Albert Lee's Country Guitar Heroes of History (The Albert Lee Interview, Chapter 2)

Albert began his rise to plek torille prominence in the roiling cauldron of 60s London music scene this was a relentlessly accretive time in rock music when future icons paid their dues and their rents by performing with established acts and then funneling that financial and creative energy back into a seemingly endless number of younger bands with ever evolving lineups Albert's guitar skills found a home with everyone from folk singer Sandy Denny to a steady gig at London's famed 2eyes coffee bar supporting Bob Xavier in the jury in a typical changing of the guard he took over Jimmy Page's guitar duties in Neil Christian's band the Crusaders and promptly handed the baton to Ritchie Blackmore and as a member of Chris Farlowe in the Thunderbirds he had a number one record with out of time a cover of a Rolling Stone song that replaced Jagger's famously loose swagger with a husky blue-eyed soul take on Otis Redding and Sam Cooke and Albert's contemporaries like Jimmy Page Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton did the same for guitar by immersing themselves directly in founding fathers like Muddy Waters and BB King but all the while a different group of distinctly American sounds called out to album thank you this incredible juggernaut of flying fingers is head hands and feet an amazing country band seasoned with the rock edge of its English purveyors when part Doobie Brothers and one part Stanley Brothers the short-lived head hands and feet nevertheless supplied enough sweaty riffing foot stompin groove and plenty of cowbell for generations of country rockers Albert was at the center of it all on both vocals and guitar a near-perfect hyperspeed melding of picking slides bends and banjo rolls that evoke the Prairie while embracing the energy of the arena Albert's blazing hybrid of rock and country music had been unleashed and as this style developed the country itself began to call out in a more literal sense Albert moved out west to Los Angeles in 1973 california's association with movies and popular music is of course the stuff of pop culture legend but perhaps less well-known is its role in the evolution of country music what Hollywood was to the silver screen Nashville had long been to the twangy sounds of Western Swing and country and probably no guitarist was more closely associated with Nashville's prominence than Chet Atkins he deftly appropriated cascading banjo style sounds into the guitar lexicon this was a continuation of the innovations of Merle Travis whose stunning hyperkinetic thumb picking managed to make two fingers sound more like 10 Atkins added a third finger and blended that down-home groove with the studied sophistication of a jazz er check skills were in some cases decades ahead of their time prefiguring techniques that wouldn't be common currency until the mid 80s but Chet's contributions went way beyond guitar when he took over RCA Victor's Nashville division in 1957 he added a second dimension to his career that would make him even more influential this ascension to a business role was rare for a creative but over the ensuing decades Atkins street cred as a player helped attract an increasingly deep bench of the very best players jerry reed was known to us 70s kids from his turn a snowman in smokey in the Bandit snowman is coming through but even more revered among guitarists for his amazing finger picking prowess as producer and mentor Atkins had helped Nashville become a bustling musical metropolis that churned out a stream of increasingly high gloss productions Atkins was instrumental in the genesis of this Nashville sound in which fiddles and steel guitars were replaced with string orchestras and backed by vocal choirs in lush arrangements aimed squarely at pop audiences and thanks to a tiny studio at the other end of the state that lavish aesthetic soon had an inverse in 1954 a seminal series of loose late-night jam sessions between an unknown Elvis Presley and Sun studio session players merged the heat of black R&B singers with the backwoods holler of country against an insistently pulsing backbeat rhythm and bathed in an improvised tape delay effect that son founder Sam Phillips called slapback rockabilly had arrived and it's rollicking guitar energy was supplied by Scotty Moore Scotty's surging rhythms were critical on those early drummer les recordings and on more sophisticated productions his solo turns were equal parts chugging and stinging the sudden meteoric ubiquity of Elvis Presley made Scottie among the most widely heard guitarists on the planet it also gave an additional boost to Sun Records label mate Carl Perkins if Elvis was the Newton of rockabilly Carl was its Leibnitz lesser known but contemporaneous and equally pioneering and in some sense even more so given his skills as a guitarist caryl seminal composition blue suede shoes aha but it's one column on it may have been more famously covered by Elvis on his 1956 debut album with RCA Victor step on my blue suede shoes wanton father money but Carl was the one with the number one hit moving over a million copies of the single for Sun Records in the spring of that year and turning a generation of fans including both Albert and future Beatle George Harrison into guitar players Elvis's rise also sparked a mad gold rush for a successor and Capitol Records found one in the popped collar swagger of Gene Vincent be-bop-a-lula was a perfect rockabilly hit with a yelping vocal drenched in slap back and a slinky tempo that practically snuck from one bar to the next if jeans performance is amped up the danger quotient so did those of his guitarist cliff Gallup with his liquid smooth lightning-quick pull-offs Gallup was Eddie Van Halen in sweater vest and pleats and he wasn't the only gunslinger in town the incredible fusillade of sixteenth notes in bill Haley's rock around the clock is a litmus test of tremolo picking agility even today it was recorded three months prior to Elvis's first Sun Studios demos by comets guitarist Dan Issa drone who passed away in a freak accident shortly after the song is recorded so drone successor Franny Beecher wasted no time in donning the Comets virtuoso mantle with six string show pieces like goofing around meanwhile the search for an answer to Elvis had seized upon a known commodity Ricky Nelson the 17 year old child star of the hit Ozzie and Harriet television show had quickly gone from imitating Perkins and Presley's guitar and vocal stylings as a fan to competing with them on the charts Ricky's hits were powered by the pulsating picking of James Burton the slinky rubbery pluck of Burton's chicken pickin sound was powered by an ad-hoc innovation most string sets of the day included only two unwound strings but the heavy gauge made blues bending challenging by replacing the top strings with unwound banjo strings and moving each of the lower strings down one slot the reduced tension gave Burton impossibly expressive bending power in fact he discussed these discoveries with popular music store proprietor Ernie Ball and lightweight custom gauge strings were born while Burton was terrorizing the fretboard Ricci was terrorizing the neighborhood running with a gang of high school friends whose occasional brushes with the law earned him a good boy turned bad off-screen persona that was perfectly rock and roll the looseness and danger of the rockabilly sound gave it a rebellious Flair that stood in stark contrast to Nashville's straight-laced appeal rock and roll pioneer Buddy Holly whose band the crickets Albert actually toured with upon first arriving in the states experienced this cultural divide firsthand when he recorded demos for Nashville powerhouse Decca Records Decca shelved the tapes and it was only after heading west to Clovis New Mexico that he recorded the definitive version of his breakthrough hit it was a fitting testament to his famously anti-authoritarian stance that buddy had found success from the outside both figuratively and geographically and soon other musicians would follow even further west in Bakersfield California Dust Bowl era settlers from Texas Oklahoma and Arkansas had begun to develop their own sound when they hear the new gianna swing but hobbs 1954 hit louisiana swing featured Buck Owens banjo inspired finger picking in the solo and if needed the hillbilly sensibilities of country to the grit of modern electric instruments rude and honky-tonk bars and broadcast on local radio stations Bakersfield was a growing Riptide against the increasing sheen of Nashville production and it's unabashedly music instrumentation including the plaintive steel guitar that had fallen out of favor in Tennessee made it hard to believe this sound was actually coming from California Owens and his fiddle and guitarist Don Rich were soon joined by more Bakersfield success stories like Merle Haggard and the strangers whose frank treatment of subject matter and songs like I'm a lonesome fugitive out run the law spend my life in jail enhanced Bakersfield's claim to a gritty authenticity Bakersfield's purest influence became progressive at the same time as the liquid tones of pedal steel legends like Buddy Emmons gave way to the fuzz doubt psychedelia of the Flying Burrito Brothers the only outlaw country band to rock the nudie suit echoes of this experimental transformation were felt as far away as Mayberry the Dillard's were the real-life alter egos of the fictional band the darlings from The Andy Griffith Show their traditional bluegrass style took the complexity of Celtic fiddle reels and garnished them once again with the outside sounds of the Blues in a way that was simultaneously soulful and hyper virtuosic but with wheat straw sweet the dillards had crossbred their Appalachians style with the reverb drenched harmonies of counterculture crooners like the Mamas and the Papas nobody knows this was yet another strain of country rock intermingling that reached rock-and-roll listeners like Albert and was a gateway drug to the hard driving bluegrass picking that had spawned it California's country rock incursion even traveled all the way to Woodstock we're Creedence Clearwater Revival's thumping backwoods boogie was a perfect melding of Bakersfield twang and 60s rock agitation Bakersfield had become such an epicenter of musical creativity that it even had its own guitar company mosrite guitar is founded by semie moseley himself another Depression era migrant to Bakersfield added unusual features like a zero fret for better intonation and extra-hot pickups and attracted the attention of extra-hot players phil baz incredible mashup country guitar was like a guided tour through the most famous guitar techniques in country in rock in a veritable menu of many of the sounds that Albert himself adopted Phil's contributions are perhaps not as well known outside of country guitar history aficionados which is a shame because his technique was well ahead of its time that's Eric Johnson's descending sixes pattern in 1965 and that's also country crooner glen campbell with some unexpectedly blazing chops but in the pantheon of Albert's influences probably none has a more lopsided skill to FAMAS 'ti ratio than Jimmy Bryant jyllian fused country guitar with the speed and sophistication of bebop in a technique that was truly mind-blowing you Jimmy had built his chops playing fiddle on street corners during the Depression but didn't pick up the guitar again until after being wounded in World War two by 1950 he was playing Los Angeles clubs with steel guitar pioneers speedy West the two released a series of face-melting collaborations together and toured as a duo here we go with Jimmy Bryant BD West and flying high where Jimmy's billing as the fastest guitar in the country was hard to argue with in the wake of the Titanic and tectonic influence of 60s blues rock heroes who still dominate most conversations about guitar greatness it's sometimes easy to forget the equally real dent that rock and roll owes to the routier sounds of country music and with the rich and varied recent history of hyper-technical players Albert's deep family tree of peers and influences is a powerful reminder just how far back that history really goes it's incredible that there even was a Jimmy Brian in 1950 there was no YouTube no MTV and for a lot of people there was no TV at all teasing you nobody has two televisions there if you work in music in the Information Age understanding guitar technique might be your full-time job and you probably still struggle with it like the rest of us but how on earth do you do all that with an AM radio and a couple of scratchy forty five if you were born in the 80s you could be excused for thinking that guitar virtuosity was invented in 1990 and if you were born in the 70s you probably think it was 1978 and I know my dad thinks it was 1969 because he told me so one day when I wouldn't shut up about hot for teacher but the truth is that for as long as there's been a guitar there have been guitar gods and considering the totally unreasonable obstacles that once stood in the way of becoming one imagining yourself as part of that incredible history is truly

Channel: Troy Grady

Views: 74,079

Keywords: Albert Lee, Head Hands and Feet, Country Boy, country guitar, guitar lesson, picking technique, Chet Atkins, James Burton, Jimmy Bryant, Phil Baugh, Danny Cedrone, Franny Beecher, Cliff Gallup, Merle Travis, Mosrite, Ernie Ball, Budd Hobbs, Buck Owens, Don Rich, bakersfield sound, nashville sound, Troy Grady, Cracking the Code, Masters in Mechanics, Country (Musical Genre), Guitar Heroes, Rock And Roll (Musical Genre), Albert Lee (Musical Artist), albert lee guitar

Id: p9BQwPrWpB8

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2015