Word: instrumentally
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...Americans, as we know, are a tinkering breed, and in the early '50s a fellow named Bud Isaacs got the idea of hooking up a pedal that would pull a single string to a preset pitch while the instrument was being played, making the movement of the note part of the style. The first recording to feature this was 1953's "Slowly," by Webb Pierce, with Isaacs on steel, and the cat was out of the bag. More pedals were added, and then knee levers, which provided new ways to raise or lower the pitch of the strings...
...imploded by the virtuoso performance of Buddy Cage, the Riders' pedal steel player. Cage is the real deal, a country veteran who played on Anne Murray's first five albums; in contrast, the Dead's Jerry Garcia, the New Riders' original steel player, was a relative dilettante on the instrument who happened to play the steel break on Crosby, Stills & Nash's "Teach your Children." Garcia got by on his marvelous musicality rather than any real technique, and it's one of the enduring ironies that his performance on the CS&N smash, probably the best-known song to feature...
...consent with my father, I took off from college to ponder the relative merits of working in a piss factory and attending an Ivy League school. They oblige on a loan, and I tackle the beast. But my first dalliance is too much, too soon: The complexity of the instrument is more than I can handle, and I eventually abandon it to concentrate on the guitar, which I already play and can at least tune, and which offers more immediate applications...
...YEARS, the band I've been leading breaks up. But by a stroke of luck, a friend has recently bequeathed me an old ZB Custom pedal steel, and I figure, what better time to tackle my old nemesis. It turns out my gift guitar was abused as a young instrument, and I send it to Nashville to be worked on by veteran steel repairman Mike Cass, a classic tinkerer in the Bud Isaacs mode, who has a few extra metal rods custom-made for me for what seems like a ridiculously low price. Mike gives me detailed explanations regarding...
...different clusters of strings and using various combinations of pedals and levers, one can play a virtually unlimited number of chord variations. My guitar has one neck, in the E ninth tuning that is the standard for country-style playing. Some of the more advanced players use double-necked instruments with one neck tuned to E ninth and the other to C sixth, for jazz and swing; a 12-string "universal" hybrid also exists. But I'm keen on the bubbly pentatonic sounds of straight country, and another neck right now would just be a cruel joke...