The Steel Guitar Forum

Hi Tucker,
Thankyou for the very informative reply.I have taken on board your technique description .
Will look at the YouTube footage .Despite my many years of playing I have never considered this way of blocking before and looks like another "project" to do and study.
Regards Dave

The New Riders sound stage video in Germany on youtube totally shaped my mind for blocking. I loved it. Yes its not the slick smooth modern style, but boy is it cool. Love the comment about doing it to keep up with loud gtr players. I loved his octaves and overdrive work too. I watched that video a lot to try and get some of it in my playing. Need to check out the Ian and Sylvia stuff. Yes, long live BC. I love that upfront, battle conditioned, in your face steel. Subltle dynamics important too. But that attack style is very useful in my world. Great thread indeed. Love to hear more Buddy stuff.

Hi Tom,
Totally agree with you and yes let's keep the thread going a while.
Buddy is an awesome player who's style is as valid as all the other mainstream greats that are frequently mentioned here.
He is a really nice guy too.In the mid to late 80s I had the privilege to correspond with Buddy ( slow mail in those days!) .He wrote to me mostly by hand and I wrote back several times over about a year or so.
Regards Dave

Forum Index->Steel Players
Yes Indeed!

OK so I am working on a better take, but I got thru this one for the most part!
I try to show some blocking and picking that is in the Buddy Cage style
She's No Angel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aXcKe6 ... e=youtu.be

Hi Pete,
Your YouTube footage is excellent and sounds very Cagey !!
Right hand blocking is shown really well too .Many thanks indeed.
Regards Dave

Well, I dug out my old LP's today of New Riders and low and behold their was Buddy Cage playing his Emmons. So I stand corrected again as I have had to do here before but it is great to have this forum to correct me. J.R.

Well, I'll try to pile on where the others AIN'T, rather than where they IS... firstly, unfortunately, sugarmegs.org has less than 200 NRPS live concert tapes, but fortunately many are quite good soundboard quality, and depending on your brain it is either fortunate or un- that there is a good representation of the Garcia... year?... 14 months. I think it's at least instructive to see/hear what kind of bag Cage adopted, and the sheer SIZE of it, when he moved into the job. Fire up just about ANY Garcia-era, pre-November 1971 NRPS concert here -
http://tela.sugarmegs.org/alpha/n.html -
and it's clear that Garcia is DRIVING the band, from the pedal steel throne, a rather rare role as I think most can attest. Not that surprising, as the origin of the band was really just an excuse for Garcia to play with his new toy, (get paid! Yay!) and something to do for... Nelson, Torbert, Dryden, Hart, Lesh, whoever showed up.

And then, in a (rare?) attack of business acumen, the Grateful Dead figured out that they were already toting at least half of an opening act with them, just shanghai a couple more hippies and you got you a real SHOW there. There was all sorts of intertwingling in that early 70's period. Nelson was (maybe) slotted for the post-Joplin Big Brother, studio engineer Bob Matthews and Phil Lesh and Dave Torbert and Robert Hunter all occasionally played bass. There were times when the promotion of the band seemingly outran the band itself, due to Columbia Record's genius wizard (clip, clip, p'toiee) Clive Davis's urge to sign the Grateful Dead.

The main point is Garcia quickly figured out that as long as everybody was waiting on him to play something anyway, he'd better slam it and he is RIGHT on top of the beat, loud and proud. The more simply and more rhythmically he played, the better it worked, and the more he meandered, the mo... well NO-body claimed to match the Grateful Dead for getting lost timewise, willfully or -un, so here Garcia wisely didn't even try.

BUT; SO; Buddy Cage walked into a job that had probably never been available for a steel player before, and probably never would be again:

YOU'RE GREAT, WE'RE NOT, DO WHATEVER YOU WANT!

Besides (sort-of) Rusty Young's gig at Poco, that job had never really existed before, and the results were surely mixed. Good ol' hippie chemistry experiments were ongoing and a job like that can ALREADY munch all but the very strongest. Why? I think maybe playing pedal steel guitar is so difficult and musically involved (changing a chord inversion from the inside out, ever try to explain it to a piano player?) there just isn't ROOM inside the music den in the brain to do lots of other things. Like other MUSICAL things, limitations within yer cellular goop? Like the Bb dendrites are out to lunch with the F's this week.... Very often the smartest member of the band, very often the one taking care of contracts, getting paid and such, can't even drink a beer until after the show the damn thing's so hard to play.

But steel guitarists are only matched by drummers in their lack of songwriting results. It might be meaningful that Rusty Young, Skunk Baxter, Bernie Leadon, and all the other multies I can think of switched over to underarm guitar when they had to sing. Not that I ever thought about it.

(mebbe Captain Trips quit the WRONG INSTRUMENT... snif?)

David Mason wrote:Well, I'll try to pile on where the others AIN'T....

What a wonderful rant! I'm in awe!

:)

--Al Evans

Pete Burak wrote:OK so I am working on a better take, but I got thru this one for the most part!
I try to show some blocking and picking that is in the Buddy Cage style
She's No Angel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aXcKe6 ... e=youtu.be

Great picking, Pete...that's the "happy" steel I associate with Buddy Cage's style and what initially got me interested in pedal steel.

David Mason wrote:Fire up just about ANY Garcia-era, pre-November 1971 NRPS concert here -
http://tela.sugarmegs.org/alpha/n.html -

Darn you, Dave! I have leaves to rake, grass to mow, a honey-do list a mile long, and a ton of other stuff. And then you go and show me that site. That will keep me occupied all winter!

Ha! Dave Mason. I have actually done the not drink beer at shows because of the steel! Finally had to stop drinking at shows. If I am really confident or its an off night I may drink a bit. But generally I can't do it. Some guys can though. But yeah, that was a good one.

Hey Dave, Your story has alot of "Buddy'tude" on it!
An important component of Buddy's style!
His body language when playing is like looking up at Mt.Rushmore

YOU'RE GREAT, WE'RE NOT, DO WHATEVER YOU WANT!

Nail on the head for me. He was so much more actually accomplished than the guys around him. As I said above, without Buddy, NRPS would've been rather run of the mill.

I took one more pass at She's No Angel.
I put the Buddy Cage slide-up-the-ladder Lick in this one!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkrRxv6 ... e=youtu.be

Pete Burak wrote:I took one more pass at She's No Angel.
I put the Buddy Cage slide-up-the-ladder Lick in this one!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkrRxv6 ... e=youtu.be

I love that lick! I think you did a great job of capturing his feel.

--Al Evans

If anyone is in the Northern California Bay Area on Nov 28, there is going to be an avent honoring and celebrating Buddy Cage and David Nelson. I believe it’s a dinner show at Terrapin Crossroads. They’re helping to raise funds to help them with living expenses since they both have been unable to work because of health reasons. 😩
Here’s the link:
https://m.bpt.me/event/3820032

Hi ,
Really enjoyed Take 2 of Shes no angel.particulary the chromatic slide up and the very finish of the solo .Thankyou again Pete.
Another Cage question....how is the harmonic intro done on " Don't put her down" I'm sure he must go along the whole string harmonic positions it's so high in the end !
Thanks again Dave

Dave Hepworth wrote:....how is the harmonic intro done on " Don't put her down"

Not Tab, but you get the idea. These are the positions, but all played as harmonics (touch 12 frets above these frets):

5th fret:
stg 5 to 5A
stg 4

10th fret:
stg 5A to 5
stg 4
stg 3

I just took a whack at the tab for Buddy's break on "Sweet Lovin' One" and posted it in the tablature section. https://bb.steelguitarforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=337923

Pete Burak: love that "slide up the ladder" thing on "She's No Angel"

That Ladder lick is done with AB down, and starts one fret lower than the first chord.
I start at fret 4 because the song is in D.
Pick string 2, then pick string 4 and slide up one fret.
Keep going with that right up the ladder!

Jeff, Thanks for the Tab I will try it tonight

Thanks, Pete!

Excellent job Pete! Very nice playing and the Emmons has a great sound!

Below is an excerpt from an email Buddy Cage wrote to me in 2012. I would not share it, as it was a personal note, but I think he would not mind. It has a couple of interesting insights. You guys are right about Buddy Charlton:

"Yeah, the issue w/the cancer is treatable...but chemo is rough stuff. I've got some hard bark but boy, the side effects can really be nasty.

The chemo w/some stem cell work can tack on 5 or 6 yrs w/o having any more treatment - some have added 10 to 15 yrs, as long as this chemo has existed. Buddy Charleton didn't have that chance, he passed away last year. He was my favorite.

Incidentally, the BossTone (Jordan) was a California product and was discovered by Emmons when he joined up with Roger Miller to play bass! I guess he was just poking around in a shop and found this gizmo. He had the idea to use it for single-string, string quartet effect and mix them later.

That's what he heard. I heard something entirely different - a fuzz tone. I was hearing sitars, Led Zeppelin, Richie Blackmore and so forth. I jumped on it immediately - that was about 1966.

So, thanks for the letter - see you around! Buddy"

Incidentally, if somebody wants to buy a new reissue Bosstone, a few're on ebay, $75, they were reissued by the guy from JHS pedals. And now, I think I'll fire up 17 Pine Ave!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTXUYTxWtdI

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R ... N+BOSSTONE