Ain't Bad for a Pink (25 page)

I play melodies and bass lines along with the chord at the same time. The average electric guitarist plays block chords linked up with scales. I don’t do that. It has nothing for me. In the main they use pentatonic scale and they’ll get a riff out of that. It’s quite crude: a series of single notes, a series of chords. The electric guitarist doesn’t use the orchestral potential of the guitar as I do. Playing melody lines on top of base lines whilst playing chords, the right hand is liberated: any finger can pick any string at any time. You just pick the convenient melody. Conventionally, people are taught to allocate certain fingers to certain strings. I can create the melody out of a set of chords. Des will give me the chords and I will use that to place a melody over it. It’s collaborative. The music stands up without vocals or other instruments. Everything you can play for a melody is a ‘safe’ note.

Some music does indeed demand a high level of technical flair, good timing and manual dexterity. I have a few numbers by Little Feat in my repertoire: I would describe their music as American swamp rock. It has a laid back feel: it still rocks but it’s kind of lazy. “Willin’” is a modern song I used to sing with Whitty. It’s not in strict tempo so needs sensitive timing. “Roll ‘Em Easy” – also by Little Feat – requires a sense of containment and release. It’s a love song I dedicate to every woman I ever loved and to the man who wrote it: Lowell T. George, a member of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention who founded Little Feat. He died in 1979. You have to get the balance right: containing the passion within the restraint of tenderness. I have gone for emotional focus over the variety of sound chosen by Little Feat. These songs are in my repertoire for two good reasons. They remind me of singing in harmony with Whitty, whose extremely good voice did justice to the melodies and they are also close to the sentiment and style of the Skunk Band. Creating a fusion of California rock, folk, rockabilly, blues, country, boogie, funk and jazz, Little Feat had the same eclectic approach to music as we did.

Speaking of technical challenges, I was impressed by The Grateful Dead song “Friend Of The Devil” which I heard at the Bickershaw Festival in Yorkshire in 1972. Jerry Garcia wrote the music and Robert Hunter wrote the lyrics. It has a folkie flavour. The lyrics are at variance with the melodic music and I liked the harmony guitar work which made me wonder if I could do the two guitar parts on one guitar. I also noticed it has the same tuning as “Bourgeois Town”. “Friend Of The Devil” is an interesting challenge on two counts: you have to tune two strings down then deal with the problem that the lyrics are going in a different direction to the guitar, which is on the run. It’s like rubbing the stomach whilst patting the head. Incidentally, it’s hard to play on a twelve string. I have used this number when tutoring up and coming musicians.

As a solo performer, whatever your level of expertise you have to exploit everything available to you with discrimination. Early blues singers made instruments with whatever was to hand. Jug bands were popular in the Twenties and Thirties, playing primitive party music on household articles such as washboards, jugs and tea chests. Some people even added mouthpieces to the jugs.

Fortunately I haven’t had to recycle cigar boxes and bits of wire to serve my musical needs! I have choices. For example, my 1936 Gibson Blues King has a warm resonant depth, a slur, making it suitable for blues playing. If I want something precise and crisp like a piano for playing ragtime numbers then I use my 1923 Martin. For a loud blues sound I have a 1932 National style 0. My 1936 National Tricone, on the other hand, has a wonderful mellow tone suited to a jazz treatment or a Hawaiian sound.

There’s a mystique surrounding the twelve string guitar. People think it’s twice as difficult to play as the conventional guitar. This is too simplistic. It isn’t twice as difficult – it’s just the same as playing six string because each string is played in a pair. Not a great many people use the twelve string guitar but it has more overtones, more power than the conventional guitar. You’ve got notes you couldn’t play on a six string: I can get notes that are an octave higher on a twelve string. The facility’s there when you need it. But you have to use discrimination. There are times when I would choose a twelve string and times when I wouldn’t – for the same song. It’s a question of mood. You wouldn’t ever use a twelve string with certain songs, though. It detracts from melodic tunes like “I’m Satisfied”- fluffs it up and makes it too cluttered. Few people use the twelve string on slide; it has its limitations, though if you listen to Leadbelly and Blind Willie McTell they adapt the instrument to suit what they’re doing dramatically. Because the strings are in pairs and each of the paired strings is an octave apart (except for the first pair which is in unison) it’s a lot easier to make a mistake when using a twelve string. Manual dexterity is required if you’re picking out one string or if you’re playing melodic slide. When using an electric Dobro I do use the strings separately for dramatic effect or vibrato effects. For example in “Stormy Weather” it gives accent and subtlety.

Demystifying the instrument with discrimination and skill, you can then exploit its capacity for greater volume, depth and resonance to advantage.

Many soloists include a range of instruments for interest and texture. A mandolin adds colour and variety to a set. It is an eight-stringed monophonic melodic instrument but I tend to like it as a rhythm instrument – like Des plays it. You need little fingers to play a mandolin but in US bluegrass music it’s usually the biggest bloke who plays it – generally for top harmonies – and it looks comical.

Lap guitars are a curiosity: a keyboard rather than a guitar and visual as opposed to tactile. My view is that a singer should sing out to the audience, not down to a guitar but there’s no problem if the lap guitarist doesn’t sing.

But having musical wisdom and the appropriate instrument is only the beginning.

Performing alone you need power and ways to conserve energy. There’s no-one to help you and it’s no use having an inoffensive pop voice: you need immediate impact. You need to fill the room with sound. Because solo performance is so demanding and arduous it’s important to be as economical with effort as possible. You have to go back to basic chords and getting melodies within chord shapes. If a musician was going to spend long periods on street corners then he needed strategies for maximising sound and impact. As Leadbelly said, “I never change chords; I just walk to the next one.” If there was an easier way of producing the same sound he would take it; if he could use the guitar as a percussion instrument in order to add rhythmic texture, he would; if he could add variety by using his voice in different ways: moaning, humming, answering back to his guitar, spoken asides to the audience, he did. At the end of the day the impact of his performance would determine whether people threw coins in his hat, or bought him drinks in the juke joint.

Take, for example, Blind Willie McTell from Atlanta who played a twelve string guitar. I really rate some of his Last Session recordings. Among his numbers in my repertoire are “The Dying Crapshooter’s Blues” and “Beedle Um Bum”. I am also interested in his song “Reckless Disposition”: a melodic and virile song full of relentless movement with interesting tuning – the same tuning as I use for “Friend Of The Devil” – a double drop D. His technique was very economical and was later taken up by some of the folkies. To understand what he did I needed another set of mathematics. For a start his bass note is lower than on my guitar. The natural thing to do is to take it down a note to make it deeper. You can get the note but not the melody line. So you take the first string down to D as well; then I’ve got my D chord with two fingers, my A chord with one finger – almost in an open tuning again – and my G chord is two fingers again. As well as getting economical chords finger-wise, bugger me I’ve got some spare fingers! What to do with them: well you do melody lines with spare digits. And just see how little the left hand is doing! You get economy of effort plus a different sound – ideal for someone standing on a street corner hoping to draw the punters. I repeat: why chase chords when you can walk to the next one?

With maximum skill and minimum effort the musician can add surprise. Voice and instrument can be varied and one technique is to have the vocals going faster than the instrument. Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro’ Blues” has vocals and guitar moving at different paces, the increasing pace creating tension. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Matchbox Blues” is another example. In parts of this the guitar is going faster than the voice and at a different rhythm giving an exhilarating sense of movement. His “One Dime Blues” has the guitar rhythms doing a little jig when the subject is hot. In Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues” the guitar has life of its own irrespective of the voice. The same can be said for “Crossroads Blues”: the guitar rhythms are not the same as the singing rhythms. The guitar is not just an accompaniment: it’s a separate voice.

Now these were all good musicians and would know what they were doing so it would be intentional. It’s surprising how few musicians have picked up on it. This dislocation of voice and guitar is there as musical punctuation: the musical equivalent of an exclamation mark, say, to add interest and definition. Another thing I’ve noticed is that there are very few musicians who know the value of the dramatic pause. This can maximise the effect of what is to come, creating a moment of tension and expectation, often followed by a musical surprise. A note is picked and it hovers, suspended, without the audience knowing what will happen next.

In a band the importance of a good, intuitive drummer cannot be over-stressed in this connection either. My drummer Melvyn could read my body language – specifically my elbows – and know how to respond: when to wait, when to act. One of the few beat-based electronic exponents of the blues, BB King, certainly knows how to introduce drama. He’s dynamite! A great exponent of contrast. There’s a musical pause – you can hear a pin drop – then a wall of sound. It adds shape; it adds tension; it adds climax and resolution. It’s the same in a joke or in a story; you have to get the pace right; you have to time the punchline or the effect is lost.

I’m aware that some guitar playing is deceptively simple. The untutored eye follows the left hand and discerns, for example, that there are just three chords to a particular song. But look what the right hand is doing: it’s picking a tune, creating harmonies and this is how a song can be rendered more interesting, more layered: by picking rather than strumming. I can demonstrate this with a Little Feat number. If I strum the song as they do and then pick it as I do – the result is strikingly more complex.

Another way to add an element of surprise is to play a song in a different key. This can completely change the whole atmosphere of a song: from major to minor as Ella Fitzgerald sings. Some of the songs I do won’t go into any other key: because I’m playing melody lines, only a certain chord shape will allow me to have those melody lines and bass lines. You can only really travel around that chord to get those melody and bass lines. Each different chord has its own atmosphere. A lot of the songs I do are in a different key from the original so I am creating a different feel from the original – something that suits me and my style of playing.

Of course, the modern electric guitarist has many ways to create variety and drama but I can’t help but feel that some of these are cheap tricks having little to do with virtuosity – though effective and popular. One of the ways is to use distortion. Classic lead guitar solos are always distorted because musically speaking, people got louder and louder using the valve amp to saturation point to sustain notes longer. In the early days amps didn’t have distortion. Distortion was taken further by electronics so that modern amplifiers do have it. Imagine someone playing saxophone: if there’s a prolonged note in a melody and it’s not a quiet passage then the player would play the sax louder and like a harmonica, it’s on the edge of distortion. It’ll only sustain as long as the breath will hold. With the electric guitar you can take a note to the edge of distortion and hold it there indefinitely. With a clean note there is instant decay; with a distorted note there is much slower decay. Playing a distorted guitar covers all sins, making it easy for anyone to get away with approximation.

For immediate impact, though, the solo blues musician can add a whole new dimension through slide: an extra tool that enables the guitarist to get a vast array of notes in a short space. You can play slide with any guitar as long as it is open-tuned. Slide had very basic origins. There is a transcript described as “old-fashioned Southern vernacular speech” in which Mississippi Fred McDowell, who slid a bottle neck on his finger, describes the early use of the slide:

An my type of blue? I play it with a bottleneck? I first got this style from a beef bone, y’understan’ me. Rib wha’ come out of a steak? My uncle, when I was a small boy in the country. He ground this bone down, and filed it with a file, and put “t” on his little fi[ae]nger. But I play’t on my ri[ae]ng finger, y’understan’? and nis a-dis here bottleneck sound better’n the bone, cause you get more clar- clear sound outa it, [plays a chord]
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Slide is the nearest thing to the human voice. The advantage of the monophonic instrument is that you can use it to emulate the human voice and you haven’t got the restrictions of frets. Voice and slide sound converge and diverge. There’s an explosion of notes in a short space but you can only hear the amalgamation. Violins and slide whistles and trombones also have this quality. How many notes are there as the slide slides down with no fret? A lot of notes. But the ear doesn’t discern them separately unless you have a very special gift. When you do it in slow motion it is possible to hear the separate notes. Whereas frets limit you to half tones, this limit goes with slide. You can use the fingers as a slide but this still separates the notes: nothing gets rid of frets like slide does. Ry Cooder says of slide: “When nothing but the bar or knife touches the string the guitar tends to ring more; it’s released and open.” I agree.
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