Rattle Within
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4 minutes | |
Can't Win
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9 minutes | ||
Meet on the Ledge
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3 minutes | ||
Never Give It Up
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3 minutes | ||
Wall of Death
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electric 12 | 3 minutes | |
Put it There, Pal
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9 minutes | ||
Tear Stained Letter
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6 minutes | ||
Encore | |||
Beeswing
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solo acoustic | 6 minutes | |
Dimming of the Day
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solo acoustic | 3 minutes | |
• |
Trying
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5 minutes | |
Take a Heart (cover of 60's tune by the Sorrows)
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4 minutes |
Watching Jeff Healey climax a concert with his searing "See The Light" is an experience few will ever forget. After sitting through most of the set with his guitar held flat on his lap, the 22-year-old leaps to his feat, cranks up the volume knob on his Marshall amp, and launches into a blistering blues-rock solo. Prowling the stage, he frets with his left hand over the fingerboard, using his thumb and index finger to create the fastest licks and most wicked vibrato this side of Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. He's unerringly accurate, even as he picks with his teeth or plays with his Squier Strat swung upside-down or held behind his head. The song concludes with a resplendent display of feedback as he lays his axe upon the ground and pumps the whammy with his foot. The frenzied roar of the crowd threatens to collapse the hall as Jeff reaches for his white cane and taps his way backstage.Even though the article is only 2/3 of a page, Obrecht discusses Healey's band, his sudden rise to fame (thanks to the movie Roadhouse, the script for which called especially for Healey), his amazing collection of early jazz records ("I have about 10,000 78 RPM records") and, of course, his blindness ("I was blind at age one, and I got a guitar when I was three") It also goes into the details of his unique style:
"I tuned the guitar to a chord and just used a slide to alter chords. This was the only logical way I could think of at that point. Someone taught me a standard tuning a few years later. I had been comfortable with holding the guitar on my lap, so I decided to work out all my chords that way. I can use all five fingers on my left hand for different types of vibrato; usually the index is best for a wide vibrato. I do a lot of bending with my thumb, and it also comes in handy when you're in a sitting position and want to hit notes above and beyond where you could normally reach. I've tried playing guitar the normal way, but I just wasn't very comfortable.Cruelly, cancer didn't just take Healey's eyes, it killed him ten years ago. But he left a rich legacy of recordings that I never get tired of listening to.
"I started out as a rock and roll, straight ahead, Eric Clapton, Allman Brothers, Steve Miller, blues-rock guitar player...When I was just a school band sax player, I listened to jazz--to John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly and Gerry Mulligan. And then I saw--as did a lot of young guitarists around this period in the early '70s--the Mahavishnu Orchestra. That's what I now consider to be true fusion...."
" So I eventually went to the University of Miami and went into a bebop submersion period where I put the Fender Stratocaster away and only played a big, fat, Gibson L-5 with a wound G string, no effects, no bent notes--the whole bit. I studied with Pat Metheny....He had a very different sound in those days. He was a guy who had a real clear idea of what he wanted to do at an early age. To me, it was almost intimidating how mature he was. At the age of 18 he was just like he is now. He played that way, he thought that way. He was just real self-assured, knew the style, and kew that he would do well, at least as far as I could tell. He was supposed to be a student, but no one could teach him, so they just gave him tuition credit and made him a teacher."
"I'm not a big one for fusion, you know, so I may not be the most qualified to talk about it. To me, fusion always implied more power rock elements, like Chick Corea's electric bands. That's the closest thing I've heard to what I think of as fusion: odd time signatures and real powerful, loud, virtuosic playing. In my semantics, what I do is 'crossover' rather than fusion. It's sort of funky pop music without vocals. It's not necessarily designed to show off any virtuosity on the part of the players. Fusion was designed to show how well the people could play. Crossover music, and that includes Bob James, George Benson and Dave Sanborn, is much easier. It's just music without vocals."
"The burgeoning yuppie population has embraced what they call jazz, which includes a lot of so-called 'new age' music, as well as people like Metheny and Sanborn. It's sort of become a status symbol, that you are somehow hipper than your average radio listener. The audience is all 20-to 35-year olds, relatively successful young people who, at their worst, have a little bit of elitism and feel sort of superior to the average listener. As for the hard core fusion people who used to watch Mahavishnu, I see a bit of that audience at my shows. They turn out to be mostly young men who are into energy, and they just want to see you power out."
"I did some stuff on the Gaucho album. I'm a fan of Steely Dan, so I was thrilled and flattered that they called me. They are as meticulous as everyone says. I think we worked a week on one song. At one point we worked nine hours on one four-bar insert. You know, you just do it. They wanted perfection, and I could understand what they were doing....With Steely Dan and Donald Fagen's solo stuff, they have these sort of crystalline compositions, like little jewels. They don't want you to imprint your personality over their music, they want you to get inside their music and use your talent to bring their stuff to life."Good stuff! And I really like Bullock's description of playing with Steely Dan; I think it's true that the best musicians inhabited the Dan's music, rather than using it as a vehicle for individualistic expression. Know-it-all musos like me love to know who played what guitar solo, but there's a reason it's hard to tell sometimes, and I think Bullock hit the nail on the head. Sadly Hiram Bullock also succumbed to cancer ten years ago.
To get to the point of doing this type of album, were you encouraged or influenced by the blues resurgence of the past few years? People such as Robert Cray, Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Fabulous Thunderbirds?
Not at all. I never listened to them; I never related to them. Making the record was just a matter of 'why try to please a record company at the expense of doing what you do best?'
Would you say that what you do best is play blues?
Yes. That's taken a while to come around to, because I am such a lover of great jazz music--jazz in the traditional sense. I've never really loved or been very influenced by the modern electric jazz-fusion thing. I've never really liked it that much. The Yellowjackets, I enjoyed playing with that group, and I always enjoyed working with Russell Ferrante. I've listened to Weather Report and I have a lot of respect for those guys, but I always go back to traditional music.
You once stated that Weather Report was your favorite group, and in the Oct. '76 Pro's Reply you said that about the only group you'd consider touring with as a sideman was Steely Dan. That seems so odd in light of your return-to-roots album. [note: Typical Dan Forte. It was 12 years ago, and Ford was in his mid 20's--people change Dan!]
I'm a nut case [laughs]. Well I must say that I really did love Steely Dan for awhile, The Royal Scam record--I loved that. Weather Report was my favorite fusion band. They had Heavy Weather out, which is still their pinnacle record, I'd say. They really hit their peak there. Great songs, great melodies, great playing. Jaco was incredible and fresh and new.....I grew up loving the pop music of my day: the Beatles, the Stones, the Yardbirds, the Animals. The radio was always on. That is a big part of my makeup...
Considering what a huge idol Miles Davis was, your stint with him was extremely brief.
...When I joined him they sent me tapes of two concerts and one rehearsal of the band, and Miles wasn't on the rehearsal tape. Adam Holtzman, one of his keyboard players, lives in L.A. and he came over and gave me some music. Not clear charts, but this was all that was available. So basically I had five days to learn the material. I flew out to Washington, D.C. on the red-eye flight which arrived at 5:00 in the morning-to play that night with Miles, never having met him or rehearsed with his band. I met him a half-hour before I hit the stage. No rehearsal. The charts helped me a little bit, but I learned it much better just by keeping an open ear. When I met Miles, the only thing he asked me was [imitates Miles' rasp], "Robben, what you gonna wear onstage?" I thought I was going to throw up. I met him at the gig you know! All the band piled into the van to drive over to the gig from the hotel, and I was sick to my stomach with nervousness. Then somebody came up and said "Robben, Miles wants to see you." I was dying. And he was like in some other area of the hall, so it was like This Is Spinal Tap when the guys were looking for the stage, right? I was trying to find Miles Davis. I finally found him, and he was standing there with his shades covering half his face, blowing his little red trumpet, dressed so cool. I adore the man. He would call me up on the phone and go "Robben, you gotta listen to this tape." And he'd put a little tape deck up to the phone and play a guitar solo I'd taken on some gig. "Playing your ass off". He took to me, kind of. He'd drag me out to the front of the stage. He'd yell at everyone else in the band, and then say "Robben, get them chords".
Who were your early blues guitar influences? And what had you been listening to before that?
The guys who I would say I played their shit--not too much straight-out, but whom I got a definite influence from--are Albert Collins, Albert King, and BB King. And beyond that, there's a little bit of Clapton in there, but Mike Bloomfield is definitely the roots of my playing....Before that, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. You know, the Animals were always my favorite band. I thought they had great songs, and I dug the shit out of Eric Burdon's singing. I thought he could damn sing the blues. Not the guitar at all. The guy [Hilton Valentine] could not play guitar, although I liked it....
Recently there was a cable TV special on Eric Clapton, and Pete Townshend said "You can't really play the blues unless you're in internal agony and frustration and desperation." Now, you grew up in a white, middle-class, suburban, almost rural environment, with a very supportive family, yet you obviously tapped into blues like very few people can. Do you see any truth at all in the old you've-got-to-suffer-to-play-the-blues attitude?
I really don't know how to answer that. I don't think that's what turned me on to it. I wasn't in pain, like I needed to play the blues. It's an interesting question--because there is definitely pain in the blues. But I don't know--maybe this will apply: I read a quote by Bob Dylan, which I think he got from Woody Guthrie, and he said, "Man, all these young kids, they think they've got to get into the blues to play the blues, you know, but it's the opposite. People play the blues to get out of the blues, to get out of their pain." So it's to have a good time; that's why you play the blues. Free yourself, express yourself.Lots of good stuff here, but I really like the last question and answer I included above; I sometimes wondered how a sheltered suburbanite like myself could feel the blues so heavily. I did have more than my share of "internal agony and frustration", but I also just loved everything about the blues. To this day, I can play lots of different styles, but the blues just feels like home to me.
That's it for this month. I'll be back to discuss the September issue, with cover artist Vernon Reid in a few weeks. Until then, keep on picking!
With [Crossroads] doing so well on the charts and there being so much interest in it, does it create a situation where you're in essence competing with your past?
In a way, but I always was. Ever since I got through the Layla period, I was always aware that I had a lot of ground to cover, to make up for the vitality that was there in those days. So I've always had that problem in certain degrees...
Of all Hendrix' songs, why did you choose to cover "Little Wing"?
It just had such a powerful atmosphere. There was something very magical for me on his albums. I always went for the more dreamy things--as opposed to the more bluesy or heavy R&B or rock things. I found that his lyricism when he was writing ballads, like "Wind Cries Mary" or "Little Wing" was so different, in a way, that it was powerfully attractive to me. And I realized that those songs could be done by other people too; you didn't need to be the wizard that he was in order to play the song itself. Those songs in fact were much more structured than some of his other things, and more melodic too. As you know, Sting did "Little Wing" as well. The song itself, because of the way it was written, stands up so well--so anyone could do it. In a way, the song was more important to me than who did it, actually. I think that was what it was.
After Hendrix died, was it different performing that song live?
It's pretty hard for me to remember how I was feeling, but knowing the way my attitude was, I mean, I shut off my emotions towards Jimi, in a way, because it was such a devastation for me after he died. If I was doing the song now, I imagine I would try to detach from the memory of it, because it would simply be too over-emotional to perform with Jimi's image in my head at the time. There's times when that can just distract you beyond belief. So I was probably doing it in as objective a way as I could. But that's not to say that it wasn't an emotional experience.
On [your last] tour you went back to being the only guitarist in the group. What prompted the return to solitary guitarist?
Well, I find that sometimes I get very uptight around other guitar players. If they're younger than me, they're either in awe, or they have an attitude before they start, you know, which I have to kind of try to break down. Sometimes it means that they're going to be flying all my old licks at me, or kind of making me too aware of my past, and we get stuck with that. The only time this hasn't happened has been when I've worked with Mark Knopfler. Although he's very appreciative of what I've done, he's kind of a forward-looking guy and we're about the same age, so there's no competitiveness or anything like that. So we work very well together, and I think he'll probably be very much involved with what I'm doing from here on in--up to a point, anyway.
Did you decide to retire your old Stratocaster, Blackie? Was that the reason for the switch to the Eric Clapton Signature Model Strat?
Yes. I was worried that if something happened to Blackie, I'd be out on a limb, you know. I mean, it's still playable, although not comfortably so. It's got a great character--the guitar itself is really a character--and it worried me, taking it around on the road. It just seemed to be unfair; it's like taking a very old man and expecting him to do the impossible every night [laughs]. So it was Fender's Dan Smith's idea to copy Blackie as closely as we could and update it with a little bit of electronic work, to give it a fatter sound, if I wanted it. Which is what one of the knobs does: it gives you a kind of graduation in compression. They duplicated the way Blackie felt, so I would have two or three Blackies, in effect.
The guitar that came to be called Blackie was pieced together from various Strats, right?
Yeah, a very kind of mongrel thing. I bought about five Strats in Nashville, in about 1969 or 1970, and built Blackie out of all of the best components of each guitar. So Blackie in itself was a hybrid, and now these new ones are copies of that hybrid.
Do you still feel like you're at a crossroads?
Well, it's definitely not behind me. It's something I can see on the horizon all the time. There's always an option for me that's very tempting to take, whether it be shall I go on touring or shall I go into films, or shall I stay married or shall I run around. There's always kind of different avenues that are very tempting to me, and I don't think I'll ever get across the crossroads; it's always standing right there in front of me, you know.
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"I've got to give credit where it's due. The producer, Brian Fisher, said 'I want you to do something on the low strings. I want that kind of sound.' Heck, I'd always thought that when you take a solo, you wanted to burn it up on the high end. Up until then I'd played a lot of different kinds of music, but I didn't really have a distinct style of my own, and Nashville hires stylists. He helped me develop a recognizable style."
Fred's official role is electric lead guitarist, doubling on harmonica when needed. The band also includes three other guitarists, John Clausi, who doubles on acoustic guitar and banjo, Larry "Wimpy" Sasser, who doubles on steel and dobro, and Hubert "Hoot" Hester, who plays acoustic rhythm guitar, mandolin and fiddle. Each member of the 13 piece band, which includes four backup singers was hired for versatility and steely nerves.
"It's a high-pressure situation," admits Fred. "Playing live really spooked me for about a month after we started the show. I'd done a lot of videotaped TV shows over the years, and that was pressure enough. But at least it could be done over if there was a real trainwreck. Finally I decided I just had to get in there, go for the throat, and let the chips fall as they may. You just try to do the best you can and stay ready to shift gears real quick. Sometimes singers will come in halfway through a turnaround and you have to go with them. We always try to make the artist sound and look good--that's what we're there for."
Nashville number charts for each tune are usually ready when the band begins rehearsal. These charts, which employ scale numbers to represent chords, are often quite detailed, and the musicians each add their own individual notes to them. "First they play a tape or record of the tune, and we make notations as we go. Parts are left up to the individual musician, but we usually try to get as close as we can to what's on the record. That's what the artist and audience is used to hearing. I've got a little tape recorder that I keep handy, and if I've got the intro to the song or have to play a real distinctive fill or lick, I hold the machine out there and tape it. Then I've got a little reminder that I can listen to right before we do the tune."
" I make my own notations on the chart to remind me of things like when and where I want to use effects, what guitar to use, or if I need a special tuning. I've learned to always mark the chart and never take for granted that I'll remember something, because you can make a pretty glaring mistake. It's happened. There's nothing worse than to come to the end of a song and play two extra beats....Having a road map laid out is probably the most important part of preparation for a live show."
"I don't think you can ever totally relax in this business. I practice every day....A lot of times I pick the guitar up at 6:30 in the morning and just start exploring. You have to be creative and figure out new things to do. I'm really open to experimenting with new techniques, and I've been trying to make it a point to learn a new song about every other day. Some days I just work on technique, like working with a thumbpick for an hour or two, just to get back to using it again.
"I enjoy playing music more now than I ever have, just because I have a chance to do so many different things. It's a shame that a person can't live long enough to experience a good career playing every musical style, because it's all so much fun. It's too bad you can't be a good jazz guitarist for 75 years and then be a good country player for the next 50 years and then play rock and roll for another 50 years. That's my idea of a good life."
That's all for this month. I hope you enjoyed it, and that you'll come back for next month's jam packed issue featuring a cover story about Robben Ford. Until then, keep on picking!***********************
The few problems apparent on Crossroads stem from a sort of identity crisis. Just what is this hefty document? Certainly not a "Greatest Hits" collection. Even at his biggest, Clapton's audience could always have been termed a "cult", albeit a huge cult, and he crossed over to mainstream radio infrequently...In the words of Bill Levenson (Executive Producer of the progject), "I just see it as an honest 25-year portrayal. It shows the hits, the misses, the live material--it's a good 25-year documentary. And it was really meant to be an instructional tool, almost."As someone who has played along to the tracks hundreds of times, I know I've used it for instruction for sure. That said, if you've read Clapton's autobiography (written 20 years after this) or seen the recent Life in 12 Bars documentary (another 10 years later), it's clear that Clapton himself is content to take a scattershot view to his past, emphasizing some points and minimizing others. For better or worse, it's his right to do so, but as something of a Clapton scholar, I really appreciate this collection as a "primary source" of sorts.
"The Yardbirds demos that open the collection are essentially the tentative first steps of a neophyte band attempting to play their newly discovered passion, and as such are not representative of the creative force the band came to be. John Lee Hooker's 'Boom Boom' actually pales by comparison with the Animals' authoritative reading of the same (which is ironic, since Animals guitarist Hilton Valentine has doubtless never been mistaken as the deity)..."
"The primitive 'Lonely Years' and the bouncy "Bernard Jenkins', both duets with John Mayall, were recorded prior to the Blues Breakers sessions. The former shows Clapton's abilities as a seamless accompanist as few tracks in his entire catalog do. On the latter's opening solo, he attacks every note full-force. For a 20-year old Brit, he was anything but intimidated by studio microphones, his elder-statesman bandleader, or the fact that he was crossing the color line with every bend of his Les Paul."
"The next several cuts, unfortunately, illustrate all too clearly the slump that followed Clapton's triumphant return (with 461 Ocean Boulevard). "Better Make It Through Today" is at best one of the few tracks that stands out on the mediocre There's One In Every Crowd; the catatonic stance on Elmore James' cathartic "The Sky is Crying" is more indicative of this 12' dud as is the unreleased "It Hurts Me Too". During this period, Clapton's blues playing merely represented the slower portions of the program, with interchangeable songs, uninspired soloing, and cumbersome backing."Wow. Tell us how you really feel about '70s Clapton, Dan!
"And finally, the set ends with the newly recorded version of "After Midnight"--yes, the one in the beer commercial. This seems to have been chosen out of convenience more than musical considerations. A more dramatic reprise to end Clapton's history-up-to-now would have been his dynamic reworking of "White Room" at Live Aid--not only dipping back into Cream's catalog, but reinterpreting a song Jack Bruce had originally sung and then leaning into his wah-wah for all he was worth."
"Considering the glitzy sheen of "Miss You" or "After Midnight" it's ironic to recall that this is the same Eric Clapton that forsook pop stardom with the Yardbirds in favor of following a purist's path in search of the spirit of Robert Johnson. Eric Clapton has stood at the crossroads more than once in his 25 years of music making. And so far no one has passed him by."
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"According to recently published figures by the American Music Conference, a non-profit association that encourages amateur music participation, 1,247,265 fretted instruments (which includes such instruments as mandolins and banjos) with an estimated retail value (ERV) of $328,322,000 were sold in the United States in 1987. Of that number, only 123,400, with an estimated retail value of $89,280,000 were produced in the United States. Although the AMC is not able to break the domestic figures down by instrument, it is able to do so for imports: 517,300 acoustic guitars ($79,570,000 ERV) and 453,000 electric guitars ($150,642,000 ERV) were shipped to the US last year. These figures represent an 11% increase in imports and a 5% increase in domestic units over 1986 numbers."Pretty neat. Besides the fact that I think that half of those 453,000 imported guitars are available for sale right now on Reverb, the dollar value of fretted instrument sales would be the equivalent of over $718 million today. I did a little looking and found a "music industry census" online that shows that in 2017, total guitar sales in America were 2,630,950 units with a retail value of $1.07 billion (average price $433). The number of instruments sold was up 6.4% from the prior year and the ERV was up 7%. So while recognizing that America's population has grown from 240+ million to over 325 million in the last thirty years, I find these data reassuring about the current and future state of our instrument.
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Bruce Springsteen, Al Di Meola, John Scofield, Will Lee, Prince, John Abercrombie, Nile Rogers, Sting, Paul Simon, Hall and Oates, Joan Jett, Lou Reed, Billy Squier, Jack Wilkins, Jim Hall, Tommy Shaw, Mike Stern, Steve Khan, Tony Levin, Carmine Rojas, Victor Bailey, Joe Beck, Jeff Golub, Bill Frisell, Daryl Jones, T-Bone Wolk, and Neil Jason.Wow. That's a music hall of fame right there! Sadowsky is still active, and Jay Black went on to work for Fender's Custom Shop for over a decade and has his own business today. They had some pretty interesting points to make about guitar modifications and the difference between New York and L.A. (which always seems to come up in these old magazines!). Once again, in the pre-internet days, it's clear that they viewed their job as providing expert advice to their customers:
"Much of what we do is educate our clients. Often they know what they want, but they don't know how to get there. They're seduced by ads that don't deliver, and they end up wasting money. We evaluate everything that comes on the market and simplify matters by making recommendations." Sadowsky estimates that his business is now divided equally between customizing instruments and producing and selling his own line of guitars and basses.
"Customizing", Roger explains, "means upgrading the level of a guitar's performance. It's been about a decade since guitar customizing became really popular. Companies like Charvel, Schecter, Mighty Mite and DiMarzio came out with replacement parts such as necks, bridges and pickups, which essentially brought a parts mentality to Fender-style guitars. People began looking at guitars or basses as interchangeable parts rather than as an instrument."
"One of the key insights I had was when a client brought in his Strat for extensive work--fret job, new pickups, a bridge, shielding--in all a $500 to $600 job. I remember being surprised at how the instrument wasn't significantly improved after all that work, whereas other guitars I'd done the same things to came out superior. I eventually realized that there is an inherent acoustic quality going on in the instrument, which is a function of the wood. "Later in the piece, Black notes that "players who buy student-level guitars and hope to improve them through customization are much better off buying a high-quality guitar and making small adjustments.
"Irving Sloane, who authored several definitive books on guitar construction, once told me, 'Great instruments are not made for the listener, they are made for great musicians.' Most of us have felt, at one time or another, that if we only had different pickups or a certain tremolo system or a better bridge, we would be better players. We naturally prefer to blame our equipment rather than ourselves. Jay and I are just trying to eliminate the instrument as a source of problems, so the musician can focus on his creativity....The magic is in one's hands and soul, not the equipment."Very thought provoking stuff!
"Well, I was in the hospital for about three weeks. I had...my Steinberger, and I started to poke around a little bit while I was still in the hospital--but just a little. Then after I got out of the hospital, Merle Saunders and John Khan came up to my house a couple of times a week and made me practice. Merle would bring music and we'd play through the changes of standards and stuff like that. Gradually, I started to pick it up again. At first it was very stiff and mechanical. I could figure things out to a point, but it took a while before I really had a sense of how music worked. I had to kind of reconstruct all that. It was about a three or four month process before I felt I was playing well enough to play in front of somebody. I knew I wasn't playing as well as I remembered that I had been able to..."
So it wasn't really a matter of not playing for three or four weeks. There was actually damage to your memory?
"Oh yeah, I had some damage. The damage part was worse than the three or four weeks...But the blessing of losing hunks of your memory is that you don't get too hung up over what you don't remember, because it's gone. It's not a question of 'what is it I don't remember here? Is it something valuable?' It's gone...Gradually everything sort of came back, but it wasn't without a certain amount of work. I had to do everything at least once to remind my muscles about how something worked. It was the thing of making the connection between mind and muscles, because I hadn't been away from playing for so long that my mind had forgotten. The neuropathways were there and the reason for doing it and why it worked -the intellectual part- was also there, but they were separated. I had to pick them up like, here's a chunk of how music works, over here is a hunk of why I like to play it, and here's a hunk of my muscles knowing this stuff. It was a matter of putting my hands on the guitar and actually playing through tunes and trying to solve the problem of how the structure of each tune works-addressing the whole thing. That's what did it, but it took a while. I'm still in the process of rediscovery. I suddenly go, 'Oh right. Here's a whole area. I remember that year that I worked on this stuff.' It tends to come back in chunks. But like I say, I don't remember what I don't remember. I'm not hung about it, and every time I discover something new, it's delightful."What an interesting passage! It's really sobering to realize how much of our ability, personality and talents are locked up in our grey matter, and so stories like this, or like Pat Martino's are very inspirational to me.
That's all for this month. I hope you enjoyed it, and that you'll come back for next month's cover story Eric Clapton. Until then, keep on picking!***********************