December 2001/January 2002 issue.
MESSIN’ WITH THE KING
Virtuoso
slide guitarist Michael Messer has seen his profile sharply in the ascent since
his
King Guitar album was released on Catfish Records earlier in the year. With
a new album
due in the Spring we thought we had better get our hand in early and
find out more about
the guy who has a very personal and unique twist on blues
music. His
new album King
Guitar
has been widely acclaimed and one prominent
American reviewer described him
as “an unavoidable force in modern blues”
and commented that “King
Guitar
has met a new century with style, grace,
and a new, colorful direction for the music”.
CJ
Holley talked with Michael about King Guitar, his own musical background and
the influences that have shaped his outlook on music.
Tell us about your first awareness of music, the stuff you heard on the radio as a child?
I
have always been interested in music, from a very young age I was listening to
rock’n’roll. I started buying records in the early sixties, The Rolling
Stones ‘Not Fade Away’ was probably my first record, the B side was
‘Little By Little’. There were a lot of blues in that early Stones
repertoire: The Spider & the Fly, I Can’t Be Satisfied, Little Red Rooster
and so on. In 1965 I saw John Hammond on pop tour, I didn’t know
about blues but I did love his music, still do. Then in my teens I used to go to
every Rory Gallagher show in the London area, he was always talking about these
old blues guys, Blind Boy Fuller, Muddy Waters and Leadbelly.
I’ve always played around with musical instruments. As a child I got my hands on a banjo, a four string Beatle guitar and lots of drums and percussion. I was very into the Rolling Stones, their influence is still very evident in my music...well I think it is anyway! In my early teens I was playing upright bass with a friend who played folk and rock ‘n’ roll. It was the latter that really interested me. Then, along with my two brothers, Alan & David, I had a band that played all the guitar based pop stuff of the time...Led Zeppelin, The Who, Rory Gallagher, Deep Purple, and so on.
When I was about eighteen I got to know some people who listened to a lot of blues stuff and turned me on to both pre-war delta blues and post-war Chicago blues. At about the same time I was spending a lot of time with my friend, Chas Jankel, who was scoring hit after hit with Ian Dury & The Blockheads. Chas was very influential in that he showed me a lot about the value of great production and arrangements. He also took me to see Bootsy's Rubber Band and consequently turned me on to funk. Somewhere in all this and lost in the mists of time I started playing slide guitar, bottleneck guitar...whatever you want to call it. From there I explored the heart of twentieth century blues and started collecting old National steel guitars, which has become an important part of my life.
I know that you played a bit of
banjo and bass before you started playing slide.
What was it that attracted you
to this particular style of playing?
It definitely gave me a more immediate way of playing music in my
teens. I had been playing upright bass and bass guitar for a while and I’d
messed around with regular guitar, which was my real passion, but I wasn’t
really finding my way. One day in a music store I was talking to the sales guy
about Rory Gallagher and Johnny Winter's approach to slide and the guy showed me
a lick or two in open tuning. I found I could open tune my guitar and play music
with very a very simple technique and basic musical knowledge. I could play
blues and rock and roll pretty well like that. I was very into Bo Diddley,
Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Louisiana Red, Johnny Winter and Rory Gallagher.
From that point on I got more and more serious...and more and more obsessed!
Then I started to get into pre-war guys like Robert Johnson, Son House, Blind
Willie McTell and Casey Bill Weldon. I found that slide guitar is the instrument
that comes most naturally to me. I’m able to express myself freely and from
the heart. After years of playing in this style it’s become that there’s no
gap between the musical thought in my head and the sound from the guitar, as the
two are now in unison. I’m not a particularly technical player and I don’t
believe that creative emotions should be analysed too much. I found my natural
instrument in slide guitar and its’ gone from there.
When slide/bottleneck guitar is
mentioned most people immediately think of blues music, but what other forms of
the slide guitar have influenced your own playing?
I have been
playing and studying the slide guitar in all its forms for over twenty years
now, and in that time I’ve been turned on to so many different styles of
playing that have all influenced what I do. Hawaiian Steel guitar from the 1920s
and 30s has had a major impact on my style. The Hawaiian guys from that period
mostly played on National steel guitars and were some of the greatest exponents
of slide guitar ever recorded. Guys like Sol Hoopii and King Benny Nawahi are
two of the greatest, just terrific players and I’m really in awe of them.
Hawaiian Steel guitar was a major influence on American music in the first part
of the last century, it was Hawaiian guitar that turned the blues guys on to
playing bottleneck guitar and the country guys onto playing Dobro. In the early
1980’s I visited Nashville and became totally obsessed with bluegrass Dobro. I
was hanging out with so many wonderful players, including the legendary Bashful
Brother Oswald, who while I was backstage at the Grand Ole Opry showed me how to
play his classic, “Dobro Chimes”. Slide guitar originated in India and goes
back thousands of years. There are really two main styles, one is playing
classical music and mimicking the bends and sounds of a sitar, the other is in
popular film scores where the players treat it very similar to a western swing
steel player. Indian classical slide guitar is an incredible style of playing
that I first got into in the very early 1980’s. In my quest for the perfect
curry I used to go to Southall in London to eat Indian food and started visiting
the ABC record store there, one day I found a record by Brij Brushan Kabra, who
really is the greatest living exponent of this style. Anyone who remembers and
enjoys Ry Cooders’ “Paris, Texas” soundtrack should listen to this guy.
Lots of open “D” tuning ambient playing which is very cool. In the early
1980’s I also got very into African music, especially Nigerian Juju. King
Sunny Adé always had a steel guitarist in his band playing a kind of outer
space Hank Marvin version of slide guitar. The list is endless…Western Swing,
Cajun, rock, and country, even on Bob Marley’s early albums there is
occasional steel guitar.
What I enjoy about King Guitar was
the fact that the music worked from a variety of angles. You are definitely not
stuck in the past, slaving to be another expert copyist. So what do you think of
other musicians who have changed the boundaries. I'm thinking here of Skip
MacDonald and Little Axe who, in a way redefined so many blues clichés. Do you
hear anyone coming up on the inside in the blues world, anyone who¹s really made an impression on you recently?
I always try to retain my own personality in the music and not mimic
or copy other blues artists. I’m not from Chicago or Mississippi or even
American, but I have been passionately involved in blues and other types of
music for most of my life. I try to put that experience and passion for this
music into my songs and their arrangements. That’s the reason that I bring
other influences into my work.
I
am heavily influenced by many older players and past styles but I don’t really
see the point in copying what’s gone before. I like to use those old sounds to
create my own music and guess that I view this in a very similar way to Skip and
a handful of others.
The people who I feel are turning blues music around and making something
a little different, are not all names that many people would necessarily
consider as part of the blues scene. G Love & the Special Sauce are an
example of that. I really like their first single on Okeh/Sony a few years back
called "Blues Music". It was something very special and very
different. What they are doing now is perhaps a little less adventurous and not
so connected with the blues. Cassandra Wilson, the jazz singer from Mississippi,
does very interesting covers of traditional blues material. The North
Mississippi Allstars are great and very good for the blues, getting it across to
a younger audience. Their music isn’t completely original, but it is damn
good! They strike me as a Canned Heat for this generation...a full tilt boogie
band with a leaning towards country blues. It’s great stuff and even better
that the audience for it is a young one.
I have heard some of the White Stripes new album and again I like the fact that
they are getting traditional blues across to a young audience. Then there is the
more computerised end of things with guys like R.L Burnside and Moby that I also
really enjoy, but only the really good cuts – if it isn’t done really well
it can get a bit monotonous. I love the Little Axe track "The Wolf That
House Built" with Howlin' Wolf & Son House samples built into the
track. That was very original when it came out in 95/96. R L Burnside's album, I
Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down, was very clever and different, some of
that album is stunning. Taj Mahal with his Indian groove on "Mumtaz Mahal"
and a hip-hop groove on "Squat that Rabbit". There's a version of
"Come On In My Kitchen" with the Indian slide guitarist playing the
melody and Taj rockin' on the National steel that is really cool! I love stuff
like that. Taj has always been out there pushing the boundaries, his recent
album with the African guys, Kulanjan,
is also excellent. Ry Cooder was getting there too, but I haven't heard him push
those boundaries for a while now; I guess "Get Rhythm" was the last
time he was pushing in that direction. I recently got the new John Hammond and
Tom Waits album "Wicked Grin" which is a great record. I love John
Hammond and to hear him perform some original material is just great. I think
what interests me more than inventing new ways of playing the blues, which is
getting harder and harder, is to write about my relationship with this music and
the people who created it. A few years ago I really wanted to make a computer
blues record, but now its been done, and done well. That's why I like to bring
in all those elements into my music. As far as the blues scene goes at present,
well, there are some incredible players out there playing some really damn good
blues, but is it different, is it original? There are so many great players it
would be hard to list them all. Yeah, I do really dig the current blues scene,
but I also crave originality, that’s what grabs me the most.
Tell me about your new recording
project. Re-worked standards,
your own compositions, a mixture of both?
The new album will
be a mixture of new compositions and my own versions of older material that has
inspired me. I am currently at work with my song-writing partner, Terry Clarke,
and my musical partner, Ed Genis, developing the material for this project.
I’m trying out ideas with different musicians to bring a whole new colour and
flavour to my music.
How do you prefer to work in the studio, do you record live, or do you
build layers to create the tracks?
Sometimes the only
way is to get the whole band in the studio and play as if you’re on stage.
Other times I prefer to craft the track piece by piece, for example a lot of
King Guitar was done on my own without the rhythm section, I put them on after I
had the basic tracks down. I really had a very clear vision of the sound I was
looking for and I was single-minded about that, I didn’t want anyone else
around whose input would have changed anything. Other tracks like “Driving
Wheel Blues” and “Diving Duck” were recorded totally live. Steel Guitar
Blues was actually recorded at home on my DAT Walkman! So really I don’t have
any specific rules for recording, it just depends on what I am trying to create
and we go with what suits.
When I record I always strive for originality and what I call a
larger-than-life sound. I believe that recording music is a different skill to
performing live, and to try and create a live band effect on record is neither
easy or necessarily the way to go. If you listen to most great records of any
genre, separate to the performance that obviously has to be great, the sound is
usually larger-than-life and not a reproduction of a live stage sound. That
slap-back echo on Chess and Sun recordings, the mix of Howlin' Wolf or Otis
Redding's voice saturation in their music, the intensity of sound from Robert
Johnson recording into the corner of the room. These are all recording
techniques that create a larger-than-life effect and a great recording. Nobody
actually sounds like that until they are recorded and produced to create a
desired effect. Sometimes these are by accident, but most times they are
calculated. There is no doubt in my mind that Robert Johnson sat facing the
corner of the room to create a certain sound, to surround the microphone with as
much signal as possible. I don’t buy into the story of his being too shy to
face the room while singing at all, that’s just absolute nonsense! Listen to
his songs and read about his lifestyle. Was that really a guy who was too shy to
sing in a studio?! The incredible Chess recording sound was achieved by using
different lengths of drainpipes as reverb tunnels; that is why their vocals
sound the way they do. Many great musicians make average records because they
don’t embrace the studio techniques necessary to make great sounding records.
The recording approach and production of my music are as important and integral
as the writing and arranging.
I know a lot of guitar players will
want to read about your collection of vintage guitars and amps.
Tell us what you have in the way of National steels and other models;
and what about the National amp you're sitting on for the "King
Guitar" cover?
That really is a whole other can of worms and could easily be the subject of
another interview! I’ve been collecting, researching, and playing National
instruments for over twenty years.
Guitarists may be interested to check out a web site that I run with a friend
who also collects these instruments, Colin McCubbin, on the subject of vintage
National steel guitars www.notecannons.com
These days I don't have the amount of guitars that I had back in the late
eighties. I have a cross section of instruments that I use in the studio and on
the road. For example, relating to the tracks on “King Guitar”, the slide
part on the title song is a 1950 National Map of America Glenwood. On
"Living in Rhythm" there is a 1929 National Duolian plus a 1928
National Triolian. "Steel Guitar Blues" was recorded with a 1929
National Tricone Hawaiian guitar. Both "Diving Duck" and "Driving
Wheel Blues Parts One & Two" were recorded with my "Fine
Resophonic" guitar made by Mike Lewis at Fine Resophonic Guitars in Paris,
France. He is the greatest builder of National type resonator guitars in the
world. I also have two guitars made by the British guitar builder, Dave King,
His guitars are also used by Eric Bibb. The amplifier on the cover of King
Guitar is a late thirties National model. Those amps are so cool and have an
amazing sound. The only other picture I have ever seen of a musician with that
amplifier is the one of Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim, and Little Bill Gaither.
Check it out; it's the same amp and guitar! Like the Memphis Minnie National,
but earlier. Most of the electric guitars on the album were played through a
1950's National amp.
About eight years ago I met a string maker, Malcolm Newton, who makes Newtone
Strings, approached me with the idea of making strings specifically for playing
open-tuned on National guitars. After many experiments with different gauges and
materials we started a brand of strings called Michael
Messer National Guitar Strings. These are now licensed by the National
Guitar Company in California and are the most popular strings around for those
instruments, pretty well the industry standard, and something that I’m very
proud of.
The Amistar “Don” Guitar in this competition was hand-made in the Czech
Republic to very high standards. These instruments are beautiful and the winner
of this competition is in for a treat. An engraved personalized guitar of this
quality is a real treasured possession and in years to come, will be a
collectors’ item. Amistar guitars are available in the UK from Resound
Distribution.
You can check them out at www.resound.uk.com
I would like to thank both Amistar & Resound for making this presentation
instrument.
Thank you for this interview - Michael Messer.