How many times have you had to play this song? Bored with it yet? Well, trying spelling it backwards. Or just spell Tulsa backwards. It’s funny.

When I came to town in the 70’s I made friends with the Texas Troubadours, and hung out with them a lot. The lineup then was Lynn Owsley on steel guitar, Pete Mitchell on guitar, Junior Pruneda on bass, Don Mills on drums and Wayne Hammond fronting the show. When I went to the clubs in Printer’s Alley with one of them I got in for free, and we had some fun jamming at the Den and other clubs on Broadway and I got all access when they did the Midnight Jamboree

Ernest was doing some sessions at Pete’s Place and I got to tag along. Pretty friggin’ awesome watching Ernest Tubb record, I’ll tell ya. He had Owen Bradley, whom he called Moon, on piano, and Pete produced the sessions. The whole studio was engulfed in a cigarette smoke haze, but the Ol’ Man didn’t smoke. He’d quit years ago, on the advice of his doctor. His bass player at the time, Pete’s brother, Jack, ignored the medical advice and smoked himself to death.

Pete was one fine guy, laid back and self-deprecating, who took the time to talk to me and pass along some old anecdotes and he even let me in the booth to listen to playbacks and watch him work.

Wayne had a session coming up, and I somehow got on it. Lynn was busy or out of town or something, so I got to do a real Nashville session with the Texas Troubadours at Pete’s Place, the birthplace of so many hit records.

Pete told me that if I could come up with something good that he’d never heard before he’d use me on some more sessions. But I was like, damn, I’ve only been playing four or five years, WTF am I gonna come up with? Hell, I couldn’t even get a steel guitar in tune back then. But I really appreciated his good will. Very encouraging for a new guy in town, especially when a lot of big time Nashville pickers weren’t quite so accommodating… to put it mildly.

Pete told me he couldn’t even play a song all the way through anymore. He said all he could play now was intros and turnarounds. Funny. He was a good guy. He has a new website here. Stop by. Lots of good stuff.

Pete’s Sho~Bud, on display at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop on Broadway.

I did a session at Burns Station Sound in Burns, TN the other day. It’s a nice little studio, but there’s a lot of graffiti on the bathroom wall. The culprits seem to be Bob Moore, Pete Wade, Charlie McCoy, Lloyd Green, Pig Robbins, Bonnie Bramlett and Buddy Spicher. Kurt’s the engineer.

I played my first steel guitar gigs in the bars around the South Bend/Mishawaka area in Indiana the mid 70’s, and I heard a lot about Buddy Emmons, who grew up there, too. A lot of the guys I was picking with had worked with him, and he was a god to them. At the time I was only familiar with Hal Rugg, from watching the Wilburn Brother on TV, and Lloyd Green, from an album I bought during a late night trip to a grocery store in Indianapolis. I really didn’t know much about Buddy, but when I found out that was him on so many of those great Ray Price shuffles I became an instant fan.

Buddy had a cousin, Chuck Drew, who played a very early Emmons, a black D-10 with no knee levers, and he invited me to go along with him to Nashville to get Buddy to put knee levers on it. This was in the mid 70’s, shortly after Buddy had moved to Hermitage, just outside of Nashville, from California.

Buddy, who was wearing a dark blue Emmons T-shirt, had a project going out in the garage, putting an elbow lever on a guitar. I watched him work on Chuck’s guitar and the first thing he did was chop most of the springs in half. He really liked the way the guitar sounded, and decided it was because of the changer, so he called Ron Lashley in Burlington and asked if there were any like that lying around the factory. Ron dug through a trash heap out back and found one and sent it to Buddy. I asked Buddy to show me a lick he’d played on some Price record and he showed me what he remembered of it.

Buddy had a session later at the House of Cash and he took us with him, and we got to see a real live Nashville session. But the excitement died down after listening to a gazillion retakes and overdubs so we borrowed Buddy’s car and went sight seeing. When we got back, a little late, I guess, Buddy was waiting patiently in the parking lot with his guitar.

Curly Chalker was supposed to be playing a club in town that night and Buddy was going to take us to see him, but it got canceled or something so we stayed home and played cards with his gorgeous wife, Peggy, and smoked Vantage cigarettes. On the wall there was a hat rack full of derbies.

Peggy Emmons was a very gracious hostess, and a wonderfully warm person who was a pleasure to be around. When I told her I had a college degree she gently suggested that I might want to re-think this wild idea I had about being a professional steel guitar player.

I was way cool meeting the world’s foremost steel guitarist so early in my formative steel guitar years, and I went back home with renewed vigor and completely ignored Peggy’s sage advice.

The gig was over, hits had been played, T-shirts and CD’s had been sold, autographs had been signed, girls had been hit on, the equipment was loaded onto the bus, we had our money from the promoter, and we were ready to go back to the hotel. But the star was busy drinking Crown Royal and kibitzing with a few late-night party fans, and it didn’t look like we were leaving anytime soon. So… Plan B. Borrow a car. One of our fans said, sure, you can use my car to go back to the hotel, so off we went, the guitar player and me.

We were in a strange town and had only a vague idea of where the Holiday Inn was. But we did have some directions, so it was just a matter of reading the street sings and turning the appropriate direction, like, either right of left. And, oh yeah, we were drunk. Like, seeing double drunk, and we couldn’t read the friggin’ street signs. He was driving, and I was the navigator, and we meandered around town for a while hoping just by chance to come across that big green sign.

And then I reached down on the seat amidst a pile of McDonald’s wrappers, cigarettes, sunglasses and cassette tapes and came up with – a pair of binoculars. BINOCULARS! Holy shit! Just what we needed. So I clamped them to my eyes and started navigatin’ like a sumbitch, reading street signs like I did when I passed the eye exam to get my drivers license when I was 16, and soon we were back “home”’, and at the bar.

Sometimes ya gotta wonder if there’s someone or something out there watching out for poor disoriented road musicians.

A guy who liked what we’d just played said, “Don’t get no better’n ‘at.”
The bass player: “Naw, not yet.”

People are strange when you’re a stranger
Faces look ugly when you’re alone
Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted
Streets are uneven when you’re down
– the Doors

I grew up in South Bend in a house full of music. My Dad played the trumpet and the organ, and he had a high tech stereo system with a pretty extensive record collection, stuff like Al Hirt, Harry James, Benny Goodman, Pete Fountain and some Dixieland stuff. Kinda square, really. He wasn’t into Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie, despite being a trumpet player who’d worked his way through college playing in night clubs. I started piano lessons in the second grade, studying mainly classical music, and then started trumpet a few years later, and my Dad and I used to play stuff together, reading sheet music.

Somewhere along the way I started listening to rock and got all into Elvis and Top 40 music from WLS in Chicago, and continued on to the Beatles and the Stones, and started playing guitar in a rock band.

Around this time I began watching “The Wilburn Brothers Show” on TV and became fascinated with what Hal Rugg was doing on that steel guitar. I’d never seen a steel guitar in person, and didn’t know anyone who played. I didn’t even know anyone who liked country music, except just one guy in high school. I started listening to the country radio station in Chicago, WJJD, and buying Loretta Lynn and Ernest Tubb records.

In college (art school) I met a bunch of hippy/artistic types and began listening to underground stuff like Quicksilver Messenger Service, Cream, Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield, the Blues Project and a lot of blues. Nobody I knew at school listened to country music, except the guy who drove the snack truck that stopped by at lunch time.

When I got old enough to get into bars without a fake ID I searched out all the bars in Indianapolis that had live country music with a steel guitar, which could be a dangerous enterprise, given my long hair (think Dennis Hopper in “Easy Rider”) and the fact that none of my friends from school were interested in tagging along. Joe Tippie was the first live steel guitarist I ever saw, and “The Other Woman” was the first song I heard that night, and I made a whole new set of friends as I continued to hang out in these bars.

When I graduated I went back to South Bend and decided I had to have a steel guitar, so I borrowed $1,000 from the owner of the tree service where I was working while I was trying to find a day job commensurate with my new Bachelor’s degree, and drove down to Nashville a bought a new D-10 Sho~Bud Professional from the store on Broadway. I never did find a day job, but after practicing like mad for about 6 months I started hanging out and sitting in in the country bars and found steady work almost immediately, and again developed a whole new network of friends, apart from the friends I’d had while growing up. I quit looking for a day job and considered myself a real musician. I’d never had any lessons or encouragement from anyone in my endeavor, just some instructional stuff from Sho~Bud and lots of records to learn from.

I have my Dad to thank for my early grounding in music, which was, of course, an enormous help in eventually learning steel guitar, but after that I was on my own, and I did it pretty much all by myself. I’m not in any way special or exemplary, just a loner who was able to fixate on something and pursue it as far as possible.

When you’re strange
Faces come out of the rain
When you’re strange
No one remembers your name
When you’re strange
When you’re strange
When you’re strange

I was the bandleader at Gabe’s in Nashville and a guy who wanted to sit in with us came up and asked me, “Can anybody sing?”
I said, “Well, I can’t.”