Firstly, the use of quotes here does not indicate an attack on your person, your mind, your playing, your dog or your cow or your spurs or church or race or anything, it indicates you have summarized a certain position succinctly! Congratulations!
If the Pedal Steel is going to survive, we had better pray that new players come along and create new music with our instrument...
- Wally Moyer
If the steel guitar isn't used in more contemporary musical settings, it WILL become an antiquated, irrelevant instrument limited to a dwindling audience. The steel could become a throwback like the frailing banjo. But with its huge sonic range, and ability to use modern effects, it has far more potential to grow into music of the future.
- John McClung
This is where I go blank - I thought that the steel guitar WAS being using in many fascinating, diverse, and even...
weird ways.
Mike Perlowin recently alerted me to the music of Ned Selfe, who isn't involved in our moist-leg club but plays steel in the service of some interesting music. As does, surely, Mr. Perlowin himself. And Susan Alcorn, Mr Cohen, a whole raft of people who are, right now, not later, using the sonic range, use of effects to play interesting, even powerful music. There's a steel guitarist named Greg Leisz who apparently hires a six-stringer named Bill Frisell to twank away on top of his foundations, though IMO they could use just a little twink of the animation of the big-network "sacred" steel club.
Pete Burak -
Just watched the vid. I thought that was great!!!... My brain heard four steels rippin' from start to finish on a song I've liked since jr high.
Those guys take no prisoners!!!
What's not to love!
Well, mostly, it was really dull
music. I have this weird idea that if you're going to sing a song, you should try to find some sort of emotional connection to the lyrics. Why were this group of people singing a song by Greg Allman? About a girl....(?) They could have been singing the phone book. And unlike the originators, the Sacred Steelers don't play into and out of the key changes, just find a riff and beat it to death. Making faces, being "exciting" and "entertainers" is, in my experience, what people do when they can't play anything that will either pay them as well as they think they deserve, get them hot young nookie (surely no
churchman would... oh no!) or get them attention.
We sometimes forget that we actually play to satisfy something within ourselves, not to please a listener.
- b0b
Whoa! Huh! I though it was all about succeeding, and entertaining, and hot youn... oh. So You won't be burning your Susan Alcorn CD's, getting a white suit and "learning" how to play one riff for ten minutes while executing an array of "entertainment faces?" But it's all about attention to the pedal steel! We could rig them to shoot flames! We could drop them off of skyscrapers and see how many people we kill!
Now, I don't watch television - that clip won't be having me calling Comcast, either - so it would be silly for me to call for "More Susan Alcorn on Jay Leno!" I wouldn't be watching it because Jay Leno is an ass, Susan Alcorn
might do it, but they wouldn't like it - too many chords! Not enough faces! But it does raise the simple question, what is music for? What is it for for you, and do you shape what you play because of a belief that you either know or wish to control what music is to your (ahem -
potential) listeners?
Now, what RR does is fine for him, and it's attracted him enough listeners and fans that he hasn't had to move off his starting peg. When I first read of him and heard him, Stevie Ray Vaughan had been his catalyst, and I read that he was listening to Coltrane, Miles, Duane... for whatever reasons, (success?) nothing seems to have taken hold. He's got his nitche, and that's fine. But they seem supremely, musically, phony to me. The "gospel" music in the "Blues Brothers" movies was a
parody, and to become your own parody, yikes.
And to try to crawl under
his tent - "Hey look at me girls! I'M a steeler too!" That's only going to
work if you pursue it wholeheartedly -
throw out your Buddy and Beethoven CD's,
get that white suit,
learn that leg-twirl thang - but the kind of skank you might catch with that honeypot (metaphorical skank...); though you might just look like an idiot,
success would make you wish you had your
mental standards back.
Mick Jagger quite openly sang "Country Honk" and "Faraway Eyes" and "Dead Flowers" in a exaggerated Texas Twang and he said he felt it wasn't insulting because there was a great strain of self-mocking, parodic behavior within the country tradition itself. Minnie Pearl, Buck Owens, Hee-Haw... I thought there was actually an uncomfortable tension at times between the "countrypolitan" strain and the darker, simpler stuff, but it was (luckily?) washed away in a tide of money. It's all good - if it gets you rich.
What is music for? I mean, I can hear far more interesting, greater and more important music being played on steel guitars anytime I want to, and I don't have to worship at the Altar of Buck
or the "Sacred" Steel Church to do so. Performing backflips (watch it, Gramps) because a bunch of steels materialized before your eyes - on television - is telling alone, because only old people watch television anymore! Is a personal and social interest in promoting
quality entirely out of the picture?
Nick Reed,- considering your job at two different TV stations,- can you give us a clue as to why the programs like NCIS, NCIS-LA, The Good Wife, Person of Interest, Hawaii 5-0 and now Golden Boy have the music so LOUD that it drowns out all the dialogue. Several people have complained to the networks and have sent feedbacks but nothing is ever changed. What do you think we could do? Boycot the sponsors?
