In the Slums of New Pennsylyorksey

I think I finally played some blues.

I’ve been working on material from Stevie Ray Vaughan, B.B. King, and ZZ Top. It’s great for technique improvement. But as of yesterday I had not gotten to the point where I could really PLAY anything.

I used to play one blues tune on the acoustic guitar. I would tell you what it was, but I can’t, because it was actually two songs. Sometimes it was “Boom Boom,” and sometimes it was “Dimples.” These two John Lee Hooker tunes are so similar, they are pretty much interchangeable.

Over the last ten years, I forgot a couple of the chords that were needed to play this tune, and I procrastinated and didn’t sit down and figure them out. I hate finding the right chord by ear. I don’t have the training to figure chords out analytically, so I have to go by trial and error.

Yesterday I found some solutions, and I started playing. Everything started opening up to me. The guitars which had been resisting me suddenly started working with me. It was MUSIC.

I learned a couple of things. First off, it looks like the semi-hollow single-coil sound is probably going to be a big part of my playing. Yesterday I started out with my flawless History ES335 copy, with humbuckers, and I thought things were going well. Then I switched to my $500 Epiphone Riviera with Chinese P90s, and I felt like the clouds parted. Suddenly, I the reverb became part of the music instead of seeming irrelevant, and I felt like I heard the guitar instead of just the pickups. The sound had more life in it, and oddly, the intonation seemed surer.

From there I moved to my Gibson Blueshawk, and the sound was even better. The Blueshawk has single-coil Blues 90 pickups. It sounded more open and alive than the Epiphone. The action is still not great; that guitar needs more adjustment. But as I fooled with the selector switch and the Vari-tone, I got one great sound after another out of it.

I like the humbuckers in my Burny Les Paul, but the ones in my History guitars seem somewhat sterile and bright. I ordered some Z90 humbucker-sized pickups to try in my History Les Paul; we’ll see how that works out.

The move to John Lee Hooker was a good one. It opened my eyes to a horrible truth: B.B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan are much better technicians than John Lee Hooker, but I enjoy listening to Hooker’s guitar playing more, and if I want to touch other people, I should probably think more like John Lee Hooker than the other guys I admire. Soul is much more important than skill and knowledge. It’s the most important thing to get right.

Think about it. Imagine a group of non-stoned listeners who are not mindless teenage metalheads. What will get their blood pumping fastest? Steve Vai, shredding like a maniac, or the first fifteen seconds of Muddy Waters playing “Mannish Boy”? Everybody–EVERYBODY–sits up straight when they hear Mannish Boy. I’ll bet even Al Gore gets Mannish Boy. And you could probably train a monkey to play it. It couldn’t be much simpler.

Of course, if you’re on drugs and full of adolescent hormones, you’ll go for the loud, speed-demon white guy from suburban New Pennsylyorksey every time. I never liked that kind of music. Boring.

Maybe I’ll put up a Youtube eventually.