RIP Ben Keith

Ben Keith, a steel player known for his long association with Neil Young, has died of a heart attack at 73. Aside from his work on twelve Young albums and several tours, he was a Nashville fixture who played on innumerable sessions, including Patsy Cline's "I Fall To Pieces." Keith had a voice on steel that I would describe as minimalistic, almost lonely. I never detected a showboat approach in his playing, which probably appealed to Neil. I saw him play live in 2006 on the CSNY "Freedom Of Speech" tour. A great loss to be sure.

Fire up the soldering iron.

Engaging in some good old-fashioned DIY this week. With a bee in my bonnet to sort out my black Strat, I decided that I'm sick of paying surly techs at music stores to change pickups and otherwise rewire my guitars, and that I, a fairly capable man, should be able to do this work myself.

In bygone days I tried to do a bit of soldering but really had no idea what I was doing. But now there is YouTube. With a bit of poking around I found some videos on basic soldering and pickup how-tos from Seymour Duncan and Jason Lollar. Readable wiring diagrams were a little hard to find but I finally found a clear diagram on Seymour's site. His site is in fact a valuable font of information, in contrast to the DiMarzio site, which had basically nothing but marketing.

I have a date with a soldering iron at Greg Wyard's place on Friday afternoon - I'm going to change back from the single-single-double Rio Grande set to the original single-single-single set. I never could get with the Rio Grandes, and I'm not sure why. Oh, and I'm going to do a little modification, disabling the second tone pot to just have master volume and master tone. I'll tell you all about it when the deed is done.

Blind Lemon Jefferson, guitar symphonist

I've been working on Blind Lemon Jefferson's "One Dime Blues." It is a solo guitar/vocal performance recorded in Texas in 1927.



For quite a few years I've had a Stefan Grossman transcription book called Texas Blues, with tunes by Jefferson, Mance Lipscomb, Little Hat Jones and others. I learned out tune out of it when I was a teenager, "Bad Luck Blues" which has become transmogrified over the years.

Lately I've been focusing on Blind Lemon Jefferson's music a bit - he's one of my favorite blues performers. His voice is refined, his lyrics are droll, and his guitar playing is top-notch fingerstyle ragtime blues.

After working on the tune for a while, I took a look at versions on YouTube while my right-hand fingertips recovered. There is this excellent interpretation by "Freddie 12 String":


Damn close to note-for-note on the guitar. The vocal less so, unfortunately. But still nice to listen to and great for cribbing fingerings. Etta Baker's modern version, seemingly as famous as the original on the web, is a lovely gloss on the Blind Lemon arrangement, though it lacks the inventiveness of Lemon's performance - his weird little bass lines under the vocal, the use of an alternating root-seventh during the first solo. These little touches, and the almost orchestral use of a single downmarket acoustic guitar, really make Blind Lemon Jefferson's music worth checking out, in my opinion.

Rhythm guitar: the spackle of music?

In situations where two guitarists are in a band or on a pickup gig, it is often the case that one player is the designated "lead guitarist" and the other is the "rhythm guitarist." Much of the time, the rhythm guitarist is relegated to chord strums out of necessity, not choice. This is sometimes due to the demands of singing. John Lennon played strict rhythm in the early days of the Beatles, only breaking out solos on later recordings like "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" and "Get Back." His rare solos are not bad at all, but he clearly did much more singing than George Harrison, which would necessitate a clear division of lead guitar labor. Even Bryan Adams has been holding back all of these years, save for rare moments. But more often it's a lack of single-note fluidity that places a guitarist in the rhythm camp. In a way, it's a shame that rhythm guitar sometimes becomes an afterthought, the Spackle of musical texture.

I've always admired guitarists who cultivate rhythm guitar as an art in itself. The first time that I remember becoming aware of this was in a May 1982 Guitar World magazine article about Grateful Dead rhythm guitarist Bob Weir. Weir advocated using a large triangular pick and practicing with a "polynome" - a metronome that did polyrhythms. In fact, Weir occasionally played solos in the Dead - one example that comes to mind is the first solo in "Friend of the Devil" on the Dead Set live album.

Some great rhythm players who rarely or never took solos? How about Freddie Green (Count Basie Orch.), Catfish Collins (James Brown, P-Funk), James Hetfield (Metallica), Scott Ian (Anthrax), David Knopfler (Dire Straits), Al McKay (Earth, Wind and Fire), Ed O'Brien (Radiohead) and Keith Richards (Rolling Stones). Who am I missing?

Tonequest - the musical, or, barking up the wrong swamp ash tree

Playing my dead-sounding Highway One Strat at a theatre gig the last few days got me thinking about ways to try to resurrect this guitar, which I bought about two years ago for the rock shows I was doing at the time. I was trying to find a workable Strat for about a thousand bucks, and was enticed by the classic features of the Highway One, and the nitrocellulose finish, which is all the rage these days.

I've already changed out the pickups, dropping in a set of Rio Grandes in a SSH (single-coil, single-coil, humbucker) configuration and no dice.  The guitar still sounds like ca-ca. I'm not sure why I didn't hear it earlier, but this guitar just lacks presence, sweetness, lows, highs, mids...at the theatre gig I eventually just started using my much-better-sounding Mexican Telecaster, which I've had for over ten years.

My friend Rob Phillips changed up his late-80s Strat by switching out the body altogether, using a new body from Guitar Mill.  The body, with a custom sunburst, took months to show up but he's very happy with the guitar now.  Could a new body be the cure for my Strat's near-terminal suckiness? I can't help thinking that the guitar somehow enters a new stage of existence with a new body - every other part is subject to change and it's still THAT guitar.  But change the body and you change the guitar.  I'm not sure why this notion persists in my mind, but it does. But Leo designed his guitars to have easily replaceable parts, like a Ford Model T. It makes repairs much simpler and has also led to a culture of user modifications stretching at least as far back as Hendrix's white Strat with a Tele neck.

And what of options? Say I go with a swamp ash body ($185), humbucker rout for the bridge pickup (+$20), string ferrule installation (+$35) and Olympic White nitro finish (+$225).  Total is $510.00 plus shipping, duty, and currency exchange. And I still might hate the guitar.

Having played guitar now for almost 29 years, I've gotten extremely picky about my instruments, yet I find my tastes hard to articulate. My feelings about a guitar can take many months to settle, and I've bought and sold many, many electric guitars over the years trying to find the elusive tone and feel that I like. It's a bit of a sickness, and unfortunately for me modifications rarely do the trick.  There's something about the gestalt of the total guitar that has to be right, or I'll never be happy, it seems. Or maybe it's just a matter of research.

No Sco, but O.

I never did see the Scofield show. He wasn't going on until nine, and I had a gig. Typical.


I've been reading Jas Obrecht's Otis Rush interview with great pleasure. Otis is another upside-down lefty, which seems to be a recurring theme on this here blog. From the interview:

JO: You and Albert King both put your string sets on with the skinny ones nearest the ceiling. This must cause a different sound on bends, since you're moving the strings the opposite way from most players.

OR: A right-hand man try to push the little E up, where I ain't got nothin' to do but just pull it down. And it's more easier to pull something down than to push it up. Just like this building – you can tear it down in a second, but to put it up takes a few months.

John Scofield's New Orleans-gospel-jazz-rock-blues thing.

Amongst my friends and students, I'm not known to be a great follower of newly recorded music. I find there to be so much to discover in old music that it keeps me busy enough. And there's something about the old ways of playing and singing that resonate with me so deeply.

It's always nice to find something that is current that I actually connect with. In these last couple of weeks I've taken some time off of the blog and used the extra time to check out some recent guitar-related releases. I mentioned the new Jeff Beck in an earlier post. In a related vein, I'm just been listening to John Scofield's Piety Street from '09. Not his latest, I know. From what I've read Scofield had been itching to record a straight blues album but found the field too overcrowded; he turned to black gospel music, played in a funky New Orleans style. The core band for Piety Street was Jon Cleary, a keyboardist/singer who plays very tasty and authentic piano and organ and contributes several vocals; on bass George Porter, Jr., who has a long list of credits including the 70's NOLA funk legends the Meters, and on drums Ricky Fataar, who was a member of both the Beach Boys (he played on "Sail On Sailor"!) and the Rutles as Stig O'Hara (George Harrison). Fataar plays in Bonnie Raitt's band, along with Cleary.


I'm no Scofield expert, but some of the qualities that I identify in his playing on this record are:

1. A deep knowledge of blues licks, many of them extended into odd little harmonic places. Scofield seems to really be at home playing earthy New Orleans style gospel. His phrasing and sensitivity are really outstanding on this record.

2. An interest in tone manipulation through articulation - pick angle, velocity - and tricks like playing close to the bridge for a trebly, bell-like attack.

3. The sound of heavy strings. I hear a bell-like "inharmonic" sound in some of Sco's notes, which suggest that he is using a plain G string that has been made so thick that it has taken on the harmonic properties of a metal bar - upper harmonics are out of tune, which gives the notes a slight chorusing sound. He does in fact use a set of strings that begin with a .013 high E and a plain third. I've experienced this myself by experimenting with heavy gauge strings. Rock and blues guitar after 1967 needs a plain third string - the wound G strings just don't bend right. The outcome of all of this is that Scofield has that rare thing among jazzers: an awesome tone.

The band sounds really quite great - Porter Jr., Fataar, Cleary and Scofield cook effortlessly, and the singers add a different kind of performing frame and, oh yes, the lyrics to these songs, which include "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child" and "His Eye Is On The Sparrow." The singing is a bit faceless for me on first listens, but it's not distracting either. This album was recorded in New Orleans in 2008, just after Hurricane Gustav.

This record does not evince a traditional gospel approach, although there are many elements in common - the hard swinging, the use of combined piano and organ and tambourines (both used sparingly on Piety Street). Fataar's drumming has something of a West Coast coolness which keep things from getting bombastic. My overall impression is that Piety Street is that it must have been a blast to record, with some of the top musicians in the U.S. coming together to re-interpret an old repertoire of black gospel, drawn from the recorded output of singers like Mahalia Jackson.

This band (with Terence Higgins replacing Fataar) is in fact playing tonight at the Toronto Jazz Festival, and I'm heading down there to do a Talkback segment with JAZZ FM at six. I'll report back.