by Julia Crowe
I was eight years old when I started playing the recorder and ten years old when I received my first guitar. The guitar was a Galiano, a classical guitar, that my mother had found and purchased for me from a flea market for $4. I changed the strings to a combination of silk and steel. I played this guitar for a while and found that I could bend strings if they were steel, but I could not bend them if the strings were nylon. I did put a light gauge steel string on this guitar, but then the neck broke because the steel had too much tension.
I had learned recorder because it had been a part of school instruction. If you were eight years old, you had a choice of either flute or recorder. I learned to read music at this time, which I then later forgot. I remember some instructors saying I had talent. One teacher complained, saying, “She doesn’t actually read music as much as she anticipates it, and we’d like her to focus on what the sheet music says, even if she is playing it by some other method.” At some point, I discovered in choir that I do not need to know the song in order to sing harmony, but I do need to know the song in order to sing the melody. I know where the chord is going to go and I know what the harmony is — there’s something odd there!
My mother played folk music and my dad played folk music as well, but his preferences leaned more toward old-timey Appalachian and American roots music whereas my mother preferred Burl Ives and Pete Seeger, which was more contemporary and less rough around the edges. My dad played clawhammer style, and I learned this technique from him and applied it to playing Robert Johnson’s music. My family found my interest in the guitar pretty much annoying, so I always tried to find a far-off corner so I could practice. Right away, my mom, bless her heart, became a big fan of mine. But I’d say everyone had been driven crazy first by my millionth version of “Froggy Went A-Courtin’.” When I started backing my dad on Carter family–style songs, then I was in the loop, and there was a reason for me to be playing the guitar and my dad appreciated it.
I think the guitar is a funky, gritty, earthy, hands-on instrument. Piano is hands-on as well but with the guitar, you’re actually touching the strings. It’s probably, other than drums, the most primal instrument. I like to sit when I play the guitar so I can stomp with my feet. It’s a good feeling to hold the guitar and play it, and I’m sure that with any instrument, it allows you to release emotion. It’s a vehicle of expression that is good for my health. I think, without it, I’d be in a whole other space — who knows where!
When I first started listening to Robert Johnson’s music, I thought, “This is so clean, so beautiful — it can’t be slide guitar!” My friends who were playing slide guitar at the time, in the 1960s, sounded quite different. Their playing had more of a rough sound, less precise and less clean sounding. But they were experimenting, too. I made a decision to try to play with a slide but found that I had a hard time finding a slide that would fit my finger because they were all made from bottles. You had to break a bottle. The perfect bottle with a long slim neck was not to be found anywhere by me, but my guy friends all found that if you break a wine bottle neck and sand it down, then a larger hand will have a perfectly good slide. So I decided to just do all the Robert Johnson stuff without the slide. Then, years later, John Hammond told me to get myself a socket and so I found one of those, tried it and couldn’t figure out why it sounded so horrible. I was trying to be very stiff and get to the fret exactly and not vary, go under or beyond that fret. It was like the fiddle. So I was trying to be very rigid in the process of getting to the note and discovered it sounded bad. Then one day, it locked in and I hit the pocket, discovering that playing with a slide is a lot less rigid than I’d thought. This was my biggest challenge with the guitar, and it’s all about rocking and doing this in a very relaxed way. I realized I could conquer this and started practicing intensely. It was annoying, hard work because I had reached a plateau and remained there for years, playing everything I already knew how to play without pushing the envelope. When the socket came along, I had an obligation to do this because people consider me to be a role model as a musician and eventually, my effort bore fruit. I do not think I am a great slide player, but I know how to have a really good time with it.
I remember playing at the Peace Church in Greenwich Village, where everything that was anything took place. If you had a play, you could put it on at the Peace Church. It was just a big old church sitting on West 4th Street in New York. Somehow, I was able to get a booking there to hold a concert. I got up onstage, looked out into the audience and was totally terrified. I saw all my friends there — everybody I had ever met my whole life. It was a surreal moment, like something out of a Fellini film. They were all there looking at me. I thought, “I’m going to die.” I just started shaking. I played all the country blues songs I knew how to play and felt so humiliated. I got offstage thinking I had played horribly and that everyone hated me. But then I saw a long line of these friends who all wanted to hug me. I was shaking again, and later, John S. Wilson from the New York Times gave me a stunning review. That’s when I knew it was going to be all right — that I could do this professionally, if I wanted to. He’d said good things, great things.
Martin had given me one of their guitars because I already endorsed their strings. I was out of my mind with excitement, planning to attend a convention in Los Angeles where I was going to represent Martin guitars. Every guitar builder and brand on earth was there, and I was going to play a concert. Five minutes before showtime, I was backstage, tuning up, and discovered a huge gash on the back of my guitar. It looked as if someone came over with a wood-cutting axe and had thrown it down, creating an 8-inch wide gap. I started screaming. No one had a clue what had happened. The guitar must have gotten knocked over. Someone went to get Dick Boak from Martin Guitars to send out the red alert that my guitar was cracked. Roy Rogers was backstage and everyone was offering to let me use their guitars, but I said, “No, no, no.” Dick duct-taped the guitar back together. Artie Traum was there. Michael Dorian was there. All these guitar builders where there, watching him squeeze the guitar and tape it. After the show, Martin took this guitar back and gave me a new one because the crack had grown wider, all the way around to the neck. The action had shifted during the first two songs of my set and then settled. My thought at the time was “Well, many blues artists have played guitars with action this high, so why not?”
David Tronzo
David Tronzo is an American guitarist known for his innovative techniques with the electric slide guitar in bebop, modern jazz, rock and experimental music. His playing can be heard on the soundtrack of Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts, and he is an associate professor at the Berklee College of Music. He has been voted Best Experimental Guitarist and also as one of the Dirty Thirty Pioneers and Trailblazers of Guitar by Guitar Player Magazine.
When I became aware of slide guitar, I wondered why there was not more of a vocabulary to it and different objects used for different sounds. I was thirteen years old at the time, and I studied guitar with a teacher but would adapt what I just learned to what it was I wanted to do with the slide. I was committed to what seemed like the impossible.
My first guitar was a baby blue Fender Mustang abandoned by my brother that was sitting in his bedroom closet. I grabbed it up and took it to a guitar store so that the action could be raised and I could play slide guitar with it. My dad sawed off the handles of a bicycle so I could use those for slides. I had some of those slides for years and actually wore the chrome off them. Most slide guitar music is in open tuning and tends to be country and blues music. I did not play anyone else’s music but stayed in standard tuning, eventually developing this trait of dropping the high E string down to d, which is known as universal tuning. I was trying to develop musically what it was I could hear inside my head and, along the way, I started experimenting and discovering that this idea of playing a stringed instrument with a different object other than fingers alone is actually a part of many different cultures. Microtonalism is part of this concept �
�� we know microtonalism from blues string bending. I was very smitten by microtonal, twentieth-century music like the gamelan, so I started to use various objects of different densities that I can hold in my hand to play the guitar. I used plastic cigar tubes, an old Smokehouse Almonds can, metal, plastic, paper, wood, ceramics. I’ve used pencils, tubes and containers, shampoo bottles, plastic and paper cups. The items change the frequency spectrum of the harmonics on the guitar, which creates a textural change. And sometimes it is reminiscent of another instrument like an African kalimba or a wood drum. Or, for example, one time I was playing a piece in Europe that almost sounded like a Lebanese oud and people in the audience had been wondering the entire time where the oud player had been! Often when I play slide on the guitar, though, it is for a texture that is unique and not reminiscent of another instrument.
Dave Tronzo, age thirteen, wearing a slide cut from a bicycle handle bar on his third finger. (Courtesy David Tronzo)
My love for modern twentieth-century music includes John Cage, who created “prepared” piano pieces, and when you look at his scores, they are normal piano scores except for the very beginning, where he lists what object is placed under what specific string. I realized the guitar is like a drum with strings just like a piano, so I started experimenting with using alligator clips and wooden chicken skewers that make an alternate bridge if you put them all the way through the strings. If you put the skewers only partially through, then the guitar becomes a resonant thing. I use corks of various sizes floated between the strings and it creates gorgeous overtones. It’s much more complex and I have ideas for pieces with these new sounds.
My musical inspirations other than John Cage include Led Zeppelin II, Taj Mahal, Lee Morgan, Miles Davis, Chris Smither or Bonnie Raitt and Ornette Coleman. This was in my teens. I wore out that silver live Cream album to dust. I loved all the slide players I’d heard of various Delta bluesmen, but I am a staunch non-imitator. I later lived in New York for twenty-two years, where I worked as a studio musician and I would be called in, never knowing what it was I was going to be doing in terms of playing styles, and often artists would not know until I suggested something. You have to have a huge playing range — but my commitment has primarily been to develop this world, I call it, a strange orchestration.
My dad had no idea about the music business or how it worked, other than it being a road to hell, but he said, “Go for it!” My mom was the complete opposite and felt I was going to die, that this was not going to go well. And they both were right! So I was kind of on my own and took lessons in my first year. Then I did not take lessons in a long time. I was underage at fifteen when I was hired to play in a band with guys who were twice my age. See, the thing is I’ve always had these ideas about how I wanted to play and what it was I wanted to do on the guitar from the very beginning, so I am fond of saying to my students, “It is better to be a bad version of yourself than a polished version of somebody else.” I lived it. I was a bad version of myself for a long time. It was not like I fit comfortably in these groups. Generally, there were two reactions I would receive — dramatically enthusiastic approval or else, “I don’t know WHAT that is. I don’t want any more of it.”
When I wound up in New York, I was twenty-two years old and I found everything I needed musically, along with the education I had been looking for. I started to understand more about how to bring something to the public that is not your dad’s Oldsmobile. In America, unlike other places, people get no exposure outside of really commercial music. Even school programs do not explore the depth of it. I do not mean to be so general because it is not intended to be a statement about who is teaching those programs or the kids’ ability to be creative, which is endless. It’s about the systemic non-recognition about a certain truth regarding music, which is that it is an art form that has more power that you can comprehend. That power is largely healing. When you go to Europe, they perceive instrumental music as a non-verbal version of a story.
What I love about the guitar is that all guitar players pick up the instrument and begin to play it. I watch my wife, who has no intention of learning how to play the guitar, pick it up, force her fingers onto the fretboard and start making a sound. She recognizes it and then makes another sound and says to herself, “No, that wasn’t it.” She will try again and say, “There it is!” and memorize it. Guitar players go right to home plate — they start playing and it is really slow, and they realize, “Oh my god … this is going to take a long time to figure out.” I was talking to Pat [Martino] recently about how much diversity there is in this instrument culture. Guitar players are customarily acclimated to lots of diversity. I do not see as much diversity in other musical instruments. The guitar from the hands of one artist to the next, can sound completely different. That’s a marvel to me to this day.
It is the most cryptic instrument — it gives you nothing. You can play the same pitch on it in six different locations. Harmonically, the number of ways you can treat groups of notes together is more limited. We have to recycle more and hear notes that we’re not playing, but the truth is we live within the framework of what the guitar can do, which is quite enormous. There are certain physical limits to it. I love the fact that the guitar says, “Stop!” and makes you really think and spend time slowly. Right now I get the expectation, which I see even with my students, that we’re to move and learn at a pace that is much faster than the reality. The guitar cannot be acquired quickly. Literally, they turn pale if I say, “Oh, that’s a five-year goal.” I’m just trying to get them to think about what it is you have to do today to move closer to your goal. So god help me if I say that is a twenty-year goal! If a student says to me, “I want to be able to play anything I hear,” and I say, “That’s a forty-year goal,” they say, “WHAT?!” See, I used to get really heartened whenever I heard something like this because my own progress had seemed so slow that I’d think, “I’m never going to get there.” All things do even out after a while, with effort.
I have been inspired by the guitar for the music I have been able to imagine and hear inside my head and even feel, amazingly enough. But I knew the music I wanted to make could not be done in a flash. I loved and was just magnetized to hear slide guitar on the radio or on records — it would stop me in my tracks.
When I was fifteen, we had this regular gig in this little town about forty miles from where I lived and it was a hangout for the local Hell’s Angels chapter. They liked us a lot because we played Hank Williams tunes and blues. I was really kicking the fence down — I knew five good notes. I was going for it and they were all smiling and winking. I did not have problems with anyone at that place because basically if anyone hassled me, all I had to do was go over to one of these guys and say, “He’s bothering me!” It was a two-days-per-week job throughout the year as a house gig. The second gig that I did in my life was at a school for the deaf. They lay down on the floor with their hands on the floor and listened to a set of music. I knew this was going to be special and always felt like this is the purpose of the music.
I’d like to say that my first guitar was a cheetah struck by lightning but actually, I have a wonderful friend who is a very well-known guitar maker whose name is Flip Scipio. He lives on Long Island and also on Martha’s Vineyard. Flip is an old, dear friend and a great player. When I was playing modernist music, I was an endorser of Steinberger and Fender and Gibson guitars, which I loved. But I was always looking for another sound, and Flip, on the side, would rebuild all these cheap, old, junky Silvertones and Kay guitars — vintage but not well-made instruments. The short version is I would hang out, work on some guitars, play some and go down to a bar and play at this club and then we would have dinner. I’d come home at six a.m. He was working on one of my guitars, doing a re-fit of this Silvertone I was playing. We were alone in this giant workshop and I plugged into two stereo amps loudly. I was standing in the middle of the room, running this guitar for over an hour non-stop, playing everything with it that I do. This is
maybe a $70 Masonite-bodied guitar. It’s like a piece of junk but is magical because the materials are really crude. It’s an acoustic guitar that is giving you all this information and characteristics similar to a human voice. I told him that I wanted this guitar. Scipio had this look on his face as if I was asking him to kill his firstborn: “I-I-I don’t know how to tell you this but that’s my favorite guitar and it is not for sale.” I insisted, “I do not care what you ask me for this guitar but I want this guitar.”
We went and played at this club and then came back to his house at five a.m., where we had a single malt scotch. So I let him have a couple of drinks before I picked up this guitar and asked if he minded at all if I played it for a little bit. “Oh no, that’d be great!” I played this really sweet, mournful gospel blues music, which was the kind of music he loved. I played for about ten minutes and watched his head growing lower and lower until finally, he just said, “Okay. The guitar is yours.”
I would say this guitar has about 100,000 road miles on it. I’ve owned it since 1994, and it was made some time in 1960, so it has held up pretty well. Scipio is a delight. He was in Amsterdam at the time my wife and I were living there in ’97–’98 on a boat on the docks, which is very beautiful in the center of the city. Scipio was there to work on the first installment of what was going to be the Buena Vista Social Club film. Scipio was there to work on all the instruments because when the musicians took their guitars out of Cuba, they’d exploded from being accustomed to anything but that climate. So I was sitting on my boat, playing this Höfner archtop, and I hear this knock, “Captain, are you in there?” I had no idea who it was. I stepped out and saw Flip with the foreman and this young kid. Out in the shadows on the street, I hear this voice say, “God, that boat’s a beauty!” Ry Cooder stepped out of the shadows and I invited him in for some tea. He came in and I made him this cup of tea, and we were all sitting in the living room with this Höfner archtop. Cooder, Flip and I are all staring at this guitar wearing the same expression, like, “Who’s going to go for this guitar first?” So gradually, everybody picked up the guitar and played a little bit.