Word: pedale
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...reason is a longstanding infatuation that has recently overtaken my waking hours. Just as Orpheus' lyre drew the beasts and the rocks to him, so have the plangent cries of the pedal steel guitar attracted a hundred-odd aficionados of the instrument to this the 27th annual convention of the Pedal Steel Guitar Association. There will be performances by steelers from all over the country and Canada, a seminar (my main reason for coming) and a jam session featuring three of the leading exponents of the instrument. There will also be hardware, strings, instructional materials, hard-to-find...
...personality traits that determine an affinity for computers seem perfectly aligned with the slightly compulsive nature of pedal steel players. This could be some offshoot of the pocket-protector tree, musical nerds who found experimenting with different pedal setups even more fun than building Estes rockets, and I find myself wondering if my lifelong disaffinity with even the simplest math separates me from my fellow travelers. Like all cults, pedal steel has its own subgenus, and in the field this particular cladistic branch appears to consist mostly of middle-aged working-class white men in warmup jackets and Nikes...
...pedal steel guitar is the descendant of the lap steel, which came into vogue around 1915 with the Hawaiian music craze and gradually worked its way into the American mainstream via the music of Bob Wills, Hank Williams, Alvino Rey and Santo & Johnny ("Sleepwalk"). American manufacturers like Rickenbacker and Gibson began making instruments to suit this new style of music, essentially flat slabs of wood, metal or Bakelite outfitted with a pickup and six or eight strings set about an inch above a painted-on fretboard. A guitar in name only, the steel guitar is played seated...
...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...
...Purple Sage - sort of a rockin'-country adjunct to the Grateful Dead - at the Academy of Music. Perhaps my proximity to the mirror ball overhead clouds my judgment, but it is my distinct impression that my skull has been 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...