or inflict it on innocent musicians. We let a guy sit in with us one night and he did kinda OK. He wasn’t a professional level player by any means, and he played where he shouldn’t have on some songs, but he did have his own band and they played a gig every once in a while. He was a friend of ours and were just being nice, really.

Well, we got to that dreaded point in the night where we had to play “Swingin’”. The way we had it arranged, toward the middle of the song the guitar would play an 8-bar solo and then the singer would come back in on the 4 chord. Then the same deal with the piano and then me. So, by now we’ve done this little rigamarole three times and then we let our sit-in have his turn and what does he do? He plays his 8 bars and then a few more and keeps on going, stomping all over the vocals with his dazzling mediocrity. Being the experienced been-there-before pickers that we were, we covered nicely for him and avoided a train wreck, but Holy Cow, if he couldn’t figure out what he was supposed to do after hearing us do it Three Times Mister, he shoulda sold me his axe real cheap and gone home and found another hobby before someone called the Country Music Police on his ass.

Once upon a time there was a band that billed themselves as a country band. They played a bunch of good ol’ country songs and had a chick singer and OK vocals and a pretty good guitar player, but they didn’t have a steel guitar in the band. Or a fiddle, for that matter. Now, how ya gonna do Tammy Wynette or Ray Price like that? Well, you can’t, not really.

This band was fairly popular and had quite a following, but they sounded pretty lame to me and I didn’t enjoy listening to them. Kinda like that time when one of the speakers went out in my car stereo.

Most people at a live music event don’t know what a steel guitar is, and a lot of people couldn’t even identify the bass player in a lineup if he shot somebody and the police were holding them as a witness. Singers get most of the attention. But however musically unsophisticated an audience may be, wouldn’t you think a smattering of them could tell something was terribly wrong if there were no steel guitar in “Apartment No. 9”?

I get a compliment every once in a great while from a non-musician, and it’s always a surprise when someone seems to know what I’m up to on the stage. A nice surprise, and always unexpected, as surprises often are. Sometimes they just want to know somebody in the band and they pick on me for some reason, even if they think I’m the keyboard player, but if they buy me a beer, so much the better.

I’d like to think that most people – even though they can’t actually identify the sound or sight of a steel guitar – still recognize it somewhere in their subconscious as an integral part of, say, “Together Again” or “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” while they’re dancing and if it weren’t there they would get a nagging feeling that something was wrong and become disoriented and maybe two-step on their partner’s instep.

Everything just goes better with a steel guitar.

When I was new to steel guitar, trying to learn as much and as fast as I could, I got some of the best advice I’d ever gotten, from some older players: “Son, you need to play 6 nights a week.” Yep, that’s real good for your chops, and you learn a whole lot about intros, turnarounds and faking your way through songs you don’t really know. There’s nothing better than experience. But the initial problem is that you have to reach a certain level of competence before you’re so much in demand that you can get that many gigs, and that necessitates squirreling yourself away in your room, practicing like crazy until you make some significant progress. But once you’re there, you’re there, and playing 6 nights a week will help you realize whatever potential you might possess.

So you cruise along, for years maybe, playing all the time, getting better and better – as long as you don’t start to burn out – which can happen, just ask me.

Bye and bye you might turn into such a monster player that you find yourself the darling of the producers on Music Row, on their A list, and spending your days, and half your nights, in studios. But when you’re doing a lot of sessions you spend most of your time listening to playbacks, drinking coffee, discussing your golf game and networking. You’re not actually playing very much, certainly not enough to keep your chops up, and the same thing can happen with an artist gig, where you’re playing the same old stuff every night and your chops go to shit.

I’ve seen guys like Paul Franklin, John Hughey and Hal Rugg working clubs around Nashville for peanuts, but they just wanted to get out and play, even if cartage cost more than the gig paid. Years ago you might find Buddy Emmons or Jimmy Day at some club on Broadway or in Printers Alley jamming like crazy, but it just ain’t like that anymore.

Is the current crop of hot session players just not into that anymore? And, if so, why not? Well, back in the day a lot of hit records featured some pretty outstanding steel guitar – songs like “Touch My Heart”, “Night Life”, “Together Again”, “I’ll Come Running”, and a lot more. But what have you got on the radio today? A lot steel guitar pads, mostly, and a lot of generic-sounding playing mixed way in the background underneath the guitars and other oddments that somehow make their way onto “country” sessions these days. Nothing much in the way of inspired playing that would grab you by the balls and cause you run your car off the road or make you want to run out and buy a steel guitar.

So, anyway – and I now find myself in this position because I spend more time writing HTML than I do playing hot licks – the problem is how to keep your chops up if you don’t play all the time like you did when you were young and driven and getting so good. Yeah, you can sit around at home and practice scales and finger exercises for hours at a time (like you did when you were starting out, and had the fire) but when there’s not a whole lot of inspiration left, and not very many clubs to play, and just a modicum of steel guitar on the radio it’s hard to muster the enthusiasm to really get anything accomplished. Like, if you get your chops up to where they were when you were in your prime, where you gonna use ‘em? Probably not on an artist gig or on any sessions. There don’t seem to be very many gigs left where you can play real good steel guitar stuff, and jam sessions that don’t feature an endless queu of vocalists that only let you play a turnaround are real hard to find. Well, there’s steel guitar shows, maybe the last refuge of guys that just want to play, but the structure and the cliques may be a trifle off-putting to newcomers – but, damn, real live jam sessions on Broadway in the 60’s and 70’s could be more intimidating than that anyway.

So, if you like to to play steel guitar and you find that you can’t quite play like you used to, it may not be arthritis or Old-Timer’s disease – it might actually be something that’s totally not your fault, like the fact that the world has changed a lot since Ray Price recorded “The Other Woman”.

Tracy used to come around Gabe’s and sit in and win Judi Martin’s talent contest sometimes. He was an OK singer, and a nice enough guy. He’s got a new album coming out, and in a recent interview he says “…it’s more contemporary and more in the same vein as where the industry is headed. I don’t have steel guitar, but rather more guitars and fiddle.” Doesn’t sound like something I’d want to listen to. Read the interview here at the Boot if you care.

Why are amplifiers still so big and heavy? Everything else has gotten way small and really portable, but we musicians are still lugging around 60 pounds of amplification equipment all over hell just like we did 50 years ago. You can put your music and your videos and the tracks from your last 500 sessions in your pocket, but you still need something bigger than a Peel (the world’s smallest car) to wag your stuff to a gig. This might have been on Steve Jobs’ bucket list, I dunno.

We all know there’s very little real country music on top 40 country radio stations; y’all bitch about it all the time. Over-produced, compressed, pro-tooled, re-cycled 70′s rock’n'roll that passes for country music and that’s marketed to a certain demographic that’s supposed to buy the stuff they pitch on the commercials between the songs.

Well, there’s something thing else that really pisses me off, and that’s the traffic updates, weather reports, station ID’s and DJ banter that overrides the intros. I’m not necessarily a Reba fan, but I heard “Where Were You” today on WSM AM, and I couldn’t hear the intro. It didn’t really matter to me, but if I were a Reba fan I’d like to hear the whole damn recording from the beginning, and if I had been on the session doing the intro I’d be doubly pissed off.

No big news here; DJ’s have been doing that forever, but it still sucks. Radio’s on the way out anyway, what with iPods, Sirius and the rest of the internet, and you’d think they’d have a clue by now.

I worked with a guitar player who sang great, but didn’t really know how to play guitar. He couldn’t play the intro to “Mama Tried”, “Workin’ Man Blues”, “Satin Sheets’… and the list goes on. He’d tune before the first set and never even look at his tuner the rest of the night. He had 4 or 5 licks and played them in every song. He was a lazy bastard.

Good country drummers are hard to come by. Country drumming can be kinda boring, but, damn, if you’re hired for the gig and getting paid, please try to play something appropriate, if you possibly can. One drummer I worked with, who sang one song, didn’t know the ending on “Neon Moon”, where there’s this little thing that cues the band. He never did learn it. I put a picture of Buddy Harman on his snare one night and he went around asking everyone who it was.

Bass players – holy shit, some of em’ think they’re lead players, especially if they play with a pick. Have they ever really listened to what the bass is doing on “The Other Woman” or “Swinging’ Doors”? Bass players almost always sing.

I worked with a piano player who would show up 5 minutes before the downbeat and then complain about the PA during the 1st set, and how his mike was set. Duh, he coulda got there a little sooner in time for a sound check. He liked to play between songs, too, just diddling around, while someone was announcing the next song or a birthday on the mike. He also made faces when someone hit a bad note, and complained between songs about the drummer and the bass player – the audience could see and hear all this. This was a guy who’d worked a lot of big time gigs, and I don’t get how he could be so unprofessional. He did know the piano parts on our set list, so he at least had that going for him.

Many years ago a singer got up and called “Night Life” and introduced me as this great steel guitar player who was going to kick it off. Well, I didn’t know it. My excuse was that I’d only been playing a couple of years and I couldn’t know every damn intro yet. But I learned it as quick as I could, actually from a guitar player, Lonnie Atkinson, who got it from Jimmy Day. It was the only thing Lonnie knew on steel guitar.

If I’m on a gig and the band does a song I don’t know I’ll learn it when I get home and be ready the next time. I’m not gonna get caught again. I don’t know how some of these guys can go for years in public without learning their parts. Seems like they would be embarrassed or something. But I guess not. I guess they’re just fucking slugs.

I don’t sing, because I can’t, but maybe if I did I’d be able to get away with this kind of unprofessional shit, too, although I wouldn’t want to.

Do you go to Karaoke bars or watch some of those TV singing shows like “American Idol”, “The Voice”, “The X Factor”, “The Sing Off” or “Glee”? A new study has found that most people, as many as 62%, can’t sing. Wow! Wake the kids and call the neighbors!

This might be news to researchers who studied this phenomenon, but it’s hardly a revelation to guys like me who’ve been backing up this 62% for years in bars, on shows and in studios. No, you don’t have to naturally be in the coveted 38% to get a record deal because ProTools can put you there. Makes you wish Shure would get restraining orders against 100% of the 62% to keep them from abusing any more innocent microphones.

An excerpt from the article on MSNBC:

In a series of five experiments, researchers compared small groups of people with or without musical training. They tested participants’ accuracy at matching their voices to various pitches, to a target vocal or musical tone, or to other singers.

The study found that anywhere from 40 to 62 percent of non-musicians were poor singers, a rate much higher than shown in previous research.

It also found that roughly 20 percent of people can’t sing accurately because they don’t have good control of their vocal muscles. Another 35 percent of poor singers have trouble matching the pitch of their own voice to the same sound heard in other timbres, such as when it’s coming from a trumpet, piano, or a person of the opposite sex. And 5 percent of lousy singers lack the ability to hear differences in pitch or discriminate between two different sounds.

To be sure, some aspects of singing are influenced by genetics. “There are certainly people who are more natural singers, and the physiological shape of their vocal tracts can give a more or less pleasing natural sound to the voice,” Hutchins points out. But he says, the best singers just like the best athletes will be those who are blessed with natural talent and have devoted a large amount of practice to their craft.

However, it’s the poor singers of the world who are the least likely to practice. And that’s what’s necessary to get better at it.

Now here’s a great country singer, true to the roots of classic country. So of course he doesn’t get played on the radio. His “Lilly Dale” album was one of the ones I wore out learning Buddy’s licks. I backed him up a few times here and there when I was with Faron, and it was always fun.

I was playing a sit-down gig at a club in Camden, TN, and management wanted to get Darrell in there, and I said, sure, good idea, I can put a great band together to back him up. So, a month in advance I got a bunch of real good pickers to do the gig. Redd Volkaert on guitar, Ronnie Dale on bass and a fine drummer, who shall remain anonymous.

I checked on everybody a week or two before the downbeat to make sure they hadn’t forgotten, or been arrested, and everybody was cool. But a day or two before the gig the drummer canceled. He couldn’t supply a sub, and I had to find somebody. This was back when I knew every musician in town, but I couldn’t find a good drummer. Everybody was booked. Everybody, no shit. All I could find was a guy who who turned out to be really new at drumming and had apparently never heard of Buddy Harman. So new and clueless that Ronnie had to tell him what drums to hit on every song. The poor guy just couldn’t play a shuffle, although he did the best he could.

Darrell was a trouper, and went on and did his show and didn’t raise any hell with the bandleader (me). He even told me after the show that he could tell I really liked his kind of music, whatever that meant.

But this fucking drummer who let me down, this piece of drek who canceled at the last minute… Geez, I’d worked with him many times, he was a great drummer, he had a good resume and he still works on Broadway. It blew me away, how unprofessional this guy turned out to be. I never woulda suspected it. But, that’s the kind of shit you have to deal with when you’re a bandleader, I guess. I wouldn’t hire this motherfucker now to piss on the Ryman if it were on fire; he’d probably tell me at the last minute he had prostate trouble, and I’d have to get some derelict from Robert’s to handle the job.