Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
<195> <199> <200>
Yeah, that occurred to me, but it is the opposite of how the strings
on a guitar are numbered. The B string is always referred to as the 2nd
string, unless I'm mistaken.
  

    
You're not mistaken.

rik, you might like to post the email you sent me.
  

    
I never keep that stuff, Tim.   If you kept the copy, you could post it
here, along with the one I just sent you.

I think the jist of it was that someone brain farted and conflated the b-
bender with that other wierd anomaly of country-based music, the-five string
banjo.    I'm pretty up on B-bender lore since I was at the Troubadour the
night Clarence unveiled it.   It was at a Monday night hoot, and every
other player there was a guitarist.   All wide-eyed, and gawking like
schoolboys at a cheerleaders convention.
  

    <scribbled by timfox Mon 27 Oct 03 11:41>
  

    
Sorry about the formatting. It looked fine in the post box.
  

    
I'll be glad to oblige.    In Picospan, you just type  :f on a line after
your paste-in, and it will automatically reformat the text.    BTW, I'm
loving your stories, Bill.

 Rik wrote:

 I think that "fifth sting bender" was a misnomer.  Someone had a brain
 fart and conflated five string banjo with telecaster.    Or counted from
 the wrong side of the guitar.   I was at the Troubadour the night Clarence
 unveiled the thing.   300 guitar players all had scrapes on their jaws
 from where they hit the floor.   The motion of pushing down on the strap
 was invisibile, and nobody could figure out how he did it.   This was in
 1968.  Oh, and Gene Parsons was the Byrds drummer at the time.

 I responded:

 "Seems like a pretty squirrelly gadget to me."

 Then Rik said:

 It was a response to a fluctuation in the zeitgeist.   Beginning around
 1967, as the folk boom died, folk rockers discovered country music, and
 bluegrass aficianados flirted with electricity.  The most arcane, wierd,
 mysterious, and instantly recognizable sound in country music was the
 pedal steel guitar, and copping pedal steel licks on guitar became a
 cottage industry around LA.   The B-bender made it possible for Clarence
 to do that to a degree that was previously impossible.    By 1975, with
 the Eagles leading the charge, the country rockers had moved back into the
 rock camp and the pedal steel sound fell out of the music.   And the
 B-bender was taken up by real country players like Flacke, Lee, and
 currently, Brent Mason.   Ironic, because the Nashville crowd had been
 fervently anti-rock and had slammed the door in the face of the Eagles and
 Poco.   The Dirt Band, and later, Dr. Hook, got their foot in the door by
 coming to town, showing respect for the old-timers, and networking by way
 of the Johnny Cash, Shel Silverstein, and Waylon Jennings followings.

 The B-Bender was a point in time.
  

    
Thank you kind sir. I'll scribble the funky posts.
  

    
<204> <207>
Uh, what does "scribbled" mean, please?
  

    
It's a thing on the Well where the poster (or in rare cases a host)
may forever obliterate an unfortunate post. Take a look at 204 now, and
you'll see what I mean.
  

    
<209>
Got it. Thanks.
  

    
So...which string does the Scruggs peg bend? 
  

    
The second and third.   One tuner for each.   Scruggs wanted a quick way to
go from open G to open D and back.   Once he had them working, he started
using them while playing a song.   Et voila, the intro to "Flint Hill
Special".
  

    
<211> <212>
True, Scruggs tuners are generally on the 2nd and 3rd string (that's
counting from the thinnest string on up).

But Bill Keith, who invented the Scruggs-Keith tuners -- a vast
improvement over the way Scruggs pegs used to be made -- has them
installed on the 1st and 4th strings as well to facilitate all kinds of
quick note and chord changes. And some folks have installed
Scruggs-Keith tuners on the 6th string of their guitars, to facilitate
moving to the dropped-D tuning quickly.
  

    
My fault for calling the B the fifth string. I never had guitar lessons.
  

    
I'm considering it myself.

Bill, I asked earlier, but I think you missed it.    There are a lot of DGQ
fans on here, myself included.   When I first heard that first album
something changed for me.   When you were putting it together, were you
aware that you were changing things?  That you were making history.  Modern
acoustic music all seems to come from those roots.
  

    
Alden slipped.
  

    
NRPS really "changed" things for me. This was psychedelic era and I
was young.  NRPS made me realize that the new era had continuity with
the previous era.
  

    
<217>
Yeah, NRPS changed things for me too, Jacques. I discovered groupies,
bless their hearts. <bg>
  

    
Naughty, naughty!
  

    


;'}

/
  

    
<215>
<215>
Sorry if I missed your question, Rik.
>When you were putting it [the first David Grisman Quintet album]
together, were you aware that you were changing things? 

No one ever mentioned (within my hearing range) that we were making
new music or changing things. We were just playing new tunes,
passionately. We were all, I believe, trying to figure out how to play
them, what to play, how to play good ensemble together. 

It was tough. "This s*$t is hard to pick," was a sometimes-heard
expression at rehearsals. We all had to work out to apprehend our
parts. We had long rehearsals -- four hours was not unusual -- with
short coffee breaks. Sometimes guys didn't even unstrap their
instruments during the breaks, or put them down. And we got together 5
days a week to pick no matter what. Four gigs that week? We'd still get
together to rehearse on one of the off days. One gig that week? We'd
rehearse four days.

For myself, on many of the tunes, I felt that I had to come up with a
bass line that was neither two-beat nor 4-to-the-bar. I felt that
2-beat was too much like bluegrass and 4-to-the-bar was too much like
jazz. So I came up the kind of part you hear on some of the tunes, such
as Dawg's Rag, some of the time. Instead of playing 1 - 5 - 1 - 5
(root, fifth, root, fifth) I'd play 1 - 5 - 3 - 1 (root, 5th above,
3rd, root). Maybe that had been done before, and there's nothing genius
about it, but it was what I came up with to match the spirit of the
tunes, which, again, were neither bluegrass nor jazz, blues, country,
Eastern European, or Latin music, but something of them all. I used the
bow sometimes, too, something you don't hear in bluegrass. And
certainly when I heard Tony play a descending line I tried to come up
with an ascending line; when he played an ascending line I again
usually tried for contrary motion.

Nothing earth-shaking, but maybe an example of how, in just trying to
come up with the right parts for these tunes we created new music. But
we never said, Gosh, we're creating new music, we're changing things.
We were just pickin' passionately, I think.
  

    
That's for sure. 

Speaking of banjos, do you get to perform much with yours, these days?

Publicly, I mean. Not just for groupies. 
  

    <scribbled by jax Mon 27 Oct 03 15:04>
  

    


Seth Evans writes:


Bill,

I loved your tale, Paris Remembers. Considering the political climate today
do you think that perhaps they have finally forgotten?

Seth Evans
  

    
<222>
Banjo is the main instrument I use to accompany my storytelling. So,
yes, I've been picking more these days.