Over the course of our Steel theme, we have heard an awful lot of music played instruments which are variants of the guitar. This is not surprising, but there are other instruments which also fit. To most minds, the harp is probably not one of them. The harp, like the classical guitar, is usually played with nylon strings. Of course, nylon was only invented in 1935, but the mellow sound we think of for harp music was played instruments strung with gut strings before that. Steel strings are far more unusual in harp music. In fact, Mary MacMaster of the Scottish folk duo Sileas is the player I know of who plays a steel stringed harp. What difference does it make? I could try to explain, but Sileas gives the best possible explanation through their music. That’s because the other member of the group, Patsy Seddon, plays the more typical nylon strung harp. The Pipers is a tune that presents the contrast in the two sounds to great effect.
Seddon and MacMaster first came together in a group called Sprangeen, which stayed together for two years, and made their only album in 1984. By the following year, that group was done, and MacMaster and Seddon had become the duo Sileas. They would eventually be inducted into the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame, despite having only made four albums together as a duo. That’s because their other larger group, The Poozies, has proved to be far more stable than Sprangeen, accounting for another seven albums. Seddon and MacMaster are both also fine traditional singers in both English and Scots Gaelic. At least back when I first saw them in 1986, they were also wonderful live performers.
purchase [ Leo Kotke 6 & 12 String Guitar ] The only 12-string guitars I have ever seen (or played) were steel stringed. Probably something about the tension/configuration. The one I owned had serious bridge problems - 12 strings of metal pulling against a wooden bridge had bowed the whole thing into contortions, making it almost impossible to fret/play. It was back about the time I picked up this instrument that I was listening to Gordon Lightfoot, maybe a bit of Simon and Garfunkle, John Fahey and Leo Kotke. There is a full-ness to the sound of a 12-string that - even with today's options of pedal effects and studio editing - is tough to replicate. The instrument rings like nothing else. (But, for some reason, brings to mind Doublemint gum - double the sound, double the effort) The richer sound comes about from the configuration of pairs of strings that are an octave apart: you're hitting an A, but there are two of them and they are an octave apart (one a higher/lower sound than the other). As a player, (if you are right handed) your left finger needs to depress both strings together and your right hand needs to figure out if you want to hit the higher or lower sound first. Maybe not quite as complex as a pedal steel style, but presenting more complexity than the standard 6-string version. I came across Kotke's 1969 <6 and 12 String Guitar> album about the same time I found Lightfoot's <Sit Down Young Stranger>. They are both from about the same year (69/70). Lightfoot struck me as more romantic. Kotke as the more accomplished guitar player. (Check out his version of Bach's <Jesu>, which I still perform in my own variation.)
a selection of other Kotke performances:
(above 6 strings, but it's Allman Brothers!! Little Martha)
(above <8 Miles High>one of his signature tunes - but as he says :I haven't done this in a long time. However, it is fairly recent - showing that he still does his thing)
listen to the 12 strings on this version of Deep River Blues.
What would Lynryd Skynyrd have sounded like if it was fronted by a kid from Jersey named Springsteen? Check out “He’s Guilty” by Steel Mill, a band from 1969-70 featuring Bruce Springsteen on vocals and guitar, future E Street Band members Danny Federici on keyboards and Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez on drums, and “Little” Vinny Roslin on bass.
Bruce’s first band was The Castiles. When that band broke up, he joined a hard rock band called Earth, then formed Child, which then became Steel Mill, when another band had already registered as Child. As Springsteen described Steel Mill in his excellent autobiography Born To Run:
It was blue-collar, heavy music with loud guitars and a Southern-influenced rock sound. If you mixed it up with a little prog and all original songs, you had Steel Mill . . . you know, STEEL MILL . . .like LED ZEPPELIN… elemental-metal-based, bare-chested, primal rock.
After becoming a big deal in Jersey, and somewhat surprisingly, in Richmond, Virginia, the band decided it needed to head to San Francisco and teach the hippies about rock n’ roll. Auditioning at the Matrix (the club co-founded by Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane) they got a gig opening for Boz Scaggs, Elvin Bishop and Charlie Musselwhite. Steel Mill was apparently good enough that a critic from the San Francisco Examiner wrote, “Never have I been so surprised by completely unknown talent.” Shades of Jon Landau’s famous quote from a few years later, "I saw rock and roll's future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” You can hear a bootleg of one of the Matrix shows here.
Steel Mill got to play a few shows at the legendary Fillmore (where Bruce heard future band mate Nils Lofgren’s band Grin perform), and were well enough received that Bill Graham offered to record demos, one of which was “The Judge Song.” But nothing happened. Instead, they returned to New Jersey, where they could make a living.
Over the next few years, Steel Mill went through personnel changes (including a period with Steve van Zandt on bass). Springsteen explored different musical styles in bands named Dr. Zoom & the Sonic Boom (early- to mid-1971), the Sundance Blues Band (mid-1971), and the Bruce Springsteen Band (mid-1971 to mid-1972), before getting signed to Columbia Records and, ultimately forming the E Street Band.
“He’s Guilty” was never officially released until last year’s Chapter and Verse, the companion musical collection to the autobiography. The official version is edited down a little from the original, which can be found on some bootlegs, but I couldn’t find one online to post.
In 1927, the invention of the electric guitar was still many years away. This was a problem for players who wanted to use guitars in the dance music of the day. The guitar was a relatively quiet instrument, but you needed volume to play lead lines in the dance bands of the day. The invention of the National Steel Guitar was the first solution to that problem. The steel body and the resonator cones inside it gave it the volume needed to stand above the musical fray. The inventors of the instrument were thinking that white dance band musicians would be their main customers, and they also thought they might sell some in Hawaii. What they did not expect was that black blues musicians would also be great customers. Blues in those days was largely played solo or in very small groups. What the National Steel Guitar Company did not realize was that many of these artists played in juke joints. These were noisy places where the music had to cut through loud conversation and get people to dance. Today, the National Steel is generally thought of as a blues instrument. That has a lot to do with the work of early players such as Bukka White and the Reverend Gary Davis. Colin James features the sound of the National Steel in his song of that name, which is also a fine tribute to the power of the instrument.
The invention of the dobro followed in 1928, and was meant to address some of the same problems. But, as you can see, only part of the body of a dobro is steel. The dobro also has only one resonator cone where the National Steel has three. The result is an instrument that still stands out in a crowd, but has a mellower sound than the National Steel. This makes the instrument more versatile. Today, the dobro is mainly found in bluegrass and country music, but Abbie Gardner shows off the bluesy and soulful aspects of the instrument. Gardner would later record this song with her group Red Molly, and that version is well worth seeking out. But this solo version highlights the sound of the dobro better.
purchase [Sit Down Young Stranger] Steel strings on a guitar take a lot out of you: they're harder to depress and they end up putting calluses on the tips of your fingers. You need to keep at it on a daily basis. For this reason, I more or less gave up playing steel string guitars a few years back. It may be because I can't afford a decent guitar (better quality = less effort), but it may also be on account of all that metal - it cuts into your fingers something bad. I'm now a nylon man - with a lot of respect for thems that bend the steel around. It looks like the only other time SMM has mentioned Gordon Lightfoot is back in 2008. Away back in 2008 Paul -no longer an active SMM contributor- included Lightfoot in a post about a <History> theme. Myself? Gordon Lightfoot's 1970 "Sit Down Young Stranger" was a favorite. No ... more: a starting point for a budding guitar player. Someone to emulate. As I look back over the song list from the album after many years away, there isn't one that doesn’t bring back memories - a most powerful album (and his best-selling one). He's got Ry Cooder, John Sebastian, Van Dyke Parks and Randy Newman with him on the album. The Wiki says that maybe Kris Kristofferson also contributed. Pretty impressive. I guess (among all the good ones) it is the title song, Sit Down Young Stranger, that rings best: the steel strings are obvious here. The story is poignant. The quality of the vocals fits Lightfoot's folk-rock style. I read somewhere that Dylan thought this was Lightfoot's best - there are certainly a number of parallels: guitar style, vocal style and - to some extent, the lyrical/poetic message.
But I have chosen a different Lightfoot song to more closely match our theme and it's from a different album - his 1966 "Lightfoot!". If you look closely at the "Steel Rails" clip, you'll see that he has picks on his fingers - perhaps the true sign of a steel string player - if you want to make the strings ring, you kind of have to add some additional steel. Oh, and he's doing a variation of the "Travis" pick I mentioned earlier. The steel rails, as per the ticket the girl sends, are the railroad tracks - made of steel. A bit thicker than the strings on his guitar, but made of the same material, capable of singing their own song.
To pinpoint one song in the vast pantheon that Guided By Voices has
written and recorded over 30 years is a little like that proverbial needle that
got lost in the haystack.
“Lips of Steel” comes from their second album, 1987’s Sandbox,
and stands as the perfect introduction to GBV’s unique, and now singularly
owned style and sound. At 1:33 playing time, the song is: lo-fi, guitar-driven,
amped up and hook-laden power pop, recorded through a tape player and sounding
as if being played at the world’s greatest underwater stadium, by an oddly
unique version of every great arena-rock band you've ever fist pumped along to, who just happened
to have bought their instruments at the toy store on their way to a Dungeon’s
and Dragons tournament being held in the dingy backroom of a great ABC store. Beer
soaked, impossible to truly define, led by a former middle school teacher,
covering a vast and vastly odd exhibition of acid-trip, tongue-tied, four-eyed
images and ideas, GBV is a puzzle in a maze in a cork-screw universe of every
teenage boy’s tennis-racket guitar and hairbrush microphone bedroom fantasy
concert. To see them live is to be a convert; to introduce them to the
unbaptized makes one a beneficent saint.
Guided By Voices? 25 albums, 39 singles and EPs, 7 box
sets. 2 books. 2,000 plus songs. A lovingly devoted following of numbers-obsessed statisticians/fans (GBVDB.com). GBV occupies a universe of its own unique universe. Their just released August by Cake is lead singer Robert
Pollard’s 100th studio album and the band’s first double album. Prolific
is a failure of semantics. Not everything is great, nor could it be with this
much material. But when GBV hits the mark, it’s electric. If you’ve never
listened to GBV, start anywhere, work your way through in any order. You’ll
find a least a few ear-worm favorites; you’ll recognize not a few rock clichés redone
to perfection; you’ll discover a universe of music you never knew could
happen. For the uninitiated, “Lips of Steel” is a great starting point. Happy
traveling.
"Pity them who see him suffer, Pity poor old Steeleye Span; John Bowlin's deeds they will be remembered; Bowlin's deeds at Horkstow Grange"
So goes the lyric of the broadsheet ballad, 'Horkstow Grange' made more famous by english composer Percy Grainger, and, irrespective of what or who it applies to, from this comes the name of the UK's 2nd best known folk-rock originators. I think many will be aware of venerable stalwarts, Fairport Convention, if only through these posts, but almost always held in the same breath, if not regard were/are Steeleye Span.
Indeed they have a shared history, the one seguing from the other, with occasional tendrils propagating back and forth, as they derive from the same founding member, one Ashley Hutchings.
Having pulled Fairport together in 1967, inventing a british folk-rock soon thereafter with 'Liege and Lief', he promptly left. The folk-rock of Fairport wasn't pure enough. Too much rock. This didn't mean a return to unaccompanied ploughboys singing to sparse instrumentation, or not entirely. Hutchings still wanted electricity, just a greater otherwise traditional purity. So he hooked up initially with two existing singer partnerships, Tim Rice and Maddy Prior, and Gay and Terry Woods. This was 1969 and it was Steeleye Span.This short-lived line-up produced but one album, before the Woods departed, being replaced by Martin Carthy, iconic even then, erstwhile duo partner with Fairport's Dave Swarbrick. Fiddle player Peter Knight was drafted in alongside, this, my favourite version lasting all of 2 albums, including the magisterial 'Please To See The King.'
As seemed normal with bands at that time, change came as routine, Carthy and Hutchings both then leaving, Hutchings moving on to a varied career of founding further bands, usually with 'Albion' in their name. Carthy returned to the folk clubs and an ever enhancing reputation, solo and with his wife and their family. Steeleye, like Fairport ahead of them, on the loss of their founding father, decided to make a go of it, going from strength to strength. recruiting Bob Johnson on guitar and Rick Kemp on bass. This line up even produced a UK (christmas) hit single in 'Gaudete.' With robust management, they also attracted guest musicians such as David Bowie and comedian Peter Sellars, the latter on ukulele. Not bad for a folk band. (Actually it was.....) They even added a drummer by their 6th recording, hitherto having been avowedly against, give or take the occasional guest right back on their initial outing.
Along the way they endeavoured a wider appeal, invoking 'Wombles' producer, Mike Batt, giving them a 2nd hit, 'All Around My Hat', so one more than "rivals" Fairport. Not their finest moment, perhaps, in terms of authenticity, but tell that to their bankers. Knight and Johnson, leaving not so long after, left the rest in a pickle, Martin Carthy rejoining in order to fulfil contractual obligations, along with accordion maestro, John Kirkpatrick. This was destined not to last, and the band more or less fell into disarray, even when Knight and Johnson returned. Hart, then Nigel Pegrum, the drummer left, with Kemp hors de combat due to a shoulder injury. Confused?
New musicians joined, but not until their 25th reunion gig was the die cast for a more solid future. Now with Tim Harries on bass and Liam Genockey on drums, Gay Wood rejoined, the band temporarily again having 2 female leads. But not for long, as Prior, the focus for so long, promptly left. Surely this was the end, but the band limped on. Since then Woods has left again, Kemp has rejoined, left and joined again, Johnson has retired hurt, being replaced by Ken Nicol, himself then leaving after a few years. Stalwart Peter Knight finally left, in, now, 2013, yet still the band plays on, now a core of Prior, Kemp, Genockey and whoever else is currently depping. With 22 past and present members, over 23 albums it is hard to keep up. Yet somehow there remains a signature sound, usually centred around muscular guitar chords, soaring fiddle and the unmistakeable vocal of Ms Prior.
Joni Mitchell released Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire on her album For the Roses in 1972, and I must have first heard it close to that time for the first time. I turned twelve that year, so I had no idea what the enigmatic lyric was about. To me, it was an enticing dark fantasy that might involve a deal with the devil. I understood Hotel California in the same way, picking up on the undercurrent of seductive danger, but not the context. Now I know and can clearly see that both songs are about drug addiction. In particular, the cold blue steel in Joni Mitchell’s title is a heroin needle. So my deal with the devil idea wasn’t really wrong; I just didn’t know the identity of this particular devil.
Joni’s original recording of this song serves as an interesting marker for where she was in her musical career at the time. The song begins with little more than voice and guitar, harkening back to the folk period Mitchell was leaving at the time. But gradually, the arrangement fills out, until the song finishes in a much jazzier territory that Mitchell would explore over her next several albums.
When Joni Mitchell finished her run of jazzy albums, she began to explore electric rock. If she had recorded a version of Cold Blue Steel at that time, it might have sounded something like Tim Curry’s recording of the song. It’s a shame that Curry is best known as Dr Frankenfurter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. This performance strips away the campiness of Frankenfurter, and finds the sense of menace in a blistering rock version of the song. Curry never was a major hit maker, but he was serious about his music.
I found this version of Cold Blue Steel while researching for this post. Boi Akih gives the song an interesting jazz treatment that might have been what Joni’s song would have sounded like if she had not written it until the Mingus album. This version emphasizes the seductiveness of the lyric, while the dissonant musical elements preserve the sense of danger.
purchase [Take It Easy] purchase [These Days] purchase [Sleepwalk] I've had a lot of work to do to put this together. More than I anticipated. Quite some time back in this blog, I commented that covering a theme sometimes requires that you educate yourself: read, listen, dig around. I'm still wet around the ears. Some day I would like to own and learn how to play the pedal steel guitar. It's a pretty intimidating instrument - and this from a guitar player who doesnt have first hand experience except for listening. But I have been doing a little background reading and listening, both of which only further my previous conviction about the contraption. Contraption in that -if it is your stage instrument, you need to know how to set it up. It's not an instrument you pull out of its case, tune and go (like a guitar or a flute): you'll need a tool kit to put it together before your gig - tightening bolts, attaching legs and pedals in addition to the sound cables. There are various configurations (2 necks, 10 string or more), and then there are the pedals: for volume and several others that bend combinations of strings - best, apparently, in combination. So, you've got one hand sliding the steel bar, the other picking combinations of strings and then your feet (and knees) controlling volume and bending. While the pedal steel features in country music (and was birthed in the 30's out of an interest in the Hawaiian slide), it was a variety of 70's music that initially got me interested. The deeper I looked into that 70's sound, the more I saw that there were a handful of pedal steel players that got around, sort of a shared community of the skilled. . Many of the famous names end up doing session work for others, partly because the good are so few and far between. The 70's music that turned me on to the sound include the following: One of the Doobie Brothers steel players was John McFee. McFee also played on The Who's The Kids Are Allright. He has also played with Elvis Costello, Hewey Lewis, the Grateful Dead and more.
Jeff "Skunk" Baxter also played with the Doobie Brothers. Before that, he played with Hendrix. He played with Steely Dan up through Pretzel Logic before moving to the Doobie Brothers.
Sneaky Pete Kleinow (RIP 2007) similarly got around, playing with Steve Miller, the Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder and others. Sometimes credited as the man who brought the pedal steel to rock.
I’ve written numerous times about the importance that the radio I listened to growing up had in nurturing my love of music. I was lucky to live in New York (or at least, the suburbs of New York) during the heyday of WNEW-FM, one of the seminal free form/progressive stations in the country. I spent hours listening to Dave Herman, Scott Muni, Pete Fornatale, Vin Scelsa, Dennis Elsas (who I still listen to on WFUV), Richard and Dan Neer, and the other DJs who had the freedom to mix genres, go off on rants and rambles, play long, complex songs, and create shows that were more than the sum of their parts. But after all these years, one of the most memorable members of the WNEW staff was Alison Steele, the Night Bird, who was on during the overnight, when I had to listen really quietly, or on headphones, so my parents didn’t know I wasn’t sleeping.
Steele was memorable not just because she was a woman in an otherwise male-dominated lineup (although the station did have, at various times, other female DJs), but because of her distinctive, sultry voice, and because of the experimental, somewhat spacy nature of her show, which mixed poetry and social observations with the music.
Here’s the way she opened up her show, for a while:
The flutter of wings, the shadow across the moon, the sounds of the night, as the Nightbird spreads her wings and soars, above the earth, into another level of comprehension, where we exist only to feel. Come, fly with me, Alison Steele, the Nightbird, at WNEW-FM, until dawn.
Here’s a different opening, equally cosmic:
Steele was a New Yorker, born Ceil Loman in Brooklyn in 1937. I’m kind of taken aback that this icon of cool was born in the same year and borough as my father. Steele (she was, for a while, the third wife of orchestra leader and DJ Ted Steele, who was two decades older) initially got into radio in 1966 by being one of four women chosen from an audition pool of about 800, to create an all-female DJ staff at WNEW-FM, playing middle of the road music. But after 18 months, the station switched to the progressive format that ultimately made it famous, and Steele was the only one of the women asked to stay on, despite her lack of knowledge of the type of music she would have to play..
Here’s a long soundcheck from Steele’s show from Valentine’s Day, 1977 which gives you an idea of what her show was like. You can hear the type of music she played and her between songs patter (a word that doesn’t do her justice), including a love poem. She created something that drew you in, made you think, and played good music (although I’d have to question the Bread decision).
The Night Bird left WNEW in 1979, not long after I started college and began at WPRB, to work in television, returning to the airwaves in 1984 on WNEW-AM, the middle of the road AM sister station. She moved back to FM in 1989, on WXRK, known as K-Rock, where her overnight show, similar to what she did on WNEW-FM would end, and Howard Stern’s crapfest (I’ve never been a fan) would begin. From what I understand, Stern would disparage her, but in reality, he respected Steele, and aired a tribute to her after she passed away in 1995, of stomach cancer. She is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, although the Hall doesn’t list DJs on its website, it says so elsewhere on the Internet, so it must be true.
I’ll admit that I didn’t listen to Steele much, if at all, after she left WNEW-FM, but her shows on that station certainly influenced me. And I’m in good company. Jimi Hendrix wrote a song called “Night Bird Flying” which was reportedly inspired by her radio shows. The song was not released until after Hendrix died. As you may know, the Hendrix estate is very, very protective of Jimi’s music, and you can’t even find a video of the song in its entirety to watch. But there is this officially sanctioned Behind The Scenes video discussing the song, mostly by producer/engineer Eddie Kramer, which should give you a sense of the song.
Or what my wife calls slidy steel. Too obvious, too literal? Well maybe, but I cannot let this pass, the instrument being my favourite musical sound, as well as being a great way to pep up lack-lustre material: go ask Dylan*! But who or what to feature, as there are way too many wonderful players to give each a shout.
Born and bred in the UK it was never something I had knowingly heard until my teens, until a sideways lurch from my love of the Byrds led me to the Flying Burrito Brothers. I was hooked by those searing, sweeping shards of glissando, melancholia on max. For a while, the mere presence of steel was enough to draw me in, my understanding of the instrument leading me away from Kleinow to Perkins, from Rhodes back to Maness, taking in the heights of Emmons and Leisz along the way. Seemingly a near impossible instrument to play, needing co-ordination of fingers, hands, knees and feet, all working against each other, it has escaped an exclusively country music manifestation and has infiltrated other genres. Which is, eventually, where I get to the titular player.
Cole is english. That alone used to be remarkable in its own right, but his list of sessions reveal the degree with which he is held in international acclaim. Put off by the ubiquity of "plain" guitar, and intrigued by the 'Sleepwalk' of Santo and Johnny, he sold all his toy trains to buy, first, a lap steel, then retrading up to the full pedal steel experience. Initially orthodox, applying country tropes to a standard heavy rock framework, in the band Cochise, it was really after their demise that he found his feet (knees, hands and fingers.) Big breakthrough, arguably, was his appearance on Elton Johns's equivalently breakthrough album, 'Madman Across the Water', on standout track, 'Tiny Dancer'.
But it is his more exotic excursions into ambient, jazz and electronica that really crystallise for me the enormity of his talent. Here are examples of each:
Pavane pour une enfante défunte ('Transparent Music' 1989)
Chasing a dream ('Lush Life' 2009)
Hipalong hop ('Stop the Panic' 2000)
These are but tasters for the horizons he expands, alone and in collaboration, yet still as likely to turn up, in a tiny club, playing still alongside old chums like Terry Reid or Hank Wangford. I have certainly travelled cross-country for the opportunity to see the sidesman, not the singer. But pride of place in the Cole canon has to be this performance, with R.E.M., as part of a british TV special. Never has Country Feedback fed so far back into emotion. Listen and weep.
“Post songs that ring like steel.” As soon as I read that description of our new theme, I knew what my first selection would be. John Henry, and specifically this version, is a favorite from one of the first albums I ever bought for myself. As the youngest of three brothers, I was used to hand-me-downs, and that even included music to some extent. I got albums for my nascent collection that one or the other of my brothers had gotten tired of, and I also set about replacing music that was no longer available to me when my oldest brother moved out to go to college. But it was with albums like this from Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee that I began to define my collection as mine, as an extension and definition of me. It represented the beginning of my exploration of both folk and blues music.
The song is also a good starter for our new theme, in that it pits man against machine. Steel does not occur in nature. It is an alloy of iron and carbon, with other elements added in different proportions to make different types of steel. So steel itself is an early triumph of human technology, but the song John Henry reminds us that technological advances can have a human cost. In the song, John Henry is a steel driver. That is how he defines himself, and he takes great pride in his work. But now there is a machine, the steam drill, that can supposedly do the job better than him. The song tells of how John Henry set out to prove that he was better than any machine, and what it cost him.
A steel driver had the job of hammering steel drills into a rock face. The resulting holes would then be dynamited to make tunnels through mountains. This was an essential job during the building of the railroads in the nineteenth century. There are many claims that John Henry was a real person, and there are historical markers in several different locations that claim to be the site of the contest in the song. What is clear is that the technological change depicted in the song would place the action of the song somewhere in the 1870s. Whether or not the action of the song actually took place at all, the song and the legend are one of the finest expressions we have of human pride in the face of technological change, and that is a theme that still resonates, or rings, today.
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