Sunday Night Music
Jonathan Rowe on Apr 20th 2008
A commenter named hupur inspired this. He commented on a post featuring Gary Moore’s cover of Roy Buchanan’s “The Messiah Will Come Again.” Reading their opinions in the comments, I don’t get the how Sandefur, Brayton and Matt Kuznicki don’t “get” Gary Moore’s authentic bluesiness.
Well here is another try. The following is a truly beautiful song Gary Moore did with the late Phil Lynott while they were in Thin Lizzy - “Parisienne Walkways.” This was taken from Moore’s solo tour after Thin Lizzy disbanded and shortly before Lynott died (this may be one of Lynott’s last recorded performances). Moore’s playing/phrasing is obviously inspired by Buchanan here as well.
Filed in The Bistro
In that clip, Gary Moore is playing “The Peter Green Burst” — a 1959 Les Paul Standard in the Cherry Sunburst finish. One of the single most coveted guitars in the world, it last came to market (about a year ago) at over a half-million dollars.
I’d be afraid to take that thing on stage with me!
great guitar.
though you may call it the blues, to me, it still feels like a blues song played by a prog rock guy. Gary Moore IS a great guitarist. I just dont feel the blues fit him as well as other styles could.
Jonathan: the market value of that guitar has a lot to do with its history. That thing’s been passed around among stars quite a bit. Nonetheless, there are about 1700 Les Pauls of that vintage and finish (1958-1960, in Cherry Sunburst) that drive collectors and players crazy. (This is known from Gibson shipping records, and not all of them have been found. There was a case about three years ago in which one was found in Minnesota, and it set off transcontinental flights and a six-digit bidding frenzy.)
Some people simply put them away. A guy named Dirk Ziff (heir to the Ziff publishing fortune) owns about a hundred of them in a vault. That collection alone must run at least ten million dollars. There are other people who’ve owned them since before the market explosion of the past twenty years or so, and others who’ve liquidated everything they own to get their hands on one. A lot of these people are stone players who swear by the “old wood” principle and the early PAF Humbucker pickups. They really play them: they take them out and gig them, insisting that that’s what they’re for. Very often, the rule is just to play it cool, because almost nobody is going to realize what they see when they’re looking at a $200,000 guitar right in front of them.
Those rockers would now know how classical musicians — who often have old instruments worth 6-figures — feel. Still the jazz and rock road is more tumultuous than the classical road, which often involves simply taking a cab to the performance. And yet, I’ve heard stories of absent minded classical musicians leaving their instrument worth six-figures in the cab.
I’d just save it for the studio. I have a lot of Ibanez guitars. And I sometimes bring them in and do a presentation for my students. I compare them to Toyotas. They are good guitars for what you pay for but are not Mercedes, Lexus or BMW. You have a nice car like that and some a-hole puts a scratch or a dent in it and then you fall to pieces. Or you are neurotic about preventing that from happening.
I want a guitar that plays well but that I can be rough with. Some of the older Fender Strats well fit the bill in that regard. Lots of beat up but great playing and sounding Fender Strats that can be put through a hurricane and still last (or in SRV’s case, him stepping on the guitar and playing it with his feet).
A good close friend of mine has a 1981 Ibanez AR50 Artist, in the Pearl White finish with gold hardware. He also has a half-dozen Les Pauls (ordinary post-Norlin vintage), a Flying V and a couple of other odds & ends. He hasn’t played that Artist in about fifteen years. I worked out with it good and hard at a band rehearsal not long ago. If I had a spare eight hundred dollars or so, I’d pry that thing out of his closet and run down the street as fast as I could. It’s a great worker.
Stevie once said that the difference between a Gibson and a Fender is that when you drop a Gibson, it breaks. I was privileged to work with him, and he used to let me play his guitars. They’d been around, for sure, but they were also great workers.
It’s an ethical toss-up, innit? In my little collection, I have a Les Paul Studio in a Limited Edition Metallic Blue finish. Not a single scratch on it. I take that thing out and play the hell out of it, but I’m waiting for the first nick. It’ll probably happen sooner of later, no matter how careful I am. To me, it’s just part of the life.
You worked with Stevie Ray? That’s a story we’d be interested in hearing. [And please forgive me if you've told it to us before; just kindly remind us of the post.]
Late 1983: I get a call from a lighting company in Syracuse that I worked with, giving me a list of dates. I’m writing them down, and asking the guy, “Stevie who? Huey who?” It was two separate strings of shows with SRV and Huey Lewis. I’d never heard of either one of them before. (Huey’s “Sports” album was just breaking.)
The first show with Stevie was at The Geneva Theater in Geneva, New York, opening for The Band, actually. He came out and tore the place down. The Band came on, and it wasn’t long before I felt a tap on my shoulder. I’m standing in the stage-left wing, watching the show, in my “dimmer beach”; lights dimmer-racks, output cables in large coils, power distribution, etc. The guy tapping me on the shoulder is Stevie, and he asks, “Is it okay if I stand here?”
I looked at him, astonished after the performance he just threw down, and told him, “You tell me where you want to stand, and I’ll move my gear.”
We were friends right away. He was a sweetheart, and we ended up doing about a month’s worth of shows here & there until I ran into him again in Texas in ‘84. I was working with a band called Duke Jupiter (out of Rochester, NY) and we hooked up for two weeks down there. We had a little roadie-band among the crews, and Stevie used to stop by and listen. To all of us, he was just another guy out there, going through the working-drill of a rock tour together with us.
I ended up going to work for a lights company in Atlanta that kept me so busy that I never saw him again. We just never crossed paths anymore, but while I knew him, he was a splendid guy.
I was in Indiana when I heard that he was killed at Alpine Valley, Wisconsin — a venue I know well. That was the last day of the Hank Williams Jr. tour (with the Kentucky Headhunters). Heard it on the radio on the crew bus. We cracked a new bottle of Crown Royal for a much-needed drink.
[...] Guitar connoisseur Billy Beck inspires this post where he leaves a comment discussing his past work with the late Stevie Ray Vaughn. Most of us have never been so lucky. Vaughn was a blues guitar virtuoso. He wasn’t one of those shredders who played scale like licks and patterns until he was faster than anyone else, but his playing was just as challenging and virtuostic. Many of the electric guitar virtuosos play relatively thin gauge strings, much easier on your tendons than acoustic guitar strings; many of them can’t razzle or dazzle playing acoustic. Some fusion guitarists like John McLaughlin, Al Dimeola and Steve Morse have outstanding acoustic chops as well. Vaughn apparently played with really heavy gauge electric strings (for the tone), very muscular. His physical power over the instrument shows in this 12 string acoustic version of Pride and Joy. [...]