English folkie Bert Jansch collaborated with Mike Nesmith on his 1974 gem,L.A. Turnaround. Nesmith brought along his colleague, pedal steel guitarist Red Rhodes too. By this time, Nesmith was three years into his travels down his own distinctive country-rock byway. Jansch had left Pentangle and returned to a solo career.
I don’t know the back story behind L.A. Turnaround, one of Jansch’s finest–among many fine–records. Much to my surprise, there are on youtube a series of clips of sessions featuring Jansch and Red Rhodes. The setting is a country cottage in Britain. The sessions are marvelous and intimate. Eventually, Nesmith would augment tracks cut in the impromptu studio with contributions from L.A. session men, guitarist Jesse Ed Davis and fiddler Byron Berline, as well as Brits, including bassist Klaus Voorman, and drummer Danny Lane.
The three youtube clips comprise a beguiling mini-documentary.
Via a tip on the Pedal Steel Guitar forum, here a video of–I believe–Eddie Fulawka making a pedal steel guitar. At one point in the incredibly concise clip from the Discovery Channel’s How It’s Made, the narrator mentions that in getting the pick-up level, “There’s no room for error.”
Hmmm, there’s not a lot of room for error elsewhere. The modern pedal steel guitar is a wonder of craftsmanship, and with the top-of-the-line guitars, each is the product of a lot of handcraftsmanship.
Legendary pedal steel guitarist Pete Drake demonstrates ‘talking steel guitar’ on a magically real clip. Thanks to the superb culture blog, Naturalismo. (The album track for Forever is available there.)
excerpt, interview with Douglas Green, Guitar Player, unknown date
How did your “Talking Guitar” thing come about?
Well, everybody wanted this style of mine, but I sort of got tired of it. I’d say, “Hey, let me try and come up with something new,” and they’d say, “Naw, I want you to do what you did on So-and-so’s record.” Now, I’d been trying to make something for people who couldn’t talk, who’d lost their voice. I had some neighbors who were deaf and dumb, and I thought it would be nice if they could talk. So I saw this old Kay Kayser movie, and Alvino Rey was playing the talking guitar. I thought, “Man, if he can make a guitar talk, surely I can make people talk.” So I worked on it for about five years, and it was so simple that I went all around it, you know, like we usually do.
How did the talking guitar work?
You play the notes on the guitar and it goes through the amplifier. I have a driver system so that you disconnect the speakers and the sound goes through the driver into a plastic tube. You put the tube in the side of your mouth then form the words with your mouth as you play them. You don’t actually say a word: The guitar is your vocal chords, and your mouth is the amplifier. It’s amplified by a microphone.
When did you first use it on records?
With Roger Miller. He had a record called “Lock, Stock And Teardrops,” on RCA Victor, but it didn’t hit. Then I used it on Jim Reeves’ “I’ve Enjoyed As Much Of This As I Can Stand.” I really thought I’d used the gimmick up by the time Shelby Singleton and Jerry Kennedy of Mercury Records wanted to record me. I had already recorded for Starday [a Mercury label] some straight steel things like “For Pete’s Sake,” but I went ahead and cut a song called “Forever” on the talking thing. It came out, and for about two months didn’t do a thing; then, all of a sudden, it cut loose and sold a million. So then I was known as the “Talking Steel Guitar Man,” and did several albums for Smash, which is a subsidiary of Mercury.
I did something audacious (or drug addled,) in the summer of 1972. I ordered a Fender 400 pedal steel guitar from DeArango Music in Cleveland Heights, my hometown. I was told I’d have to wait several months. I don’t remember the price, but I vaguely recollect it was about $400. I had saved up and also had the benefit of a graduation gift or two. My best friend Jamie told me that “with your talent you’ll learn how to play it in a year or two.” Such as my talent was at the time, my musical talent was–as yet–unexpressed and tending to nil. (Well, in most respects it still does tend this way.) But he and me had big time cowpie-in-the-sky rock band visions.
As it happened, the Fender never arrived. DeArango may have sold it out from under me. Who knows. I was offered a Sho-Bud Maverick off the floor, a starter pedal steel, and a Fender Twin Reverb amp as a package for a slight bump in price. I jumped on it.
The whole thing was nutty. I bought an OMI dobro a year later. A friend gave me a wreck of a National wooden body acoustic lap guitar. Over the 18 months, before moving to Vermont, I may have logged 250 hours, mostly on the dobro, trying to jumpstart even beginning to learn how to play. (I had at the time ‘higher’ priorities-literally.) The Maverick wouldn’t stay in tune, so it quickly became an object of my disaffection, or, better, rationalizing; and sat in a corner all pretty and ignored.
In 1975, while living in Maine and having exhausted my monies, I sold the maverick and amp for $300. (Oh…just a new white face Twin amp!) I rarely touched the other guitars after that point, and gave both to the fine Vermont musician Michael Corn in 1991.
Then, 30 years later, I hatched another nutty idea. I wanted to fashion some of my distinctive, naive electro world hed music and use as appropriated source the music of north Africa and the Sahel styled into ambient sound worlds. Why? Pentatonic raptures; for me, entrancing and proto-bluez like. Nutty, but absolutely aimed at only my own satisfactions-and, it doesn’t take much.
Needed a guitar, to whack pentatonic vamps on. Then I had a brainstorm: why not steel guitar? I started tracking eBay. Soon enough, I won an auction for a new Fouke Indy Rail. Nice. Open E. Sweet all-aluminum axe.
I have to confess, 4 years later, I have about 1,000 hours into it. Still, I discovered something fantastic: a lap steel is a fine sound device for running through synth patches and effects chains. The IndyRail has terrific sustain and so I started recording my playing, or sound sourcing, and came up with lots of ambient and drone and pentatonic goodness. So much so, that I added a second lap steel, handmade by Allen Melbert, to experiment with straight pentatonic tunings. Now I’ve dedicated a cheapo Rondo lap steel to my crazy fever dream.
Then I began to think of how neat it would be to work a pentatonic tuning on a pedal steel guitar. (…such a charlatan I am!) Only problem was, after a little research, it became clear that a modern 10 string pedal steel guitar in mechanical terms was not going to be amenable to naive experimentation. Student models couldn’t have their set-ups (string and pedal changes,) altered, and professional models could, but they cost a lot of money and even then, changing to exotic set-ups wasn’t, generally, their forte.
Then, much to my surprise, I discovered that the old Fender 400 fit the bill for a ridiculous reason: it’s archaic cable-driven pedal-and-changer mechanism could be changed in minutes. Understand that Fender stopped making this particular “cabled” steel guitar right around the time I ordered it, 1972. Where modern pedal steels are marvels of engineering, the old cable Fenders were known as crude affairs that had retained their simplistic mechanics against the tide of Sho-Buds and Emmons innovations. Most common qualification: the Fenders were clunkers.
But…you…see, this pedal steel that didn’t show up in 1972 was the one steel that fit my feverish requirements. I began to regularly scan eBay. Starting last winter, Fender 400’s seemed to hit the auction block weekly, several hit the buy section of the invaluable Pedal Steel Guitar forum, but I was outbid or the guitar/seller didn’t pass the minimal smell test. I wanted a player, not a project.
Then in May a seeming player hit eBay. I raised my purchase price bar up a bit and placed the winning bid on an in-state 400.
Pedal Steel connected to MacBook; signal chain is: Guitar Rig Mobil I/O through Core Audio to DSP-Quattro Pro, then, via DSP-QP’s virtual board lots of effects, or, directly plugged as a sound source into Native Instruments Absynth. More skinny.
Drove down to southern Ohio and completed the deal. No case. I put the body of the guitar on the back seat and the pedal rack on the floor of my Honda, and smiled all the way on the 3 hour return trip.
