Ain't Bad for a Pink (26 page)

Playing slide takes the rhythm guitar and chord basics of a tune and allows your guitar to be a violin. Monophonic harmony note is the melody to what I’m playing in the chord.

I like the continuity you get in a slide performance. Listen to “Amazing Grace” on slide: there are so many harmonies, you can imagine a choir whereas played with frets it sounds a bit Scottish. You can only do it on certain songs. It either sounds OK or it doesn’t. Blind Willie Johnson uses one chord then a monophonic melody line, the chord droning, using the slide to produce the note. The man to listen to is Kokomo Arnold. He makes everyone else look as if they haven’t got out of bed.

Mississippi John Hurt uses the slide to fret the note, as if he’s using his finger. I do this and I use all the notes in between with slide and I also use my finger as slide.

A lot of people use slide as if they are playing an ordinary guitar whereas the real masters of it play melodies to anchor the whole thing. “Stormy Weather” and “Vagabond” have to be very precise whereas harsher songs such as “Black Ace” and “Dust My Broom” rely more on power, though there is still an anchoring of melody.

People often ask me to explain about slide guitar. A slide guitar is a gitfiddle: a combination of guitar and fiddle. It has no frets and is played flat or conventional with a slide or a bar resting on the strings. I have a 1947 Gibson Hawaiian guitar I traded for a copy of a National. Through one of those musical coincidences the very same week a 1938 Gibson Hawaiian guitar arrived through a friend, off the internet.

The weight of the slide is important. It should be heavy enough to create the required sound but not uncomfortable. Slides come in different weights and are usually made of metal. Original slides were fashioned from bottle necks or, more gruesomely, from hollow bones. I frequently demonstrate the purpose and method of using slide or bar by placing the guitar on my lap, producing a distinctive Hawaiian sound when the bar is used. Although it takes more effort, it is possible to get quarter tones and half tones by pressing the strings down.

Practice is one of the main factors in successful slide playing. The other is open tunings: strings are tuned so that a chord is achieved without fretting, or pressing any of the strings. With such a tuning other chords may be played by simply barring a fret or through the use of a slide.

Practice applies to all areas of course but aptitude must count too. There are some really good guitarists who can’t play slide. When I first started playing guitar in the Sixties and met famous slide guitarist Mississippi Fred McDowell, he handed me his guitar and when I tried to play it I realised it was out of tune according to my way of playing. I didn’t move the pegs but I started to distinguish which strings were out of tune and where they were out of tune. I was sorting out the mathematics. The first string was two frets lower, which in fact made it a D and going across the guitar I realised the next three strings were in tune – according to tradition. The fifth string was one note higher which made it a G. The sixth string was tuned on the same fret to the fifth string, which made it a D. So from the bass string (the thickest) it was D G D G B D. And that’s how I first learnt about open stringing for slide playing. So by sitting and working it out and using the mathematics from my piano playing, a new world opened to me. This was open G tuning and this was the occasion when Roosevelt “The Honeydripper” Sykes said, hearing me: “Ain’t bad for a pink!”

You’ve got an open chord; if you’re playing slide you’re already one finger down but you’ve got a completely open guitar to do the rhythm line, putting melody on top with slide. It’s easy to play rock ‘n’ roll or blues with this tuning. Most rock ‘n’ roll is based round the twelve bar: first recorded in the Twenties. So open tuning without slide is rock ‘n’ roll. A lot of Rolling Stones music is open tuning; Keith Richard plays a lot in open G including “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Honky Tonk Women”.

To continue the story. It didn’t take me long to realise there were certain things I couldn’t do in open G tuning. There were songs I couldn’t play in that tuning because the notes wouldn’t flow where the fingers could go. So I needed another set of tables: more mathematics. Because slide guitar demands open tuning it has to be tuned to a chord. This is why musicians have several instruments lined up, depending upon what songs they are doing. They can be tuned to D, G, E, C and so forth. They can also be tuned to minor chords.

To play slide guitar well, it’s got to be picked. Electric players don’t pick and a lot of people emulate them because that’s all they’ve heard. In reality, because you’ve only got a bar on the finger of your left hand, your right hand becomes more important. To demonstrate this I usually play the opening part of “Black Ace” to show the right hand picking and the left hand sliding.

Damping provides another control. It is used to suppress quirky notes and overtones you don’t want when playing slide. You just let your fingers fall across the strings. Some musicians use the palm of the hand. Some use the right hand but I find it easier to use the spare fingers of the left hand.

A solo guitarist is a one man band. To be convincing he has to hold the audience in the same way a play does: with skill, artistry, dexterity, surprise, timing, variety and a good story. Get one of these aspects wrong and the illusion goes, the atmosphere melts into drab reality.

Add one other person to your lone guitar doodling and things change. There’s an increase in pressure, a shared experience and real or imagined expectations. Opinions – not necessarily unwelcome, negative, or unproductive – make it a performance; a dialogue rather than a monologue; a restriction rather than the freedom to explore, make mistakes and be unselfconscious. You have an audience.

In the early days of my musical collaboration with Whitty, it often happened that we were each other’s audience and the audience watching us was not all that relevant. Our public performances were an extension of the private playing we did all the time in the shop.

At jam nights there’s a blurring of performers and audience, of performance and rehearsal and a cross-fertilization of musical ideas which can be exciting. In the Cheshire Cheese days the Skunk Band would encourage new bands to get up, often providing some musical scaffolding so they wouldn’t feel too exposed. Or jam night can be deadly: cliquey, self-indulgent and musically barren. Why don’t they come clean and say they just want to fiddle with the equipment – and drink?

But there is always a need for jam nights – otherwise they wouldn’t happen. I was involved in local jam nights at The Cheshire Cheese, The Leisure Club, The Limelight, The Royal and Square One. Jam nights in one particular venue have their moment, then there’s a decline and then they sprout up elsewhere. Andy Smith reckons the heyday is about eighteen months but some go on longer than that. Why do people pay a lot of money to see performers then talk all the way through? I can understand this happening when the entertainment is not the only agenda – like in a pub – or when it is completely informal – like a jam night – but when the entertainment is the point of being there why hijack the space? It’s disrespectful, unfair to the rest of the audience and a waste of money. It’s up to the performer to grab the attention of course, but they have to be given a chance.

Generally speaking audiences in folk clubs are more respectful; the audience has made a conscious decision to listen. In the Sixties and early Seventies, people would listen and wait until the end of a song before going to the bar. Hard to believe, I know. But many in the audience would be waiting for their turn to perform so this protocol was in everyone’s interest.

But even more formal situations like competitions are not immune. In 1989 I was competing with four bands in a big Birmingham pub at the Banks
’
Best of Blues Competition. The four bands were all doing rhythm and blues numbers. I stuck my neck out during my solo set. I had no problem competing with the bands but I drew a line at the in-house competition. “It’s difficult to compete with piped music. Unless you turn it off, I won’t continue and I doubt whether anyone else will be able to, either.” They turned it off, grudgingly. I don’t know if I sabotaged my chances. I didn’t care.

It was strange to find that I was the wrong audience on one occasion. Reputation is double-edged. Sometimes being well known in a district does you no good. People take you for granted; you don’t get the recognition. Familiarity breeds contempt they say, or indifference. Sometimes reputation can induce fear in others. Once I was sitting in The Barbridge after a meal and a band started to set up. “You won’t be sitting there, will you?” a girl said. “Only I’ve seen you perform at Square One and I’d be too nervous if you were sitting there watching me.” So that was me, a performer, being what someone imagined would be a critical audience: one she didn’t really want! So I left, of course. It was a sort of compliment when I think about it.

If you’re in a band the best venue is an intimate setting with 150-250 people in the audience and a space for dancing. If you’re partying on stage, they’ll join in. As a performer, you’re the first person to party; you can’t have a barrier because you having no barriers is the only way you can get the audience to let theirs down. It’s getting that first half dozen to dance that matters. In the old days you could rely on all the girls immediately going onto the floor with their handbags. I’ve seen some bizarre examples of people letting down their barriers. On one occasion there were couples waltzing at the same time that bikers were doing a
“
wanky dog” dance. A song like “Goodnight Irene” can get people up and waltzing even though it’s being performed by a very loud band.

Doing a festival is totally different: you’ve got to lure an audience into your particular gig by giving it ten on ten and keeping at it. The scale is too big at festivals – you don’t notice individuals. When I did the Labor Day Festival in Georgia I didn’t notice anyone in particular except for a mass of black people responding to my rendition of “Shine”. This might have been selective attention due to my anxiety about their reaction.

Many of the big names I’ve met have said they love to do the local pub, if they can. I see their point. If I’m playing in a small bar I can pick out the interesting characters and best-looking girls. You can make eye contact in a small venue but if you can’t see anybody, you can’t connect in this way. You just do your best and hope for the best.

There are tricky moments on stage: drunks shouting raucous stuff, people wanting to sing out of tune with the band, demands for impossible songs and de-briefed girls climbing on the stage weeping with passion. These were the good nights. It’s a risk you take if the barriers are down. There was no point anyone trying to sing at my microphone, anyway, because my voice is so loud, but you go along with it to a certain extent because it can be funny and it can be incorporated into the action.

But you always keep control.

At the right moment you thank the sideburned man with barcoded hair and ask the audience to applaud. His performance has turned him from a mean drunk to a happy, maudlin’ drunk but you don’t want his intoxicated meandering to detract from the band’s pace. I’ve always had enough stage presence to deal with anything and I knew I could throw people off stage if necessary. I’ve never been in any physical danger on stage partly, I think, because I have what it takes to be a good front man: you’ve had good practice if you also do solo work.

The front man has a complex role. He is the bridge between the audience and the band and its music, but also part of the performance and part of the organization. He has to take control of the space. He’s the one who communicates with the audience – a buffer between the band and the audience, holding things together, giving the band space to get organised or adjust the equipment.

In terms of the technology of playing music we invariably got the sound system right. After all it was my job! We rarely had any technical problems so I didn’t have to cover for that.

The front man is also a conductor: the band members will watch his body language in order to know what happens next. It’s professionally important to know when a song is going to end – some old blues songs have many and varied verses. Sometimes I would bring a song to a sudden end if it wasn’t going well with the audience. The easiest way to indicate this is to step back from the microphone. The front man is also a continuity man and compere. He represents the ethos of the band and he carries the band’s information, telling the audience anecdotes about the band members and about the songs, introducing solos, filling in gaps while people organise themselves for the next number, keeping the audience happy. Humour is the best ploy: some stand-up comedians began as musicians. The front man is the public face of the band so he has to do a good job.

Some front men, like Bruce Springsteen and John Lee Hooker use the power of sex appeal; others like Dylan are enigmatic and keep the audience in awe and guessing. But I keep going back to BB King. He certainly has the supreme power of good timing: the manipulation of sound and silence. He’s the best front man I’ve ever seen: a mountain of a man who plays with economy of effort and sings like a gospel singer. When he did “Put the Hammer Down” he started off talking, like in a cabaret act then went powerfully into the punch line: “PUT THE HAMMER DOWN!” It was dynamite.

Did you know a male spider can seduce a female spider by playing a tune on her web?

A front man can only be successful if he has power and as power is the best aphrodisiac all powerful front men are sexy: it comes with the territory. If you don’t have initial confidence you can’t get up there. Confidence is rewarded and this feeds back to increase charisma. “When he plays slide it makes me cream my knickers,” said one new bride at a concert I did.

In the Skunk Band things were a bit unusual: both Whitty and I were extrovert; the rest of the band just got on with it. Can you have two front men? Definitely. It worked with me and Whitty because we were such good friends. Our harmonies expressed our friendship.