For Guitarists Only

Like many of my contemporary guitarists, I like to keep informed about electric guitar, amplification and effect pedals. My inquiries usually lead me to YouTube, where countless guitarists and gear enthusiasts have started their own “channels” while often adopting irritating and phony broadcast personas that they seem to think they need to be bona fide cool. Think Steve Martin as a Vegas show host here. 

Me? I’m pretty old school when it comes to guitar tone. I have to have a great clean sound, a tone with a little bit of breakup, and a singing overdrive. I use compression, delay, overdrive and reverb as my key elements. 

So I will check out video demos of different pedals and electric guitar effects to get a sense of what the products sound like. Over time, I have begun to get a sense of which videos are going to instantly fail. Here are the warning signs of bad product videos:

1. When “Here is my clean tone” sounds like a can of bees before demoing a low gain overdrive pedal. 
2. When there are more tattoos than visible skin on the player.
3. Flying V Gibson style guitar or pointy headstock instrument.
4. Drop C open tuning through a decimated distortion driven amp, chugging incessantly.
5. When the host talks in condescending tones and can barely play a bar chord. 
6. “hair down to his knees”, skull images, rings, nose rings, neck tattoos and poetry tattoos written on faces. 

OK. I generalize with a sense of humor. Some of these cats can shred.

Now, to be fair there are a number of great guitar reviewers out there, and I greatly appreciate their efforts to inform us intelligently about new guitar products. And I have nothing against great overdriven sounds, but when demoing a chorus, compressor or delay, I would like to hear things begin with a clean guitar sound, so I can actually hear what the effects are doing to a clean guitar signal. Yes, I know heavy overdrive makes you sound big and badass, dangerous and some sort of cool, but not every guitarist is into death metal and grunge. Some of us, dare I say, still actually play music where chord changes are important, lol. You can’t tell what the pedals do when they are buried in metal distortion. 

You know, I think part of my dismay is based on the era I came from. Playing a slightly overdriven guitar in a bluesy style was once a rarity. Now, everybody can shred pentatonic blues, even while sipping on Nyquil cocktails. I used to see my guitar playing as special and something that set me apart. Now, I am just another nobody in a huge sea of guitarists who have learned to do what used to make me feel special. 

I find this drop C tuning, playing one finger bar chords up and down the neck through a highly distorted amplifier simply ugly. Aesthetically ugly and unpleasant. 

And it is certainly fair to label me a crotchety old man, screaming at demonic players to get off my lawn, lol. Call me Mr. Old School. I’m fine with that. Who says I have to change to “keep up with the trends”? What is wrong with perfecting style and tone that is aesthetically and harmonically pleasing? I just wish we could kill the heavy distortion ALL the time. It has its place at the right time and that is not ALL the time. 

The internet has become the great equalizer, where the best and worst exist side by side. I guess that is the cost of freedom…

The Making Of Restless Traveler

This record took a very long time to complete. I had set a high bar with my Roswell Road record. I knew I couldn’t do another one like it. That collection of songs was all about my years in the South and my love for the place. I’d gotten it out of my system, but I didn’t feel done with the Americana style of music, which was part country, part folk and part just rootsy songs that had no business on the current Top 40 charts. That music was more like the history of American song-the kind of songs any singer with a guitar could perform. It would be as much at home with my parents and grandparents as with the generations growing up now. 

I wanted to write songs that sounded like they had always existed in some way-songs that had structures of granite, that were bulletproof and eternal sounding. I wanted them to be folksy and far from pop or techno, even though I did use some synths and a Roland 808 drum machine on some of them. I knew that folks who expected blues and rock from me might not get what I was doing, but I knew I had to make this record on my own terms.

The record starts out with “On The Long Road Home”, which is a meditation of sorts about trying to make sense of the long arc of my own life. It is also a look into what people my age start to think about after being alive so many years. All the age old questions surface. How did I get here? Why was I born? What happens next? How does one make sense of this string of experiences? Confronting my own mortality-that was a part of it.

And that led naturally into “Waiting To Fly”. I’ve always taken life as being an immense gift, but along the way, I’ve always had to face the nasty fact that the selfishness and conniving of some human beings has made existence less than the glorious gift it should be. When I see the hatred and divisiveness of modern politics, it makes me so discouraged about the fate of humanity. This song was written when I had had more of such greed and selfishness than I could stand. I don’t think Earth is our final destination, but I’m “waiting to see”. I think death is the next great adventure. We are spiritual beings. We continue to exist after our bodies are cast aside. Such a song has very little to do with party mentality music, even if I do hope that tonight’s gonna be a good night.

Songs started coming to me around the time I was 15. I had no agenda. The only reason I wrote them was so I could record them and listen to them. My expanding record collection in the 60’s contained songs that were miles above what I was writing at first, but I knew there was a shape and a purpose to those old great songs and I was determined to dive in and learn how to write them. It was a long evolved process and it still goes on. There is no perfect formula or recipe. Each song is its own universe-its own thing. You may write a monster hit today and not have a clue how to write the next song tomorrow. 

I started writing in the 60’s and continued writing in the 70’s and beyond. Most of my work was still developmental, but it did keep getting better somehow. “Our Hometown” was basically written in 1984 after spending some time in a small Michigan town. I did a 4 track demo of it and it sat around a long time. It was an odd structure and I didn’t know how to arrange it, but I finally came upon the answer and got the final recording. It is a song about struggling against overwhelming odds but keeping faith, determined to get through the worst. 

I didn’t write the next song on the record. It was written by my brilliant friend Tom Lee. It is called “Thing ‘Bout Love” and it is about how people fall for appearances and go through the motions without ever really getting to the bottom of what love really is. It is deep and it is an amazing piece of songwriting.I thank Tom from the bottom of my heart for allowing me to include it on this record.

“Jesus In The Rain” is about how spiritual truth can sometimes not be revealed as expected. This is totally open to interpretation. I’m still experiencing it in different ways.

When I returned to Michigan in 1969, I came back armed with great new guitar skills. I was excited to return.  I thought it would be easy to get into a new band and continue what I’d done in Atlanta. That didn’t happen. Next, I experienced a whirlwind of changes that lasted for years. Rootless and lacking fundamental relationships that most others developed going through school, I found myself feeling like an outsider in many ways. My musical path wandered. I ended up in a failed marriage, failed bands with failed friendships. But I survived. “Michigan” was originally slated for the Roswell Road project, but I decided to not include it at that time. 

I actually did work on the assembly line at Hydramatic in Willow Run. The line, “I’m not cut out for your assembly lines” was certainly true. For me, it was a wretched way to spend ones working life. I quit after six weeks.

“La Mirada” is focused on my early youth living with my family in California and is a reflection on how lives unfold over time-how we lose the ones we love. I was very fortunate to live in Southern California before every square inch of real estate was developed to the max. There used to be huge orange groves behind the homes of both of my grandparents. We could drive down Pacific Coast Highway and see thousands of acres of undeveloped land. Freeways moved easy. It was the perfect time to be in SoCal. 

“Magnolia Wind” picks up the old theme about missing the South, as well as the greater theme of feeling out of place and needing a place where I felt like I belonged. Many of these songs have that theme of needing a sense of belonging. I think my early life, where I continually moved from place to place, left me feeling like I was without any stable roots somehow. The restless traveler.

And that theme  continues with “A Place Where I Belong” and with “Restless Traveler”. Both are what I’d call Americana. Again, I tried to write songs that sounded like they had no particular place or time. Like they had been around forever. My early life was all about moving. Born in California, I was soon in Michigan, then Texas, back to California, down to Atlanta, Georgia and finally settling permanently in Michigan. Always feeling like an outsider looking in on lives and bonds forged  when I was not there. 

All I ever wanted was to be embraced and told that I belonged. The only time that ever happened was in a little band in Atlanta, where I suddenly had an important role for a while. Then I moved back to the obscurity of Michigan, where I have been since 1969. And now it is time to let all this baggage go.

My friend Jericho worked up here in Michigan, but when he finally retired, he had plans to return to Birmingham, Alabama. When I read about his desires to return to the cradle of the South, it moved me. I heard “Detroit To Birmingham” in my mind and it resonated deeply with me. I understood the lure of wanting to return to my roots, and I sat down and the whole song poured out of me. 

Finally, I lost both of my parents. They had left me in Michigan in 1975 when my dad was working as a liaison between GM and the Mexican government. When he retired at 60, he didn’t come back to Michigan. Instead, he and mom settled 2500 miles away in Palm Desert. When they started to feel the frailty of old age, where they might need their kids, they came back to Michigan for their final years. Dad passed in 2010 and mom passed five years later. Suddenly I was faced with the prospect of being an orphan. I wrote “Don’t The Wind Blow Lonesome Tonight” about that mindset and feeling. 

“When We’re Running Out Of Time” is an attempt to try and put some perspective over my life’s journey. We all are given this beautiful gift of life. It is difficult to encapsulate what it means or what it feels like. It is simply too large to capture in one song or in one synopsis. And no two people experience it the same, so what we may take with us is different from person to person. 

I can only conclude that fate somehow set me slightly apart from feeling a part of something and feeling whole and contented so that these songs might emerge from a restless traveler-one still trying to wrap his head around the enormity of life, hoping to get at least a glimpse of what this journey might mean. Try and grasp it all and it flows through your fingers like beach sand, but every grain still tells a partial story.