Bigsby Files and a new book in the works...

Sorry folks, it's been quite a while since I posted anything here on the Muleskinner blog.  I've been busier than ever!


I haven't been resting on my laurels, though.  I created a new blog about Bigsby guitars that took a lot of my brain space away for a spell.  Check it out at www.bigsbyfiles.blogspot.com


Also, I have a book deal with Voyageur Press for an upcoming book of Guitarcheology called "The Strat Under The Bed."  I've been surgically attached to my laptop trying to compile the best guitar stories for a really fun book on the art of digging up old guitars.  I can't post those stories here, because they're paying me to write a book, but look for it soon at a local bookstore--Voyageur gets their stuff everywhere.


More fun Muleskinner musings when I get the time....

Runes of The San Fernando Valley

RUNE STONES, STRIP MALLS, AND OUR MOMENT IN TIME

I’m fascinated by the history of civilizations, and the signs and symbols they leave behind.  Just turn on the History Channel and watch endless hours of programming deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics, Norse runes, Paleolithic cave paintings, and other mysterious forms of communication that humans left as proof of their existence.

With all the attention given such ancient artifacts, given a sense of perspective one can’t help but realize that these amazing glimpses into previous epochs were no big deal to the people who lived in those times.  Cave paintings?  Undoubtedly the graffiti of some bored everyman stuck in a cave during a cold spell.  Rune stones?  The ones that have surfaced tell of general events of the day, the scratched-stone equivalent of a local newspaper.  Egyptian artifacts?  The Egyptians meant for their dead to stay buried, not looted by thieves and dissected by scientists.  The point is, none of these people thought that they were leaving something behind that would be intensely studied by future generations, keen on unlocking the secrets of their society.

With that in mind, I began wondering to myself about the present.  We as Americans have been raised at birth to think of ourselves as the center of the universe, but other than a few marble monuments and presidents carved into the side of a mountain, what symbols and signs would we leave for future generations to decipher who we were?

The answer, I came to realize, is that in the last two hundred years or so, most of what we’ve left behind are things made of paper, plastic, wood, and other mediums that will not survive into the future the same way that rune stones and cave paintings have.  For instance, McDonald’s restaurants are undoubtedly the most revealing look into American eating habits of the present day, but would any evidence of McDonald’s survive two thousand years?  I suppose if you count the Styrofoam containers they used to put McDonald’s hamburgers in back in the 1980's, you’re probably right.  The legacy of the McDonald’s brand, however, is a different story.  The buildings, advertising, and products themselves are made of stucco, particle board, paper, cardboard, and other things that wouldn’t survive a couple of bad winters, much less a millennium.  I’m guessing a thousand years from now some kid will dig up a Happy Meal toy of the Hamburglar in his back yard, and it will be sent to a university for study of its meaning (this assumption based on the hopeful premise that McDonald’s will have disappeared from the planet in a thousand years).

Now that much of our society and human interaction has gone online and digital, the distinction (and the shelf-life) is even greater.  Just try reading some of your old floppy disks from 12 years ago, if you can get your monolithic PC to work at all.  Undoubtedly much of the written word in the next hundred years will be lost with one nasty solar flare on the electrical grid, gone in one digital blip.

With all that in mind, I began thinking about my surroundings.  What was there in my civilization that signified what my culture was about?  What symbols were there that I could recognize as signs of my society?

Laugh if you must, but in the midst of this soul-searching, a journey for my own sense of place in history, I believe I have discovered the runes of the San Fernando Valley.

The San Fernando Valley is the sort of place that baffles city planners and is spoken of with disgust by the East Coast effete.  It is the great American suburb run amok, expansion that happened so quickly and turbulently that now we are left with an area that would be America’s fourth largest city, if it were to secede from greater Los Angeles.  In the Valley’s great area of population, there is no central gathering place, no downtown, no real sense of self—just a hundred little villages from the earlier part of the Twentieth Century that all grew into each other to form one dazzlingly large single-cell organism, like a fungi of unbridled capitalism and humankind.

Across the hill in the greater Los Angeles basin, Hollywood hipsters have the luxury of walking out the front door to find piss-soaked winos in their doorway, or the window broken out in their car, stereo removed.  In exchange, they are allowed to live within earshot of the thumping loud dance club down the street.  This particular logic might appeal to the displaced East Coaster, but I always felt at home in the middle of Super-suburbia, knowing that if I wanted to go see a show or attend a movie premiere, I just had to drive 15 minutes over the hill. After all the Big City excitement, I could drive back to my quiet little street in the Valley, and if I accidentally forgot to lock my car doors, everything would still be there in the morning.  For me, Midwestern transplant that I was, the Valley just made sense, city planners be damned.

The San Fernando Valley was, up until the middle of the last century, a fertile valley for farming and livestock.  Huge ranches and orchards took up giant chunks of acreage, with small pockets of civilization popping up around its perimeter (Ventura Boulevard, for example).

The Valley stayed mostly farmland, due to an annoying habit of massively flooding every ten years.  Developers waited, drooling uncontrollably, until the city planners devised a solution—to contain the Los Angeles River within a concrete waterslide diverted directly to the Sepulveda Flood Basin in the middle of Valley.  The “channelization” project, as implemented by the Federal Army Corps of Engineers, started in 1938 and was finished in 1960.

Once the river had been contained—now a humorous trickle down the middle of a series of cavernous concrete flood channels—the law of supply and demand took over.  After World War Two ended, the San Fernando Valley expanded at an incredible rate, bursting from the South end of the Valley to the North, over the years taking over the ranches and Orange groves and putting hundreds of ranch-style homes in their place.  Everyone had jobs, everyone had money, and these people needed places to live.

At first glance, it is hard to imagine a place in the United States less suited to societal study than the San Fernando Valley.  After all, the Valley is less than a hundred years old, and it’s unremarkable in terms of historical events, architecture, and population makeup. What is there, if anything, that resembles a rune stone, a cave painting, or hieroglyphics?

It took me years to absorb my surroundings in the Valley.  The untrained eye would simply dismiss the entirety of the region as generic housing for the masses.  In many cases it was, but then I started noticing the symbols.  Silly as it may seem, upon closer inspection, these were what I had been looking for—the secret symbols of the San Fernando Valley.

I started seeing them everywhere once I finally noticed them.  The most common one was a square or rectangle with branches on each side, framed by a larger square or rectangle.  There were variations, dozens and dozens of variations on the same theme.

Once I noticed them, I started photographing them.  In the course of two or three years, with a frenzy of real estate “flipping” and remodeling, many of these symbols disappeared, replaced with generic Home Depot windows, made in China by the millions.

I realized, as I watched these things disappear, that the San Fernando Valley symbols were never going to make it to another millennium.  These symbols were going to be remodeled into oblivion.  I thought about how many rune stones had been repurposed into making buildings or stone walls, and how they used to have so many mummies in Egypt that you could actually buy ground-up mummies to use as paper pulp, brown dye, and a medicinal supplement (true).  The whole trick with a society and their symbols is that when that society was active, these things were commonplace.  The symbols gain meaning when the society disappears, and there are only a few examples left of their symbols to study.

I began to search to see if the San Fernando Valley’s symbols had any real meaning.  After doing a fair amount of research, I couldn’t find any exact corollaries with the Valley symbols.  A complete perusal of Symbols.com and SymbolDictionary.com found several close matches, one of which pointed to an ancient chemical symbol for Vitriol, another that revealed an ancient Mariner symbol for a Buddhist temple, and another that indicated the design of an ancient Swedish board game.  None of these seemed like the San Fernando Valley homebuilder’s intent.

It’s possible that the design was borrowed from a generic architect’s vision of a Buddhist temple symbol, but in true L.A. fashion the symbols are on houses with an Oriental theme, as well as houses with a Colonial flair, and on houses that look like a 1950’s flying saucer.  If there was supposed to be an Asian motif behind the symbol in the first place, these builders apparently didn’t seem to care.

I tend to think that the designs are meant to be Asian, or in that great California way, meant to make you feel an Asian feeling.  On the other hand, the only time I've seen something eerily similar was on a trip to England, on a random house outside London.

So, if anything, what do they mean?  Perhaps they don’t mean anything.  It very well could be that the homebuilders of the 1950’s and 1960’s just needed quickie decorative elements on the outside of the houses they were throwing up in slapdash fashion.  Maybe, but the amount of variation and creativity displayed in the many designs suggests there is more to it than that.

I prefer to think that in some “Mad Men” architect’s office fifty years ago, there was an operative of the Illuminati whose mission it was to impart a campaign of secret symbols throughout the Valley.  Several hundred years from now, some author will write a ‘Da Vinci Code’-type novel based on the secret symbols of the San Fernando Valley, finally deciphering what these ubiquitous, yet mysterious, symbols were trying to tell us all along.

In the meantime, as I walk these streets (who am I kidding—as I drive these streets), I see them.  Hundreds of them, like silent sentinels, guarding their tract houses like ancient lamb’s blood on the door.  Whatever they are supposed to mean, these runes of the San Fernando Valley are disappearing with every passing day.  I hope to bring attention to them, before they are all gone.

When I saw how quickly the symbols of the Valley were disappearing, I decided that in my own small way, I would help to preserve them.  When my garage window became so ravaged by time and sun that it needed replacing, I decided to fill it in with something else--a brand new secret symbol of the San Fernando Valley.

What’s in your Valley?  What objects do you walk by every day?  I hope that wherever you live, you find something that represents a symbol of your society, no matter how unexplainable and potentially silly they may be.  Open your eyes and let the possibilities exist.

Deke Dickerson, Northridge, CA

Below: More examples of the mysterious San Fernando Valley symbols.  Do you have more to share? Email the author here.

The Maddox Brothers and Rose, country music royalty

The Maddox Brothers and Rose, immediately after they migrated from Alabama to California in 1933 (Kenneth, aka "Don Juan" Maddox, on the right, age 11 years in this photo).  At this time they joined hundreds of other depression-era families who lived in abandoned drainage pipes in what was called "Pipe City" in Oakland, CA.

From left to right: Fred, Don, and Cal Maddox, live on stage mid-1950's.  Previously unpublished photograph.

Below: Don Maddox and myself, Medford, Oregon, 2009.

Did you ever see a "Twin Six" guitar?

From the book "Appalachian Portraits" by Shelby Lynn Adams

Yes, these photos are real.

Don't forget to attend "HILLBILLYFEST" this Saturday night at Joe's in Burbank, CA.

WILLIE DIXON--Blues Songwriter and Bass Player Extraordinaire

“I BUNCHED ‘EM”—My favorite authentic bluesman story

Willie Dixon was the first real bluesman I ever saw live.  I was thirteen years old, infatuated with the guitar, and living life as an uncoordinated, gangly teenager in the country outside Columbia, Missouri.

By the time I was thirteen, I was doing my own radio show on public station KOPN in Columbia, where a great man named Bill Wax mentored me on music (don’t be too impressed about having my own show, it was public radio, after all, and I followed “The Puppet Lady,” who was a woman who, indeed, performed puppet shows…on the RADIO). 

Bill Wax, at the time Music Director for KOPN, was one of many obsessed music freaks (and I mean this as the highest compliment) that I have had the pleasure of knowing in my lifetime.  Listening to his own show on KOPN, I vividly remember the first time I ever heard Louis Jordan—on a two-hour special dedicated to Jordan’s music.  Thinking about this now, it boggles the mind—who dedicates a two hour timeslot to Louis Jordan in the wilderness days of the early 1980s?  The answer: A lunatic like Bill Wax.

Bill turned me on to blues music.  I had a negative image of blues at the time, because I hated (and still hate) eternal jams of soulless, wanking blues music created by white people.  You know, the type of blues music that actually sells millions of albums.  I thought that blues music was something that hairy hippies did to torture people.

My first guitar teacher was one of those guys, a Carlos Santana-look-alike that grimaced and made faces as he played solo after endless solo, apparently feeling some sort of soulful catharsis that did not provoke the same emotions in me.  In fact, his blues soloing made me dream about killing him, so that I would never have to hear his guitar playing ever again.  When he told me that I had to quit listening to Buddy Holly if I ever wanted to get any better on the guitar, I promptly quit taking guitar lessons (and I still love Buddy Holly).

Bill Wax convinced me, a jaded 13-year old snot-nosed rockabilly kid, that real black blues music was “the shit,” to use his term.  He turned me on to lowdown guys like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Elmore James, as well as uptown guys like Louis Jordan and Bobby “Blue” Bland.  I still remember hearing Howlin’ Wolf sing for the first time.  It scared the hell out of me, it sounded violent and wicked and like a scream set to music.  That was the moment when I knew that Howlin’ Wolf, despite record sales and monetary compensation that would indicate otherwise, was one million times greater than Eric Clapton or his ilk ever could be or would be.

I remember being in the KOPN broadcast studio in early 1983, when Bill Wax told me that Willie Dixon was coming to town, and that I needed to figure out a way to go see him play.  I didn’t know who Willie Dixon was at the time, but I was given the two-dollar history that day at the studio, and I’ve spent the last thirty years learning about the rest of Willie Dixon’s story.

Willie Dixon is best known as blues music’s greatest songwriter.  His pen is responsible for such classics as “Spoonful,” “Little Red Rooster,” “Hoochie Koochie Man,” “Wang Dang Doodle,” and even Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” (which Willie had to sue to get paid for—in the end Led Zeppelin settled out of court in Willie’s favor).

Willie Dixon was also one of the greatest acoustic slap-bass players of all time.  He played bass for all the people that recorded at Chess Studios—not just the blues guys that you would expect, but also rock and roll artists, including the classic recordings of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.  His bass playing skills went back to the 1940s and early 1950s when he was a member of the Big Three Trio, and his scary slap-bass solo on “Hard Notch Boogie Beat” is a tour-de-force that modern slap-bass players use as the benchmark of slap bass acrobatics.

Willie also produced records at Chess, something that went unaccredited back in the day.  Many of the classic recordings made at Chess sounded the way they did because of Willie’s arranging skills, or his advice on how things should be done.  The Chess Brothers paid Willie, but nothing like what he should have been paid for the influence he had on these million-selling records.  In the end, Willie Dixon had the last laugh—long after the Chess empire had gone bankrupt, Willie Dixon’s estate bought the former Chess studios at 2120 South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, and turned the place into a museum run by Willie’s family.

When I found out about Willie Dixon coming to town, I begged my dad to take me to the Blue Note to see the show.  The legal age to get into the club was twenty-one.  There was no way I could go.  I begged and begged and cajoled and pleaded.  Somehow or another, through Bill Wax and a few other people in town that liked me, my dad talked the owners of the Blue Note (Phil Costello and Richard King) into letting me into the club to see the show, as a sort of “cultural education” project.  I remember hearing my dad talking on the phone, promising Costello that he would personally watch me and make sure I didn’t drink.

The Blue Note is still there, in my hometown, and it is still the premier live music venue in one of the biggest college towns in the Midwest (the University of Missouri has its primary campus in Columbia).  Today the Blue Note occupies a huge converted movie theater in downtown Columbia, where a thousand people can come to see national headlining acts.  Back in the early 1980s, however, the club occupied a spot in a seedy strip along the Business Loop, in a sweat-and-beer-infused cinderblock room that held 250 people on a really good night.

The Blue Note was part of a long established “chittlin’ circuit” that slowly evolved into a “college circuit” as time went by.  The circuit roughly went from Chicago to St. Louis to Columbia to Kansas City to Lincoln and/or Omaha, down to Tulsa, Oklahoma City and then Texas.  This particular circuit must have started back in the days when the highway system was first evolving, and then it turned into a “follow the money” situation where a lot of live acts played that route because of the lucrative college gigs in each of these towns.  When I was first going to shows in the 1980s, it was interesting to see old blues guys obviously playing the same towns on what was their old “chittlin’ circuit,” in the same week that a new upstart band like R.E.M. or The Replacements was playing at the same club.

Most people would qualify the original Blue Note as a ‘dive,’ but to a 13-year old kid with stars in his eyes, it was a magical palace of wonderment.  My dad parked his car in the large gravel parking lot, and we went inside and sat at a wobbly table on duct-tape covered vinyl seats.  After hearing the “grownups” at the radio station talk about the Blue Note for the better part of a year, I couldn’t believe I was actually inside the place, getting ready to hear live music!  By god, I was excited.

The opening act was a local blues act called The Bel-Airs, who, like the Blue Note nightclub, are still around today.  Led by two brothers, Dave and Dick Pruitt, the Bel-Airs were white guys, but they weren’t hippie blues wankers.  I would eventually see the Bel-Airs hundreds of times, but this was my first time seeing them live in person.  They were great, covering vintage blues songs, mixing it up with a few rockabilly classics like Warren Smith’s “Uranium Rock” and even a little soul with Joe Tex’ “Show Me.”  I was floored at what I was seeing.

When it came time for the main event, I quickly learned a thing or two about legendary bluesmen.  First of all, most of them are so burnt at how they were ripped off back in the day, that they play incredibly short sets.  To accomplish this and still get paid by the club owner, they bring a band that performs a warm-up set, which in blues parlance is “killing time.”  Willie’s band (and I apologize if any of them are reading this) was so completely unmemorable that I have no memory of what they played.  All I remember is that I wanted to see Willie Dixon, and they were keeping me from seeing Willie Dixon, and it was way past my usual 8^th-grade bedtime.

I was lucky enough to see many of the great bluesmen (and blues women) at the Blue Note club growing up in Columbia.  I saw John Lee Hooker, James Cotton, Pinetop Perkins, Etta James, Koko Taylor, Matt “Guitar” Murphy, Buddy Guy, Johnny Copeland, and many more during this era.  Most of them followed the same formula—a half-baked “warm-up” set by the backing band, followed by the bluesman doing a short set of classics with one or two songs from the inevitable “new album,” and then a strong-armed, grifter-esque hustle to buy their incredibly overpriced merchandise after the show. 

My one personal interaction with John Lee Hooker involved him refusing to sign a poster I’d removed from the wall for the Blue Note gig.  He refused because I hadn’t bought anything from his merchandise stall.  When I opened my wallet and showed him that this little punk-ass white kid literally had no money in his wallet, John Lee Hooker growled at me like an caged lion, angrily grabbed my poster and ‘wrote’ a slash mark across it, as if he were a pissed-off drug dealer in a hurry to get to his second job as a pimp.  If I recall correctly, John Lee Hooker was selling cassette tapes at his show for twenty dollars—TWENTY DOLLARS—in an era where they usually retailed for five.  I think my defaced poster (which I still own) and the story I’ve been telling for thirty years was a much better bargain in the long run.  I’ll never forget getting the crap scared out of me by John Lee Hooker, that’s for sure!

When Willie Dixon finally took the stage that night, I was floored.  I was dumbfounded.  Here was the guy who wrote all those songs, the guy who played bass on all those records, a real honest-to-god hall-of-fame legend, ten feet in front of me.  He was old!  He was black!  He was incredibly overweight!  He was slapping the upright bass!  It was everything that a 13-year old nerdy music-obsessed kid could hope for.  When he spoke on the microphone, the whole club got whisper-silent.  That was when I understood respect.  Willie Dixon commanded and received ultimate respect.

That night was the first time I went to a nightclub and saw live music.  In retrospect, seeing Willie Dixon as an introduction to live music was an incredibly lucky break.  From that moment on, I couldn’t get enough.  I discovered that even though I was 13 years old, I was six feet tall and the front door guy didn’t check ID’s.  After a while, everybody at the Blue Note knew me anyway, and most of the time I was waved in without having to pay.  I was incredibly blessed and fortunate to grow up seeing blues, country music, rock and roll, punk rock, soul, jazz, and just about any other form of music you could imagine.  I can’t imagine how different my life would have turned out without the musical education afforded me by the Blue Note.

As my own musical career began, Phil Costello and Richard King gave my youthful bands experience when no one else would (kudos must also go to Johnny Hodges, the guy who ran a club in town called “Shattered”).  Thirty-some years later, Richard King still owns the Blue Note, and still supports my career, booking me when I come back through Columbia. 

I will always be grateful for the support I received during those early days—I’m not sure that many of the other jaded club owners across the country realize that they’re fostering the next generation of musicians when they’re dealing with teenage snot-nosed punks trying to play their clubs with their amateurish young bands.

What’s that, you say?  The Willie Dixon story promised at the beginning of this rambling trip down Memory Lane?  Yes, let’s wrap up this tale with a Willie Dixon anecdote that still ranks as my favorite bluesman story of all time.

Dick Pruitt of the Bel-Airs told me this story about Willie decades after the fact.  The Bel-Airs were doing a run of shows as the opening act for Willie, and on the same tour after I saw them and Willie play at the Blue Note, they played at a club in Lincoln, Nebraska.

The club in Lincoln had put the Bel-Airs and Willie Dixon and his band in a dive motel.  For a blues legend like Willie Dixon, it was an insult, but undoubtedly it was like thousands of other substandard hotel rooms he had stayed in during his long career.

Dick remembers that their band hotel room was full of flies.  Not just a couple flies buzzing around, but an outright fly infestation.  He couldn’t stand hanging out in the room, so he was walking around outside, and decided to pay Willie a visit.  Willie let Dick into his room, and they were talking about the tour, and how the shows were going.

Dick Pruitt then noticed that Willie’s room was free of the flies that had infested their room several doors down.  When asked how come Willie’s room didn’t have the flies buzzing around like theirs did, Willie Dixon had a perfectly reasonable reply:

“I bunched ‘em,” replied Willie, in his trademark, throaty, deep bluesman voice.

Unsure of what this meant, Dick looked around the room.  In the far corner of Willie Dixon’s motel room was a large pile of human crap, covered with flies.

That, to me, will always be what the blues are all about.

Deke Dickerson

Below: A newspaper article from the Columbia Daily Tribune following Willie's appearance at the Blue Note, May 2, 1983.

JOHNNY MEEKS’ FORGOTTEN TRIPLE-NECK GUITAR

A GUITAR MYSTERY SOLVED—Gene Vincent’s legendary guitarist Johnny Meeks and his triple-neck solidbody electric guitar

“Why, you’re the first to ever ask me about that damn triple-neck guitar,” said the gentle South Carolina accent on the other end of the phone.

The voice belonged to Johnny Meeks, a guitar player whose name is instantly recognizable to fans of legendary rockabilly star Gene Vincent.  Johnny Meeks was Vincent’s second guitar player--brought to the Blue Caps band in 1957 after their first guitarist, the also-legendary Cliff Gallup, quit due to the rigors of touring.  

Cliff Gallup brought a country-jazz sensibility to Vincent’s music, but Johnny Meeks brought a tough rock and roll twang that gave life to such classics as “Lotta Lovin’,” “Dance To The Bop,” “Baby Blue,” and many more.  Despite the fact that Johnny Meeks’ tenure with Gene Vincent’s band lasted less than two years, his guitar approach gave Gene Vincent a solid second half of his original career, and Meeks’ trebly tone set the stage for instrumental and surf music that came in the following years.

Below: The 1950's in Technicolor: Johnny Meeks, in the back center, behind Gene Vincent, foreground.

Those who enjoy the science of “Guitar Geekery” know that Johnny was most famous for playing a blonde 1957 Fender Stratocaster (dubbed the “Mary Kaye Strat” by collectors from a publicity picture showing the famous female jazz player holding a similarly appointed Stratocaster).  The truth was that Mary Kaye held the guitar in the promotional photograph for five minutes and then went back to playing her D’Angelico archtop. 

Johnny Meeks, on the other hand, took his blonde Strat on the road, hitting gymnasiums in Milwaukee and clubs in Dallas and wherever else you can think of, shows sandwiched in between trips to the Capitol Tower in Hollywood for recording sessions.  In retrospect, a more accurate name for the blonde Stratocasters made in 1957 and 1958 would be the “Johnny Meeks Strat.”

Below: Johnny Meeks (left) and the Blue Caps record at the Capitol Tower, Hollywood.  Note entire band is plugged into one amplifier!

To see these two-dimensional characters come to life, see Johnny Meeks wail on his blonde Strat here, from the 1957 movie "Hot Rod Gang."

True scholars of Johnny Meeks’ tenure with Gene Vincent also know that he briefly played a Gretsch 6120 before getting the Strat.  This Gretsch can be seen on Gene’s Ed Sullivan Show appearance here.  It’s interesting to note that Johnny played on the treble pickup on the Gretsch and got some pretty impressive Fender-like tones out of the 6120.  It is fair to say a great deal of the magic came from the man’s hands.

Below, a picture of Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps recording at the Capitol Tower, Hollywood, California.  Johnny Meeks is seen on the right playing a Gretsch 6120.

What piqued this Guitar Geek’s interest, however, were two photos circulating on the Internet showing Johnny Meeks holding a black and white triple-necked electric guitar.  No one seemed to know exactly what it was.  Some ventured a guess that it was made by Doc Kauffmann, the California-via-Kansas inventor responsible for the Kauffmann hand vibrato, and the first mass-produced guitars that Leo Fender had a hand in (1940’s “Vibro” and “K&F” guitars were Doc and Leo-produced instruments).  Doc Kauffmann also made a series of “Kremo-Kustom” guitars, which looked quite similar to the Johnny Meeks triple-neck guitar.  Doc made Kremo-Kustom double-necks and triple-necks, and used a black and white color scheme.  My first thought was that Meeks' triple-neck almost certainly had to be a Doc Kauffmann Kremo-Kustom instrument.

Below: A Doc Kauffmann Kremo-Kustom triple-neck guitar.

Johnny Meeks is still with us.  He is not an easy guy to find, but not because of stardom or any ill will towards his fans.  The truth is that he lives in a small town in South Carolina, doesn’t have a computer, doesn’t have a cell phone, and he likes it that way.  Meeks spent years in Los Angeles hammering away at the clubs, doing stints in various touring bands (Meeks played with The Champs of “Tequila” fame, played in the house band at the Palomino Club, and toured for a while with Merle Haggard).  These days he’s back in South Carolina, semi-retired, and doing little gigs here and there to stay busy.

Hear Johnny’s cool instrumental “Red Eye” by The Champs here).  

Below: a photo of Johnny Meeks, right, with The Champs.

After getting his phone number from Blue Caps drummer Dickie Harrell, I gave Meeks a call and found him getting ready to go to a show at the local swap meet.  I told him how we’d played together a few times nearly twenty years previous, but he had no memory of the shows.

Below: A photo of Johnny Meeks, center, on stage with the Dave & Deke Combo at the Palomino Club, circa 1991-1992. The author is at left.

When the small talk subsided, I asked him about the triple-neck guitar.

“A boy in Greenville, South Carolina made that guitar.  His name was ‘Pee Wee’ Melton, and he could pick, boy he could pick.  He made that guitar for himself, and I asked him if he would sell it to me, and he did.

“It was right after that I got hired by Gene (Vincent).  A lot of people joked that Gene wanted the guitar, not me!  That might have been the case, I don’t know, but it was an attention-getting guitar, for sure.

“I used the guitar when I first went on the road with Gene.  Not long after that, Gene bought the guitar from me, and started using it himself.  Not to play, ‘cause Gene couldn’t really play, but he used it as a stage prop, and it got lots of attention.

“I had two stints with Gene, with about a month or two in between after I left the first time.  When I came back to play with him again, the guitar was gone.  I never did find out from Gene what happened to it.  It’s got to be out there somewhere, right?  I mean, you don’t just lose a triple-neck guitar!”

Below: A poor quality picture pulled from the internet, the only other known photo of Meeks with the tripleneck guitar.

Meeks recalls that the three necks included a standard 6-string guitar, a 4-string mandolin, and a 12-string that he tuned both to standard 12-string tuning and the “Stratosphere” tuning, where the paired strings were tuned in minor and major thirds, allowing for a “twin guitar” effect.

Not much is known about the maker, ‘Pee Wee’ Melton, but there is a brief bio on the ‘Find-A-Grave’ website.  Apparently Melton had a stint in Nashville as a session guitarist, and wrote such songs as “High Tech Redneck.”  See Pee Wee’s memorial page here.

Gene Vincent kept touring, kept playing, and kept making records, until he died of a bleeding ulcer in 1971 at the age of 36.  After Johnny Meeks left his band, he never regained the momentum his career had with “Be-Bop-A-Lula” and “Lotta Lovin’.”

Johnny Meeks, one of the last men standing from the wild days of the 1950’s, jokes about his 57 years of playing experience: “Around here, they say well, you played with Gene Vincent, you played with the Champs, you played with Merle Haggard…how come you can’t keep a job?”

Two faded snapshots, one man’s memory, and a forgotten guitar—these are all that remain of ‘Pee Wee’ Melton’s triple-neck instrument.  The mystery may be solved for the time being, but the guitar is still out there somewhere.  Only if the winding rivers known as Fate and Lady Luck intertwine will we ever know more.

Written by Deke Dickerson

LEFTY FRIZZELL--"He Died From Heartbreak"

LEFTY FRIZZELL—Liner notes to the Bear Family CD "STEPPIN' OUT"

Lefty Frizzell was the greatest honky-tonk singer of all time—if you ask the most educated and highly opinionated fans of country music, that is.  Blessed with a voice that came naturally to him—a voice that held so much soul and carried such infinite layers of emotional expression, that grown men were oft-moved to tears—Lefty was also cursed with bad habits and a downward career path that left him dead in 1975 at the tragically young age of 47.

This compilation of tracks, part of the ‘Gonna Shake This Shack’ series, seeks to compile all the up-tempo numbers—hillbilly boogie, rockabilly, borderline rock and roll and hard late 1950s country—for a package that will undoubtedly appeal to crowd of rockabilly fans and those seeking to have a lone Lefty Frizzell disc in their collection.

Let it be known, however, that a disc that contains only the uptempo Lefty Frizzell numbers is much like a painting that uses only two of the primary colors.  Lefty’s incredible depth of emotion lent itself best to plaintive ballads and waltzes, and although the uptempo numbers are also great, if you really want to experience the full breadth of Lefty’s talent this author urges you to seek out the most essential of Bear Family box sets, ‘Life’s Like Poetry.’ (BCD 15550)

William Orville ‘Lefty’ Frizzell was born March 31, 1928 in the oil and farm town of Corsicana, Texas, about 50 miles southeast of Dallas.  As a young child, his family moved to El Dorado, Arkansas, where they remained until Lefty was a teenager.  Although the family would always call him ‘Sonny,’ since he was the first boy in the family, the nickname ‘Lefty’ was acquired during a school fight with another boy.  The nickname—which came because Lefty led with his left hand in the fight—stuck with him throughout his life, even though Lefty played his guitar right-handed.

As a child, Lefty loved music and began playing guitar at a young age, even securing a spot on a children’s radio show on the local station KELD at the age of 12.  When the Frizzell family moved back to Texas, Lefty won a talent contest in Dallas, which bolstered the youngster to continue in music, which he did, alternating between working in the Texas oilfields and performing at honky-tonks on the weekends.

In 1945, Lefty wed Alice Harper, when both of them were 16 years old and too young to get married without parental permission.  Soon afterward their first child, Lois, was born, and in 1946 Lefty and his new family moved to New Mexico in search of a better life, first to Capitan and then to Roswell, a then-booming Army town close to the West Texas border.

Lefty pursued singing and writing songs in Roswell, while Alice worked at a downtown café.  A local musician had a Wilcox-Gay disc recorder, and Lefty begged to get some of his songs recorded on the primitive device, such was his desire to become a professional singer. 

Times were tough and the family nearly starved to death, circumstances made worse by Lefty’s tendency to get in trouble with the law.  Eight days after the legendary Roswell ‘U.F.O.’ crash happened in Roswell in July 1947, Lefty was arrested and served six months in the Roswell jail for what he called “fightin’ and carryin’ on” in a later interview.  In reality, the charges were statutory rape, a married 19-year old man caught with a 14-year old girl.  The time Lefty spent in jail just about killed him, wondering if Alice would take their new baby Lois and leave.

Whether ‘U.F.O.’ crashes or captured alien beings played into the equation, Lefty wrote the first of many future hit songs in the Roswell jail in September 1947, I Love You A Thousand Ways.  The song was a plaintive apology to his wife Alice for his misdeeds.

Upon release in early 1948, Lefty and family moved back to Texas, where eventually he would set up a residency at the Ace of Clubs in Big Spring, a club gig that would last more than a year.  Lefty’s original songs were popular with the local crowds, and on many occasions people recommended that Lefty should try making records.

Eventually Lefty heard about a talent scout in Dallas by the name of Jim Beck, and he set out on the 300-mile trip from Big Spring to Dallas in April 1950, to audition for Beck, the pleasure of which cost Lefty and his band one hundred of their hard-earned dollars.

Dallas, Texas in the late 1940’s was quickly establishing itself as a country music hub.  There was a large ‘Opry’-type show there, the ‘Big ‘D’ Jamboree,’ which drew thousands each week to the Sportatorium in downtown Dallas.  The show was broadcast on the radio to most of the southern United States.

Jim Beck was a magnet for talent in the area, where he not only ran the only real professional recording studio in Dallas at the time, but also through his work as a talent scout and A&R man for such labels as Columbia, King, Bullet, and Imperial.

Columbia Records in particular drew a lot of talent from the Dallas area, signing hillbilly acts like Frankie Miller and Charlie Adams, and rockabilly acts like Sid King and the Five Strings, among others.  Included in that talent pool, and the greatest discovery for Beck and Columbia Records, was a fresh-faced kid named Lefty Frizzell.

While Beck was mildly interested in Frizzell’s ballads, it wasn’t until Lefty sang him a new song he had been working on, If You’ve Got The Money (I’ve Got The Time) that Beck’s ears really perked up.  There are many versions of the story, and fifty years later it is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff in deciphering these many accounts, but what counts is that by July 1950 Lefty was recording his first session at Jim Beck’s studio as a newly signed Columbia Recording artist.

This compilation begins with a track that makes buying this CD essential—an unreleased track from 1950 that didn’t make it on the original Bear Family box set due to licensing problems at the time.  Steppin’ Out is a wonderful slice of honky tonk—co-written by Hank Williams and Jimmy Fields—that is heard on compact disc for the first time here—a rare 45 reissue of the song was released in the 1980s, but is finally here on CD for the Lefty fanatics.

Lefty’s first few sessions in 1950 and 1951 resulted in several of the biggest hits of his career—If You’ve Got The Money (I’ve Got The Time), I Love You A Thousand Ways, My Baby’s Just Like Money, I Want To Be With You Always, Always Late (With Your Kisses), Mom And Dad’s Waltz, and Don’t Stay Away (Till Love Grows Cold).  These early successes would be the biggest hits Lefty would ever have (save for the #1 hit Saginaw, Michigan in 1964), and although he would have charted records sporadically even into the 1970s, these songs would be forever known as his greatest hits.

From these early sessions, with their primal musical backing (featuring the mysterious Madge Sutee, a piano-pounding female in the Del Wood tradition), we have included here the up-tempo numbers Shine, Shave, Shower (It’s Saturday), When Payday Comes Around, You Want Everything But Me, Give Me More, More (Of Your Kisses), If You Can Spare The Time (I Won’t Miss The Money), I Won’t Be Good For Nothin’, and I’m An Old, Old Man (Tryin’ To Live While I Can).  None of these were big hits, but all of these are excellent examples of 1950s Texas honky-tonk.  To modern ears the barrelhouse piano and loose arrangements may make the Jim Beck recordings of this era sound quite primitive and dated, but this is exactly the way bands of this era sounded in the dusty Texas icehouses and taverns.

Lefty’s first flush of success brought large sums of money, even after Jim Beck’s “songwriting” cut and Jim Bulleit’s “publishing” cut (sadly, this was a defining theme in Lefty’s career—he trusted the people around him, all of whom cut themselves in to large chunks of his money, usually for some easy money up front as an advance).  Lefty, like Hank Williams and Elvis Presley, was another poor country boy with no training on how to deal with success and the money that came with it. 

These early years brought Cadillacs, fancy Western Suits, a tour bus, an airplane, and all the accoutrements of hillbilly flash that a hot young star could want.  Soon Lefty had a flashy new Gibson SJ-200 guitar, the top of the line instrument that the Gibson company made.  To add icing to the cake, not long after buying the guitar he took it to Paul Bigsby in California to have a new custom neck put on, and a custom pick guard with Lefty’s name inlaid on it.  This guitar would be the iconic representation of Lefty’s image for many years to come, and though he sometimes toured with other guitars, Lefty kept the guitar until the day he died.  After Lefty died, it was displayed in the Country Music Hall Of Fame for decades (the instrument was finally sold last year, and the buyer was none other than Merle Haggard).

In 1951 Lefty was invited to be a cast member of the WSM ‘Grand Old Opry’ in Nashville, where he shared a dressing room and co-star billing with another bright light of the era—Hank Williams.  Though the two had jived between each other about who was the bigger star, there was more a friendly rivalry than anything else. 

In the liner notes that Charles Wolfe wrote for the ‘Life’s Like Poetry’ box set, Disc Jockey Hugh Cherry remembered a conversation between Lefty and Hank that took place in 1951 at Eddie Dubois’ Key Club in Printers Alley in Nashville:  “We (Hugh and Hank) were sitting there and Lefty came in by himself, a little greased, and sat down with us.  Hank decided to feign displeasure with Lefty, and he started out by saying, ‘Here boy, why don’t you just stay down in Texas, this is my territory up here.’  This was about the time that Lefty had all the chart songs, and Lefty got that big smile on his face, and said, ‘Hank, the whole damn country is the back yard of both of us; can’t you realize there’s enough room for all of us?’  Hank kind of smiled and said, ‘Well, I was just kidding.  Actually, it’s good to have a little competition.  Makes me realize I got to work harder than ever.  And boy, you’re the best competition I ever had.’  That pleased Frizzell very much, because there really was a great admiration which existed between the two.”

Lefty’s tenure on the Opry was short-lived.  Most people in the business of Country Music know that Opry membership is a double-edged sword—while the exposure and popularity of the show is unparalleled, the money that the Opry pays its performers is often a mere fraction of what a ‘hot’ artist can make on a Saturday night.  As a result, Lefty’s manager of the time (Jack Starnes, one half of Starday Records in Texas) began booking Lefty on a hectic string of performances all across the United States, forfeiting Opry membership.  In retrospect, it may have been a prudent financial decision at the time, but ultimately hurt Lefty’s popularity in the long run.

It didn’t take long—barely a year or two—before the flush of success and fame and money became too much for Lefty to handle.  He was always a drinker, but now the temptations of roaring all night were often too strong to resist.  In the same way that people today love to tell George ‘No-Show’ Jones stories, in the early 1950s ‘Lefty Frizzell stories’ were a commonplace discussion amongst country music fans.  It was a reputation, albeit well deserved, that Lefty would carry until his death.

A common practice in the early days of country music involved a star hiring a ‘front man,’ or another singer and M.C. who would warm up the audience before the star came out.  Lefty was no exception, but Lefty’s front men were expected not only to warm up the audience, but also to handle the often too-drunk-to-perform and belligerent ‘star’ backstage.  Freddie Hart, who later became a big star in his own right, began his career as one of Lefty’s front men.  Hart has nothing but positive things to say about his former boss, and credits Lefty with discovering him and getting him his first recording contract—but tells of many nights where he would have to perform the entire show to a crowd of disappointed and angry patrons, with Lefty backstage unable to perform.

The years 1951 through 1955 were turbulent ones for Lefty.  The management relationship with Jack Starnes soured, resulting in a lawsuit against Lefty, settled out of court, that took away most of the royalties of the earlier recordings, as well as his excellent touring band.  Lefty soon found management and musicians through J.D. Miller in Crowley, Louisiana, including the excellent front man Lou Millet, but the relationship was again short-lived.  By 1953 Lefty and his family had relocated to California, where Lefty found a new manager—Steve Stebbins— and joined the cast of the ‘Town Hall Party’ television show.

The biggest problem amongst all this turmoil in Lefty’s life through these years was the lack of hits.  The new sensation that had four songs in the top ten in 1951 barely dented the charts in the mid-1950s.  Many great performances were released during this time, but none of them had the chart magic to click with the buying public.  You Can Count On Me and Run ‘Em Off, from 1953, and Mama, from 1954, are found on this collection, superb tunes but ignored at the time of their release.

If one had to mark a place in Lefty’s career that delineated the early years from the later years, it would have to be the year 1956 and the change of recording from Dallas to Nashville.  Lefty had continued to record in Dallas at Jim Beck’s studio, mostly at the behest of Columbia A&R man Don Law.  What few people know today is that Law was preparing to make Dallas the center of Columbia’s country music recording, and Decca Records’ Paul Cohen was about to do the same, decisions that would have placed Dallas as the “Country Music Capital of the world,” instead of Nashville.

What transpired is a little-known event but one that shook the landscape of country music recording—Jim Beck died in May 1956 after cleaning his tape recorders with carbon tetrachloride, an effective but deadly solution that requires adequate ventilation and short exposure times.  Beck ignored these dangers and inhaled too much of the cleaning solution and died a week later, taking with him the future of country music recording in Dallas, Texas.

With Jim Beck out of the picture, Lefty began recording in Nashville at Owen Bradley’s recording studio just a few weeks after Beck’s death.  What that meant in the big picture was a radical change in the sound of Lefty’s records, not only with a different, more ‘polished’ recording fidelity, but also with a completely different set of musicians.  The end result, taken as a whole in Lefty’s oeuvre, is an obvious difference in the sound of the earlier Dallas recordings and the post-1956 Nashville recordings.

Just Can’t Live That Fast Anymore, recorded at the first session in Nashville, was one of Lefty’s best up-tempo records of the 1950s.  This first session featured three of Hank Williams’ former band members—Sammy Pruett on guitar, Don Helms on steel guitar, and Jerry Rivers on fiddle—but if there was attempt to unite Lefty with Hank’s band on his return to Nashville, it was short-lived.  Over the next fifteen years, Lefty would record mostly with the Nashville ‘A-Team’ session musicians, specifically with Grady Martin on lead guitar acting as de facto arranger and producer on most of his sessions.

Lefty was just too country to ever really record rock and roll or rockabilly, but like most of his contemporaries, Lefty saw Elvis Presley taking away a lot of the country music revenue, and Lefty flirted with the ‘Big Beat’ like nearly every other country artist of the day.  While he would probably write off these records as novelties, and certainly not his best work, the fact remains that many of the tunes Lefty recorded from 1956-1959 have become favorites among the rockabilly cult.

Cuts included on this CD such as From An Angel To A Devil, No One To Talk To (But The Blues), Time Out For The Blues, My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It, Cigarettes and Coffee Blues, and You’re Humbugging Me exhibit all the qualities of great rockabilly, and with the band featuring Grady Martin on lead guitar, Bob Moore or Roy ‘Junior’ Huskey on bass, and Buddy Harman on drums, these records have the sound and feel of other records recorded at Bradley’s studio from around the same time.

A California session in March 1957 found Lefty recording with the ‘Town Hall Party’ band (featuring Joe Maphis on guitar), singing a duet with Johnny Bond on Sick, Sober, And Sorry, also included here.  There were a pair of California sessions and a Nashville session in 1958 that had Lefty reprising his earlier hits with a more polished late-1950s sound (all for an updated ‘Greatest Hits’-type package released as ‘The One And Only Lefty Frizzell’).  The versions of If You’ve Got The Money (I’ve Got The Time) and Always Late (With Your Kisses) found here date from these sessions, by no means Lefty’s finest hour but an interesting mix of 1950s pop-rock and country-western.

Around this same time in the mid-to-late-1950s, Lefty joined many of his contemporaries in the country music world by recording radio shows for the popular Armed Forces program ‘Country Music Time,’ broadcast by recorded transcriptions to soldiers across the USA and the world.  These radio shows are a fascinating glimpse into what country music shows sounded like at that time, because the vast majority of these ‘Country Music Time’ transcriptions were recorded live in the studio with the singer and his or her touring band.

The Lefty Frizzell transcriptions feature great performances that are often quite different from his recordings (for instance, Lefty’s live version of Cigarettes And Coffee Blues heard here is much truer to Marty Robbins’ original demo version that Marty pitched to Lefty than the rockabilly-powered version released as a Columbia single), as well as instrumentals and performances by guest artists (Freddie Hart is included on several of these transcriptions, and here we have included Lefty’s brother David singing the popular Carl Mann hit Mona Lisa).  From these transcriptions we have also included Desert Blues, Somebody’s Pushin’, Sunday Down In Tennessee, and You Win Again.

The last five tracks on this compilation date from the late 1950s and early 1960s and are more stone country than anything else, but they have that certain something that we feel will appeal to fans of the ‘Gonna Shake This Shack’ series.  Farther Than My Eyes Can See is a great Freddie Hart composition, cut at the same session in July 1959 as My Blues Will Pass, both featuring the unmistakable sound of Grady Martin on guitar.  So What! Let It Rain dates from 1960, and Heaven’s Plan dates from 1961, both being the closest Lefty ever came to a pop-rock crossover sound.  The latest track on the CD is She’s Gone, Gone, Gone from 1965, a song which surprisingly has become a breakout hit in the last few years among the rockabilly and retro country crowd.

Although Lefty would make hundreds more recordings from 1960 until his death in 1975, the thirty-five tracks found on this CD best represent the hillbilly boogie and rockabilly side of Lefty Frizzell.

Lefty would ultimately have two of his biggest hits in 1959—The Long Black Veil—and 1964—Saginaw, Michigan, the latter being the biggest chart hit of his career.  There was another front man and duet partner—Abe Mulkey—who would continue to perform with Lefty until his death.  There would be thousands more shows, more short stops on the long way down, and a few more flirtations with the country music charts, before Lefty finally gave up the ghost and died July 19, 1975.  He was only 47 years old, but in photos taken before his death, he looks like an elderly man, aged beyond his years.

Lefty’s singing style has left a longer-lasting impression than any of his 1950s contemporaries, mostly through the influence of Merle Haggard, who has admittedly taken the Frizzell slurred-syllable singing style as a cornerstone of his entire career, influencing more modern stars such as Randy Travis in the process.

In an interview with the author for a recent box set, Merle Haggard had this to say about Lefty’s death:  “Lefty got his feelings hurt, and the thieves robbed him of his inspiration, and they robbed him of his money, too…and they took his songs.  He should have been able to say, ‘I’m Lefty Frizzell.’  He was only 47 years old, he should have been sittin’ in that place Eddy Arnold had.  But, because he was a poor boy, a little boy from Texas without any representation, man, they took him to the cleaners.  Everybody did.”

Merle continues: “Lefty was a bright guy, but he was a very forgiving nature, very pleasant person, and I think he held it all inside.  And I think it bothered him so much, that he had that stroke.  He became very weak, in the last days, I talked to a lot of people around him.  And he just kind of slowed down, and cuddled up and died, from heartbreak.  Alice, his wife wasn’t satisfied with him, the music world had turned their back on him, he got beat out of all the money, he had outgrown the glory, and he didn’t have no reason to be alive…he knew that he had peaked out.  And I think when you reach that point in your life, where you know that you’re not going to do anything else that will be worth a damn, I think you sort of start to shut down.  Somethin’ will get you…and he was a blood clot waitin’ to happen, you know.”

This collection seeks to squarely focus on the good times, the honky-tonk high-water mark—Lefty Frizzell’s glory period of the 1950s and early 1960s.  The boots still had a fine sheen to them, and the clothes were crisp and newly tailored.  Enjoy the styling of the finest singer country music has ever known—a man from Corsicana, Texas, by the name of Lefty Frizzell.

Deke Dickerson

Thanks to Merle Haggard