The upside-down lefty: lonely and listening.

I just became aware this week of Gurrumul, a blind aboriginal singer from Australia who is touring the US in June and July.

Growing up on a remote island, isolated from the larger society, Gurrumul learned to play on a right-handed guitar without turning the strings around. While this way of playing is rare, it is not unheard of, though less frequently today, with the ready availability of guitars worldwide.  Gurrumul's playing style is a gentle fingerpick, though with a less regimented pattern than American folk fingerpicking.

I can only think of two guitarists that I've seen that play 'upside-down' lefty - Elizabeth Cotten and Albert King.  Albert King is best known as a sixties/seventies urban bluesman, playing highly expressive, bent-string-laden blues licks, but pulling down the thin strings, which are at the top of the neck:



There's a close up of King's hands at 1:07, and I have to say that it's strange to watch, as someone who's been intently watching people play guitar in the regular way for 28 years.  Even odder to watch, for me, is Elizabeth Cotten, who played a version of Travis picking upside-down, with the thumb playing the melody and the fingers playing alternating bass notes.


I'm not sure why Albert King played the way he did, but Elizabeth Cotten learned to play on a guitar borrowed from her brother, and she was not allowed to rearrange the strings.  I would guess that Gurrumul was borrowing the guitar from a family member, or perhaps the guitar was just around and nobody knew to 'correct' the strings. Cultural isolation cuts off this kind of information, which can sometimes fuel innovation.  Jeff Healey, another blind guitarist who played in an unusual way, said that nobody corrected him when he began to play the guitar overhand on his lap as a child.

Was upside-down left-handed playing more prevalent in the past, when communities were more isolated and guitars were less common? I really don't know, though I'd like to. I can't say that I've personally known anyone who played that way.  I, like Jeff, started playing guitar lap-style, because it was easier to see what I was doing.  My first guitar lesson took care of that.  Did guitar lessons kill this particular mutation of guitar culture?

I think that in the cases of Gurrumul, Elizabeth Cotten, and Jeff Healey, playing 'the wrong way' came mostly out of social isolation. For Gurrumul and Jeff, I would speculate that it was blindness that set them outside of the larger guitar community.  So much of guitar knowledge is traded through the eyes - look at the YouTube guitar community.  For Elizabeth Cotten, it was being a young African-American woman at the turn of the century - there were strictures on the behaviour of young black women at that time that would have limited Elizabeth's inclusion in the local musical discourse.

This is not to say that these musicians were isolated from oral and aural culture.  Gurrumul's favorite band is Dire Straits. Albert King must have grown up with blues recordings to study, based on his sure knowledge of the conventions of blues improvisation and stage performance.  I'm not sure how many recordings Elizabeth Cotten was exposed to growing up, but her playing style is very much a piece with southern musicians who recorded in the 1920s, including Mississippi John Hurt, Bayless Rose and Geeshie Wiley.

An unusual technique can put a fresh spin on traditional styles like blues, folk and Australian aboriginal.  All of the musicians that I've mentioned here play in traditional styles but have something different - a strange turn of phrase, an oddly quick string bend - that give them a distinctive musical identity.  I submit that their 'wrong' ways of playing, borne of social isolation, form a large part of what makes these musicians distinctive and intriguing in their own ways.

Article first published as Gurrumul: the Upside-down Lefty, Lonely, Listening. on Technorati.

Big Country, Jimi and "secret gadgets".

Back in 1983 when "In A Big Country" by the Scottish band Big Country became a pop (and more importantly for me at the time, video) hit, I was in Grade 9.  I had a little group of guitar-playing friends and we would exchange licks and knowledge about the world of guitars, amps and pedals.  The scuttlebutt was that Big Country owned rare and coveted pedals (I remember a "Japanese distortion pedal" being mooted) that allowed them to achieve their trademark 'bagpipe' sound.

What was the source of the bagpipe tone? We're still speculating, it seems. According to this blog, they were using the MXR M-129 Pitch Transposer, a rackmounted device.  It certainly is rare.
 Another guitar gadget of legend was Jimi Hendrix's "secret switch", which I heard bandied about for a few years. It's now claimed that this switch really did exist, possibly installed by Dan Armstrong.  A Hendrix guitar with the switch, has, in any case, never been found.

The velvet icepick: favorite Telecaster moments.

I was watching this YouTube of Merle Haggard singing "Branded Man" when out of nowhere at 1:43 into the track, a burst of beautiful Telecaster licks appeared.  I had forgotten they were there, so it was a nice surprise.


It got me thinking about some of my favorite Tele moments - the recordings that made me love the Tele.  I've played a Tele for about twelve years now.  I think that I've become a 'Tele player' in the process - I tend to play things on it that the guitar seems to want to do.  I think that the Tele has a clear, human voice, and that is part of what makes it a less forgiving guitar than say a Strat or a Les Paul.  Danny Gatton, Albert Collins and Roy Buchanan are three guitarists who have been strongly associated with the Telecaster. All three were masters of the trademark Tele tone - searing, trebly attack and gain, usually bathed in spring reverb.  Danny Gatton especially mastered the various tricks that play on the architecture of the Tele - behind-the-nut bends and the like.


Mike Bloomfield was associated with the 1959 Les Paul guitar in his later work with Paul Butterfield and the Electric Flag, but on his New York sessions with Bob Dylan in 1965, it was a Telecaster all the way.  Al Kooper recounts the story of his first meeting with Bloomfield at the "Like A Rolling Stone" session in '65, where Bloomfield apparently comes in to the studio carrying a Tele without a case, and knocking it against the wall to get the snow off.  It's a great story, but since the "Like A Rolling Stone" sessions took place on June 15 and 16, 1965, I can't see how snowy it could have been.  But no matter.  The guitar breaks in "Tombstone Blues" are my favorite Bloomfield bits on Highway 61 Revisited.
Hear here.

Dylan's other lead player of the sixties, Robbie Robertson, is another guitarist who is not necessarily connected to the Tele in the public imagination because he didn't use one in The Last Waltz.  But in early sessions with Dylan and on the road in 1966, Leo Fender's primordial plank was the go-to.  Here's a YouTube of Robbie's Tele reverberating off the walls of some old English music hall in Eat The Document, D.A. Pennebaker's documentary of Dylan's '66 UK tour.

Some others are more obvious.  Albert Collins? Even David Letterman calls him the "Master of the Telecaster":



This live video of Ricky Skaggs performing "Don't Get Above Your Raisin'" was on high rotation on the country music video channel when I was an idle youth.  Ray Flacke's solo at 1:29 is astounding.


 But the true "Master of the Telecaster" in my heart will always be Roy Buchanan, a guitarist's guitarist who not only is inextricably associated with the Tele, but with one specific Tele, a butterscotch beauty from 1952:

Rare Gibsons: Safe as houses?

In an article on the Gibson website, Jeremy Singer notes the steadily increasing value of vintage and rare Gibsons.

“It’s official – guitars are better investments than homes,” says rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia expert Ted Owen. They’re also better investments than stocks and shares. A 1958 Gibson Explorer, bought for $247.50 in 1963, was sold in 2006 for $611,000. That’s almost a 20% year-on-year annual return versus an average of 12% for the typical house or the 9% typically produced investing in shares. Adam Newman, manager of Vintage & Rare Guitars says, “Late Fifties Gibson Les Paul Standards bought for a few hundred dollars could be worth well over $300,000. With rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia auctions taking place on a regular basis, it’s now easier to purchase a vintage or rare guitar that, in turn, is a solid investment.

Not long ago, I ruminated on the resale value of guitars listed in the classifieds of a 1980 newspaper issue.  I guess "the one that got away" for me was a 1959 Strat, all original, that I found in Sault Ste. Marie for $1500.  They also had a 1955 Tele, clean, $1500.  I couldn't afford the guitar - couldn't even fathom it - but my bandmate had a friend back in Toronto with a job.  We bought it for them and they threw in a 1962 Fender Musicmaster for me for free for testing the guitar and helping to broker the deal long distance. Crazy times. If I'd had the cash in the bank to buy that guitar in 1988, it would possibly be worth $38,856.00.  Not a bad increase.

What surprised me most about the article was not its recommendation of vintage Gibson guitars as an investment, but the increases that it cited for recent Gibson products like the 2006 Jimmy Page Custom Authentic Les Paul, which saw increases of 300% and 400% in price soon after its initial sale to the public.  Were those guitars, limited to only 25 guitars signed, and more importantly, played by Jimmy Page himself, an IPO? The stock is, in this case, a highly limited product that is dripping with semiotic connotations.  To own a guitar that was played by a legend holds great weight for some people, and they will pay for it.

There's even an investment fund for vintage guitars now, offered by Anchorage Capital Partners.  They promise a 31% annual return.  Should everybody get on the bus now? Or has the market peaked?

The most valuable guitars in the world are associated with the musicians that emerged in the U.S. and especially England from about 1964-1968. This period is ground zero for classic rock, which suggests that guitars owned by Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page are valuable because of the durability, at least so far, of that body of music over time. When that music, and those artists, cease to hold great affective force amongst large sections of the public, the value of those investments will fall precipitously.  When Eric Clapton dies, will the Eric Clapton model Stratocaster become more valuable? Or less so, because Clapton's stock will fall when he is no longer touring? Death is a great career move, but more so when you are young and full of promise.  It remains to be seen how this will play out, for the most part.  I don't believe that the Fender Stevie Ray Vaughan Strat increased in value much after his death in 1990, but it is somewhat more coveted now because John Mayer used one for a while.  And the baby boomers are largely into their sixties.

I'm not sure that I would recommend vintage guitars to, say, a relative as a long-term investment.  It seems to me that the values of the rarest guitars have become ridiculously inflated and that they must fall as the affective power of the 1960s musicians amongst the general public subsides with age and death, both of the performers and of the audience.  But the decline will at least be slow, so there is still money to be made on the vintage guitar market in the shorter term.  But I won't be subscribing to Guitar Aficionado anytime soon either.  I play 'em.

Interview: Scott Totten of the Beach Boys

The man Hamer craftsman Jol Dantzig described as "a guitarist's guitarist" has been holding down the guitar chair in the Beach Boys since 2000, and has been the musical director since 2007.  Scott Totten was born and raised in Orange County, California. After attending Berklee from 1983-86 (finally earning his degree in 2006) he became a first call guitarist for Broadway shows, and has contributed his talents to New York and touring productions of Rent, Les Miserables, and Tommy.  Today Scott tours the world with "The Boys," overseeing the maintenance and rehearsal of the sometimes complex vocal and instrumental arrangements of the Beach Boys' legendary career. Recently, the band has undertaken a series of symphony shows in Australia, and Scott has overseen those arrangements as well.

I've seen the band perform twice near Toronto in the last couple of years and I can attest that the band is in very good shape indeed.  Original member Mike Love is the most recognizable face, and Bruce Johnston, who wrote my first favorite song, "I Write The Songs," is a close second.  Scott leads the band, which includes John Cowsill on drums and vocals, Randall Kirsch on bass and falsetto, Christian Love (Mike's son) on rhythm guitar and vocals, and Tim Bonhomme (from Sudbury, Ontario!) on keys and vocals.  In concert, the Beach Boys expertly play and sing their many hits, including some of the gorgeous Pet Sounds-era material.  As Andrew Hickey blogged after seeing a Manchester Beach Boys show in 2008, "this band actually sound far more like the Beach Boys' records than the real Beach Boys did in the last couple of decades of their career."

Scott and I became friends after he attended a Classic Albums Live Beatles album performance in Florida that I was a part of.  We share a love of Beatles minutiae, classic rock and pop perfectionism.  He kindly agreed to answer a few questions via email:

Scott, you wear many hats as the musical director and guitarist of the Beach Boys.  How do the roles of bandleader, arranger and band member complement each other or clash?

Hmm, interesting question-I think the arranger part complements the other parts most easily, at least on the few orchestral arrangements I’ve worked on, because I try to come up with parts that either add to the recorded parts or supplement them.  As bandleader vs. band member, sometimes the band member in me doesn’t want to go to soundcheck…

I know you to be an avid guitar collector.  What are your most interesting guitars, amps or effects?

Well, you mentioned Jol Dantzig earlier - he took me to Black Market Music back when they were in the Bay area and he MADE me buy a plexi Marshall head.  This was around '94-'95.  He told me they were way rarer than any pre CBS Strat and were undervalued.  He was right and I thank him for making me get one, it sounds killer!  It’s a '68 100w SuperTrem.  I’ve got an old Strat and Tele, a dot neck 335.  A couple of years ago I was in Cowtown Guitars in Las Vegas and I saw a reissue Fender Jaguar hanging on the wall…only it wasn’t a reissue!  It was a mint 64, and I bought it immediately.  Most of my pedals are newer, but I do have a 1970-71 Fuzz Face!

What do you bring on the road?

I take either my Hamer Monaco III or a Strat and a Epiphone Riviera 12-string.  Also a pedalboard with a Keeley Compressor and Keeley/Boss Blues Driver, a Maxon analog delay, Ernie Ball volume pedal, Boss Tremolo, Boss/Fender Reverb and a Boss tuner.

How do you deal with backline? Any problems with that?

Yes, we rent amps, keys and drums at every venue and the amp is such an integral part of the guitar sound, it’s tough having a different one every night.

You convincingly reproduce some vintage tones and effects onstage. What are some of your secrets?

Analog!  Lots of reverb when appropriate.  And using the outer 2 pickups on a 3 pickup guitar.  I’ve had to have both 6-strings rewound to do that.  It simulates the pickups on a Jaguar, which is what Carl played on many early Beach Boys records.

Who are your favorite guitarists at the moment?

I love all the usual suspects, Harrison/Hendrix/Page/Beck/Townshend but also Bert Jansch, Jonny Greenwood, Robbie McIntosh, Lindsay Buckingham, Larry Carlton, David Williams…I’ve been thinking a lot about Pat Metheny lately.

What do your duties as music director of the Beach Boys entail?

I transcribe all the vocal and instrumental parts and try to translate them for live performance by our band.  Mike Love and I tailor the setlist to the specifics of the show each night.  I review soundboard recordings most nights to make sure the mix and performance reflect what we’re intending to represent.  And I try not to step on too many toes in the process.

How do you see your role in the Beach Boys' legacy and history?

Just as a footnote. The heavy lifting was done by Brian and the other guys in the studio years ago. 

Obviously you take your
 role as a custodian of the Boys' music seriously - it comes through in 
your commitment to detail and accuracy, both as guitarist in the band and as musical director. Do you feel the weight of history in your work with the band?

I've heard my role described (independently by you and also Bruce Johnston) as "art restoration".  If I can take that analogy a bit further (without sounding too pompous), then consider the restoration of a great art work, say DaVinci's "The Last Supper".  Can anyone name the man who led the restoration from 1978-1999? The art was created by DaVinci. (Actually there is quite a controversy surrounding that restoration). I certainly take my responsibility very seriously, because I do consider the Beach Boys music to be art.  And I have always been a big fan.  But the bottom line is, Brian, Mike, Carl, Dennis, Al, Bruce and David created that art over the years.  My job today is to RECREATE it for the audience. Plus, I believe it's the records that will define the band's legend, not the live shows of the early 2000's.  I think most people coming to see a Beach Boys show remember the way the records sound, and want to hear those arrangements, rather than "our new interpretations of old classics".  I'm sure that when Mr. Pinin Brambilla Barcilon spent 21 years restoring "The Last Supper" he felt the weight of history; but I doubt that he ever thought his name would be remembered alongside DaVinci's. 

What has been your personal career highlight so far?

There’s been a lot of highlights since I’ve been in the band, it’s hard to pick one but recently we played at the Sydney Opera House with the Sydney Symphony…and they performed one of my arrangements.  I liked that!

How have you seen guitar culture change over the course of your career?

Seems like the era of the gunslinger is over…songs rarely have improvised guitar solos anymore (other than the jam bands).   Plus, I’m kind of removed from the culture; as a musical director I think less about guitar and more about vocals and arrangements.

What do you practice on your own time?

I’ve been playing a lot of classical when my nails are in decent shape, and I’ve been trying to improve my keyboard, ahem, skills for lack of a better word.  But when I get the chance I pull out my Les Paul and put on a Zeppelin record…

Thanks to Scott for taking the time to answer my questions.  Scott truly is a guitarist's guitarist, touring the world with a legendary band, but he is also, in a very real way, a thoughtful and serious curator of some classic rock and pop music.  See his work this year with the Beach Boys, on tour.

The banjo dilettante.

I spent a couple of hours in the studio yesterday wrestling with a five string banjo for a track that I'm recording with Alec Fraser.  It's Alec's banjo, left at his studio by some long-ago musician who never came back to pick it up.  I play a bit of banjo - I was even getting hired for sessions a few years back - because the standard open G tuning resembles standard tuning on the guitar - it's D G B D low to high, with a high G on the short fifth string, compared to D G D G B D on the guitar.  The only string that's really different is the first string, down a whole step.  So I quickly figured way back whenever I first picked up a banjo that I just needed to mentally move every note on that string up two frets.

Since we were basing our recording on Dock Boggs' version of the old-time country standard "Sugar Baby" (also known as "Red Rocking Chair"), I started with what is reported to be Dock's tuning on that song - "sawmill".  With a G on the short string, it's D G C D low to high.  So I think of it as the first four strings of the guitar in open G, with the second string notes adjusted to be down one fret.  If you play in D in that tuning, you get the flat seventh, the C, ringing out strongly, as well as the G, which is the fourth of the scale.  The G sounds especially strange if it's brought into the picking pattern over a D minor chord - "Sugar Baby" is essentially over one chord - D minor.  When the high G appears (courtesy of the short drone string) it creates a D minor eleventh chord.  This rather spooky chord contributes to the air of strangeness in Boggs' original 1927 recording.



Alec and I ended up trying a million permutations of the tune, changing the banjo tuning to D G A D (plus D on the short string) which better resembles the folkie guitar tuning "dadgad", which strangely enough is D A D G A D low to high.  I even switched to lap slide guitar, then standard guitar for a while, and ended up back at the banjo.

Though I enjoy playing the banjo (I like anything acoustic that loud, for starters) I realize that I am a guitar player playing a banjo, and that I have not seriously checked out the body of knowledge that is banjo culture.  To be honest, I don't know that I'll ever be a "real" banjo player - I think that I pretty much have to play one or the other, and I'm not ready to give up guitar yet! To complicate matters, there are four-string and five-string versions of the banjo.

The banjo has an incredible history, with origins in west African folk instruments like the akonting and banjar.  Enslaved Africans in North America fashioned their own instruments, and when the blackface minstrels imitated them in the 19th century, a banjo craze began.  Any survey of early recorded folk music in the American South would find the five-string and four-string banjo to be ubiquitous in both black and white musical culture.  In the early part of the 20th century, the banjo was a staple of the recording industry, with ragtime 4-string banjo cylinders by Vess Ossman and Harry Van Eps selling strongly.  It was also a standard part of the rhythm sections of dance bands, again both black and white.

When Eddie Lang burst on the scene with the Mound City Blue Blowers in 1925, he began to popularize the guitar to such an extent that banjos were basically gone from dance and jazz bands by the 1930s.  The development of the microphone helped, and once guitars were electrified in the middle of the 1930s, the banjo was well out of fashion.

But the banjo was not to be silent for long.  It had always had a strong presence in country music, and the offshoot style of bluegrass was to sustain the banjo most strongly in American music.  Bluegrass music is an oddly classical strain of country music, and the strong attack and short decay of the five-string banjo sound encourage high-speed complexities and cascading chromaticisms.  The four-string banjo has survived, in a more frozen form, in the "Dixieland" traditional New Orleans jazz band.

Early songsters and bluesmen like Little Hat Jones and Moses Mason used six-string banjos, tuned like guitars, on their 1920s recordings.  Hot Five and Hot Seven banjoist/guitarist Johnny St. Cyr used one on pioneering jazz recordings with Louis Armstrong (in a lower-rent version of the creepy trend of using dead people to advertise products, Johnny is pictured with [a non-Deering] six-string in a recent print ad for Deering's six-string banjos).  The six-string banjo is making a comeback with banjo dilettante guitarists like myself.  Here's a nice talk about and demonstration of a six-string.



I think I need one.  But would playing a six-string banjo further damage my already rock-bottom banjo cred? The banjo life is an all-encompassing one.  Respected Toronto jazz guitarist Tim Posgate knows a thing or two about making the leap from guitar to banjo.  Marc Ribot and Bill Frisell both sound great on banjo, though not very much like conventional banjo players - I suspect, like me, they spend 99% of their time on the guitar.

The ones that got away: Carter-era guitar listings.

A few weeks back guitarist Bernie LaBarge gave me a copy of the Toronto Star newspaper from December 9, 1980 - the day after John Lennon was murdered.  We are both huge Beatles fans and he was returning the favor after I gave him a 1968 Guitar Player magazine with Jimi Hendrix on the cover.

I probably read this Toronto Star issue back then, along with the Sun and the Globe and Time and Newsweek, since John Lennon's murder sent me on a quest to obtain any printed matter whatsoever about the event, and then about him and the Beatles.  My first research obsession - I was eleven.

Last night, thumbing through its yellowed pages, I found the 'Musical Instruments' column in the classified ads.  The once-mighty Star classified have shrunk to a few pages in the present day, supplanted by Craigslist and Kijiji.  But in 1980 if you wanted to sell a guitar, the Star classifieds was the place to go.  Let's have a look.

GIBSON guitar, ES335, 1969, $850. and other equipment, 822-****.

Current market price of a 1969 Gibson ES-335? $4500 to $9000 US, according to vintage-guitars.blogspot.com.  Reading these classifieds is a grim reminder of how ridiculous the market for certain American guitars has gotten.  As late as 1988 I found a 1959 stock Strat in Sault Ste. Marie for $1500 (I couldn't buy it).  

GUITAR - Gibson ES175, with P.A.F. Humbucking pickup, excellent condition, $725. 247-****.

Ouch.  A guitar I've always coveted, ever since I saw Tim Posgate's 175 back in high school.  The lister doesn't give a year of manufacture, making it hard to price the instrument today, but if the pickup is truly a PAF the guitar was probably made between 1957 and 1961, and the 2010 buyer is looking at a cool $5,100 according to this recent listing.  Of course, you can always buy a nice counterfeit for around the 1980 price.

MARTIN D-18, beautifully aged tone, $650. 444-****.

Ouch again.  I can almost hear the beautifully aged tone.  Wait, let's listen (for the full effect please use headphones, not your crappy laptop speakers):

More Martin tone porn and great picking by a Greek flatpicker:

Again, it's hard to guess at the year of manufacture of the listed D-18, which is all-important to vintage value.  A conservative estimate of the age of an "aged" guitar is ten years, I reckon.  1970 Martin D-18: $2000 at this listing, about the same as a new D-18.

Liberal estimate - how about 1942?  Expect to pay $12000. And the final cut:

1965 Fender Jazzmaster, rarity, immac., plus brand new case, $650 call Andy, 232-****

I want to call up Andy and ask him if he ever thinks about the one that got away, that guitar that he sold for a song thirty years ago, that he could have sold in 2010 for the price of a nice car. If he regrets it, even just to still have the guitar as an example of the golden era of a great American guitar company.  The fact that he devotes about a quarter of his text to the selling point of a "brand new case" is almost sad.

I've been thinking about the ones that got away - the guitars, I mean.  There's the toneful 1958 Gibson J-45 acoustic that I used for a year then blew the chance to purchase.  The oddball Tele Frankenstein with a seventies Strat neck, a Gibson humbucker, a 1968-dated Tele bridge pickup and a multi-wood double-cutaway body.  Even the Japanese-made 1983 Squier Strat that I bought new at Burlington Music (now a branch of Long and McQuade, the Canadian music store behemoth).  Anybody harboring regrets? Share your shame.