November 29th, 1953: Bud Isaacs started the ball rolling with his revolutionary use of pedals as an integral part of his playing on the recording of Webb Pierce's Slowly. I was born 12 days later.
The Pedal Steel Guitar and me ...... part one
- the strings of a pedal steel guitar are stopped with a metal bar rather than fretted
- the pedal steel is not a traditional guitar shape held vertically but a box mounted on legs with the strings horizontally oriented
- pedal steel string tension is able to be raised or lowered individually and precisely using a system of pedals and levers
This gives rise to an instrument capable of a wide range of harmonic invention.
I had a fascination with stringed instruments from an early age. I have a memory of visiting my Uncle Herbert in Nundah, Brisbane where he was the local police sergeant.
In between playing in the normally empty lockup with the other kids I'd walk up to the music store on his street and gaze longingly at the copy of Beatles for Sale on display in the window. Also in that window was a smoke green Gretsch Anniversary guitar. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
We lived in Kenilworth, a tiny country town and life was very quiet, which suited me mostly. At age 12 from a small amount of money left me by my grandfather I finally bought a guitar which seemed to have fencing wire for strings. I learned how to fingerpick in basic fashion from a Mel Bay book, got a capo that had the added advantage of making the guitar a bit easier to play, and made my TV debut on a programme called Funsville. It was a talent quest and I came second on that night playing and singing Scarlet Ribbons with the capo on the fifth fret. I was complimented on my guitar playing but I was so nervous I could barely hold the strings down. I did, however, wear a fetching bow tie.
I loved to listen to the transistor radio under the sheets late at night. One night I heard a song, the title of which I can't remember, but I do recall that it was by the Dillards (probably something from Wheatstraw Suite) and it featured the sound of the pedal steel. It seemed to go directly inside me and stay there. I sought out the sound but didn't have much luck at the local record store 45 minutes away in Nambour.
I had to wait until I left school and moved to Brisbane where I studied to be a primary school teacher. My friends and I spent hours sifting through the racks at the Record Exchange in Adelaide St. The first thing I bought there was by the Flying Burrito Brothers. The cover featured the band standing around a shed in the desert dressed in western clothes embroidered with illicit items like marijuana leaves and pills. They had mysteriously glamorous female companionship too. When I got back to the college library and put the needle on the disc I discovered they also had Sneaky Pete on pedal steel. I missed a few classes that day playing it over and over. I did not at this stage even own a record player so I spent quite a lot of time in a listening booth in the library.
The nearest I got to actually playing a pedal steel was the six string square neck dobro I bought at a shop in Russel St, Melbourne after I'd graduated from college and had begun teaching in Brisbane. The pedal steel just wasn't the kind of thing you saw in shops in Australia at the time. You still don't. I don't recall ever having seen anyone playing one in real life then.
I played in bands. We thought we were serious but no one was about to throw in their day jobs. We rehearsed a lot in an old warehouse in Fortitude Valley and there I met bands like the Go-Betweens and the Laughing Clowns, people who took their music much more seriously than I did at that point. I suddenly arrived at the surprising point in life of taking long service leave from teaching. I felt old and wondered what I had actually done with my life. I decided to travel through Asia to the UK, came down with a nasty case of hep A and spent six months on my sisters couch in Salisbury, England perfecting my knowledge of the odds in backgammon and mastering Chinese Checkers. It seemed I still hadn't really done anything with my life so I resigned from the education department and moved to London where I worked in an insurance office. This ended when my boss took me out to lunch at an expensive restaurant and offered me a career in insurance. I was horrified.
In '83 I moved back to Australia and took up residence in Newtown, Sydney. Without any blinding flashes of light I had quietly decided to be a musician. Easier said than done of course but I did run into people such as John Kennedy and James Paterson, formerly of the warehouse in the Valley and now resident in Sydney with their band The Cuban Crisis. I was, at the same time, mixing with the country music crowd in Sydney. John Kane's bluegrass band The Flying Emus were creating waves and I sometimes sat in with them, playing dobro and singing Once A Day, a Bill Anderson song I learned from the Scotty Stoneman version. I felt a little out of my depth but managed to get through a gig with them at the Tamworth Country Music Festival when their fiddle player had other commitments.
It was at this point that The Triffids came into my life for the first time. I had gone with James Paterson to see them play. James had insisted I really had to see them as he was totally smitten by this band and their lanky songwriter David McComb in particular. I thought they were pretty good too and went to meet them after the gig. David invited me to come around to the house they shared in Lawson Square, Redfern and asked me to bring my dobro. So the next day I found myself sitting on a the floor playing some of David's songs with the band and James. I'd been impressed the night before but actually playing a part in the songs made me realise this was something special. The Triffids themselves had worked hard enough touring to make their first trip to London and they were due to leave in about three days. I was at a barbecue with my girlfriend and her folks in our backyard when a phone call came through. It was James. He said some recording time had become available that night and The Triffids wanted to record those songs that we'd been through. I remember tossing up whether I should leave the barbecue and eventually deciding it would probably be a good thing to do. I thought this might lead to something.
We had to sneak into the Sydney Opera House under cover of darkness and we recorded live in the orchestra recording hall. Everything was recorded live first or second take and we had a ball. This was my first serious recording session in quite a while and it was refreshing to see these 20 somethings take it so seriously even though the end result would, at best, be a limited release offshoot from their main thing, and, not insignificantly, they had to catch a plane for London in a matter of hours.
The Triffids left the country and I heard news filtering through of a gig with the Go-Betweens, a support tour with Echo And The Bunnymen, the cover of the NME.
Meanwhile I was on the dole, poor but optimistic. I was busy but a little bored with my own musical progress. My girlfiend's half brother had a pedal steel, a Sho Bud Maverick. I asked if I could borrow it. It was in pretty good nick, three pedals but only one lever. I sat down behind it for the first time after having digested a bit of Winnie Winstons book. I placed the bar on the third fret, grabbed a cluster of notes as I'd seen in the book, picked the strings slid up seven frets and engaged pedals A and B at the same time. Wow! That sounded beautiful. I knew then and there that I was hooked and this thing would rule my life.
I worked my way through the book. Some things seemed impossible to master but I generally managed to get a pretty good sound out of the Sho Bud. My friend John Kennedy in whose band I was now playing asked me to play steel on a song of his called Miracle In Marrickville. The steel is used mainly for effect – there's a simple lick but it does sound good. I'd been playing for about three months at this stage. I continued learning as much as I could and then a phone call came that changed my life forever. It was David McComb calling from Perth. He asked if I'd play pedal steel with the Triffids on their upcoming East Coast tour. I said to Dave, “You do realise I don't really know how to play this thing yet, don't you?” Dave said, “Yes, that's why I asked you.” Now this might seem like a strange attitude to take for one so serious about his songs and his band but Dave knew what he was doing. He was trying to put together a band that had a unique sound not a slick one. The whole purpose of the band was to provide a sympathetic and atmospheric framework for the songs. He wasn't interested in fancy licks, meandering double stop country runs, turnarounds just like Buddy played them. Fortunately for me. Of course I said yes. The Australian shows went well and I found I could fit in personally and musically with the band.
In a couple of months I found myself in Leuven, Belgium sitting on white plastic garden furniture in a field of plastic daffodils as the TV interviewer asked David this probing question - “So, you are the new Jim Morrison, how do you wish to die?”