Tag: features

L.A.-based rockers The Soft White Sixties prove you don’t have to be old to be classic. Originally from San Francisco, the quintet deftly blends early R&B influences with ’70s glam rock while also managing to sound quite current.

With its recent release, The Ocean Way EP, and a full-length record in the can, lead guitarist/songwriter Aaron Eisenberg delivers first-rate tone and sets the bar high.

“The classic inspiration is really a caliber reference for us,” Eisenberg said. “There was definitely a standard for musicians back then. It’s something we’ve always noticed about that music. Now, with technology, you can take your time, do multiple takes, comp them together and all that, but that’s never really been a mentality for us. It’s much more about having it together and really focusing on the performance.”

In the studio, Eisenberg maintains a simple approach.

“My studio setup is pretty much just my Vox AC30. There’s a couple parts on The Ocean Way EP, like on ‘Miss Beverly,’ where I didn’t use an amp; the guitar is straight into the Trident desk. It’s very Beatles ‘Revolution’ style, just blown-out preamp. I also use a Zvex Mastotron Fuzz, which is my main fuzz, and an MXR Blue Box. Live, I usually use a JHS Colour Box, which is a pretty accurate preamp simulator. I’ll leave it on as a preamp and it makes the tone so much better and full bodied. The new record has the Colour Box pretty much on every song.”

For the new album, the guitarist decided to broaden his dynamics. “I ran a stereo rig with my AC30 and an old Silvertone guitar that had this natural resonance, kind of a ringing that I don’t think was intentional. You can’t really find happy accidents and imperfections like that with new gear. When you find it, it’s a special thing. I also used a late-’60s Fender Vibratone with a ’65 Bassman head.”

On the road, Eisenberg relies on his Vox.

“The AC30 has been a solid foundation for trying different pedals. I have a decent-sized pedal board, and different amps tend to react differently to certain pedals. The AC30’s been a really consistent foundation to sculpt different sounds.”

In a live setting, re-creating sounds from their records requires a few tools.

“I have a vintage Small Stone Phaser, a POG, and a wah that I’ll leave half-open, then a couple of standard tremolos and delays. For most of the set, I’ll also use a Keeley-modded Line 6 DL4 for slap-back to fill everything out, especially when we’re playing as a three piece with a singer; the bass player and I have to get more creative. Now that we have another guy playing guitar, I can be more selective with pedals and save things for special moments.”

His affinity for Guild started with the acquisition of a vintage Starfire.

“A friend bought a ‘68 Starfire a few years ago and until then, I’d never really seen electric Guilds. A year later, I bought it from him and now it’s more or less my main guitar. It’s got the stock bridge pickup and at some point someone put an early-’70s Gibson mini-humbucker in the neck, which is really great. It seems to grab hold of the fuzz pedal really nicely. About a year later, I bought an early-’70s Polara. I really like the sound of the stock pickups Guild was using for that era. They have a really nice, woody quality to them.”

Soon after, Eisenberg developed a relationship with Guild.

“At NAMM one year, I met the guys and they were already familiar with the band and we started working together. They have a new line of Starfires that are really great, which I bring on the road instead of the vintage stuff. It’s nice to have something new that holds up.”

Choosing the right guitar presents little challenge.

“My selection process is simple; if it looks cool and it feels good, then I’m in. You can change the pickups, run it through pedals or different amps, and dial in the tone. There’s really something to the Guilds. I end up talking to people after shows and they ask, ‘What is that? Where’d you get that? How old is it?’”

In the age where the lines are often blurred between creativity and manipulation, Eisenberg feels hopeful.

“There’s some realm of current music that’s swinging back into the area of that imperfection. It’s nice not to have everything sound like a computer. For us, there’s been a lot more encouragement of the human side, like don’t be tied to a click and don’t fix all the little stuff. Just let the music push and pull and be this human thing.”

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This article originally appeared in VG February 2017 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

When he joined Atlanta Rhythm Section in early 1972, J.R. Cobb and Barry Bailey had more in common than simply being the band’s co-guitarists.

Like Bailey (VG, December ’16), Cobb had been playing in bands since the early ’60s. Furthermore, he had performed in a hit-making aggregation. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, he grew up in Jacksonville, Florida.

“No one in my family was particularly musical, but the radio was on all the time when I was a child, and I was exposed to lots of different kinds of music,” he said. “My uncle gave me an old beater acoustic and taught me a few chords, but I really didn’t get interested in playing until high school.”

Cobb’s first electric was a Silvertone guitar and amp, and he later upgraded to a Fender Jazzmaster and a borrowed Fender amp.

“I was influenced by the Ventures, Duane Eddy, Chet Atkins, Buddy Holly, and just about anybody I heard on the radio,” the guitarist recalled. “I was in a band that played sock hops, supermarket openings, cocktail lounges, and night clubs, which in Jacksonville at the time were just fancy names for bars with a little stage and a dance floor.”

He recalled interpolating British music after the Beatles appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

“We dropped most of the instrumentals and started to discover R&B and traditional blues,” he said.

“Nobody played much country music, and standards weren’t cool anymore.”

Cobb was a member of the original lineup of the Classics IV, which formed in Jacksonville in 1965. The band’s producer/manager was Buddy Buie (1941-2015), who ultimately co-wrote numerous hits with Cobb, including “Traces,” “Spooky,” and “Stormy.” They also co-wrote Sandy Posey’s “I Take It Back” and Cobb collaborated with Ray Robert Whitley on “Be Young, Be Foolish,”Be Happy” (“A beach-music anthem!” he recalled proudly).

“The idea of writing songs just really appealed to me,” Cobb said of his rapid evolution. “I’m sure the Beatles and artists like Roy Orbison, the Beach Boys, and other singer/songwriters coming along then sort of fueled that. While most of the Classics IV hits were mellow or ballad-ish tunes, that isn’t necessarily my preferred style.”

As for gear with the Classics IV, Cobb recalled, “I played a Jazzmaster for a short time then switched to a Telecaster, which I played as long as I was in the group. I had a Fender Super Reverb, and I have kicked myself ever since for getting rid of it.”

By the early ’70s, Buie and Cobb were ensconced in the operation of Studio One, a recording facility in Doraville, Georgia.

“ARS was made up of studio musicians and a couple of other players that hung out and recorded at Studio One,” he said. “I used a couple of Strats and a couple of black Les Paul Customs; some were tuned for slide. For acoustic, I used an Ovation. I used an Ampeg amp for a while and later switched to Peaveys when we got an endorsement deal. In the studio, I always preferred Fender, but unfortunately, they just weren’t loud enough for the stage.”

The list of ARS hits is long – “So Into You,” “Champagne Jam,” “Alien,” “Angel,” and more. The band defined a laid-back stylistic facet of southern rock, and created numerous hit albums. Memorable performances included a gig at the White House during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, two Champagne Jam mega-concerts in Atlanta, and the Knebworth festival in England.

Cobb could hold his own among the high-caliber musicians in the ARS – one example is the live version of “Another Man’s Woman,” which clocks in at over 14 minutes on the band’s live 1979 album Are You Ready? In addition to a jaw-dropping bass solo by Paul Goddard, the song includes stinging trade-off licks from Cobb and Bailey.

Cobb ultimately tired of road life and departed the band for an easier lifestyle.

“I was pretty burned out,” he reflected. “I had a teenage son who my wife was raising virtually by herself, and I wanted to do some other things, as well. I worked with (producer) Chips Moman and played behind (country supergroup) the Highwaymen for five years.”

These days, he’s still going at his own pace in rural Georgia, and enjoys playing at his leisure.

“For the most part, the time I spent in ARS are some of my best memories, and I don’t regret one day,” he said.

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This article originally appeared in VG February 2017 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

In an era of high-tech musical toys, there’s some irony in the fact that the cigar-box guitar – most primitive of homemade stringed instruments – is alive and well. 

The first examples appeared in rural America, created and built by musicians too poor to have a “store-bought.” Today, Shane Speal is the self-appointed “King of the Cigar-Box Guitar.” 

“I first used that goofy title in 2003, when I posted plans for making cigar-box guitars on the internet, and it’s always been tongue-in-cheek. Who in their right mind would want to be king of such a s*****y instrument?” 

Regardless, Speal has done much to popularize the cigar-box guitar. Solo and with his Snake Oil Band, he gigs using only CBGs (“I take six or seven to every show,” he said), organizes festivals and hosts broadcasts focused on them, promotes other artists who play them, and makes and sells them via cigarboxnation.com. 

How did you get to this CBG-centered place in life?
I’ve been into music since I was a kid. I got my first guitar at eight years old and discovered Kiss. In high school, I played bass in heavy metal bands. When I hit college, I dove into acoustic guitar and the blues; I followed the history backward from Hendrix to Muddy to Hound Dog Taylor, then the Delta guys. I borrowed Smithsonian Folkways records from the library and my favorite music became the earliest stuff, which sounded creaky and broken – primal – played with pocket-knife slides. To me, that was the deepest-sounding music. At the time, I was flogging an old Stella with a spark-plug-socket slide. 

The cigar-box guitar was one step deeper, even. It was imperfect from the beginning. I built my first in ’93 from a Swisher Sweets box, a hunk of wood, and three strings. As soon as I tuned it up, I was in love. It was the sound, the feel, the mojo I was searching for. Cigar-box guitars buzz, they can be out of tune, and yet I’d rather play one in concert over any manufactured instrument.

Is there a feeling among CBG players that the instruments and those who use them should remain off the popular musical radar?  
No. We all went apes*** when Paul McCartney played one in the Sound City documentary, then won a Grammy for it. 

What’s in your collection?
I have over 100, most on display at our family’s tavern in New Alexandria, Pennsylvania. The oldest is more than 100 years old – a two-stringer. 

What’s it like to play one live?
It’ll kick your ass simply by its primitive nature. It forces you to downshift your playing and take it deeper. There’s a beauty to embracing the art of the American poor. It comes from humble hearts, giving souls and a will to live. Hard times make great music. If you want to play cigar box guitar, don’t buy someone else’s. Make it yourself!

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This article originally appeared in VG February 2017 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

Ed. Note: Guitarist/producer/recording artist/guitar innovator (we could add more to that list!) Steve Ripley has passed away (January 3, 2019) at his home in Pawnee, Oklahoma after battling cancer. He was 69 (1950-20019). Most guitar players first became familiar with Ripley from the 1980s Kramer-Ripley Stereo Guitar, with a pickup where each of the six polepieces had its own control knob. Ripley was the guitarist in The Tractors, whose self-title debut album went platinum in 1994.

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It seems like guitarist/producer/designer Steve Ripley has always taken a unique approach to making music and the instruments he’s used.  As a native Oklahoman (now residing in Tulsa), he grew up in a farming en-vironment with numerous musical influences due to what he terms “…a somewhat isolated musical location.”  But he ultimately became aware of the fabled “Tulsa sound” before he ever moved there.

Ripley’s first tastes of international success weren’t due to his musical aggregation’s recordings.  He recorded with Bob Dylan on the legendary singer/songwriter’s Shot of Love album, and designed an unusual stereo guitar that was subsequently marketed by the Kramer guitar company in the mid ’80s. 

The affable veteran garnered acclaim in ’94 when his band, the Tractors, sold over two million copies of its self-titled debut album.  The members of the Tractors each have decades of experience, and their former musical associations make for an impressive resumé; keyboard player/co-producer Walt Richmond has worked with Bonnie Raitt and Rick Danko, guitarist Ron Getman worked with Janis Ian and Leonard Cohen, bass guitarist Casey Van Beek with Linda Ronstadt and the Righteous Brothers, and Jamie Oldaker has drummed for Eric Clapton.

What’s more, Ripley has continued to design innovative guitars.  One of his latest creations is the D-neck, a bolt-on that ex-tends a guitar’s sonic capabilities by two frets.

The updated version of Tom Wheeler’s American Guitars noted you moved your guitar enterprise to Tulsa.  Are you originally from there?
I grew up on a farm about an hour from Tulsa – a little town called Glencoe.  It was a family farm we got in the land run, like in the Tom Cruise movie (chuckles).

Do you think there’s a stereotypical Tulsa sound?  If so, what is it?
I think there is a Tulsa deal of some kind.  For me, it goes back to [J.J.] Cale a lot – I paid attention to what I call the J.J. Cale/Leon Russell school of recording.  We tend to make records just like Cale did.  A lot of the playing is done one guy at a time, and you can stick the mic back and go for his first take; you don’t worry about the drum sound or the headphone mix.  Wingin’ it is part of it, and you build a record.  I call Cale for therapy – Uncle J.J. (laughs).

But a big part of it also has to do with shuffle and western swing; Bob Wills’ “Stay All Night, Stay A Little Longer.”  The Wills guys called it the “two-beat.”  Slow that down, and pretty soon you’ve got “Crazy Mama” (a Cale-penned tune).

Some might call it “laid back” music.
Well absolutely, for Cale.  If you looked up “laid back” in the dictionary, his picture would be next to it!  But blues was a big part of the Wills thing, as well, and Jimmy Reed slips in there.  Then Chuck Berry at some point, and the groove gets all-important.

And I think that culturally it had to do with being in the middle of America, with influences coming from all directions; a real melting pot.  But Tulsa was never a place to play and make money in a band.  The clo-sest big town was Stillwater, which had Oklahoma State University, and almost directly to the south was Norman and O.U.  If you could learn “Walkin’ the Dog,” “What’d I Say,” and something else, you could get a fraternity gig.

You’ve said you’ve only had two gigs – driving a tractor and playing guitar.  So I need to ask who you were listening to when you were farming.
My first records were 78s by Bob Wills and Hank Williams; I’d play them in my Uncle Elmer’s farmhouse.  I played “Settin’ the Woods on Fire” and “Stay All Night, Stay A Little Longer” over and over.  We were almost cut off, living on a farm in Oklahoma.  There were two TV channels and almost any kind of entertainment that made it to there could change your life.

I fell in love with a lot of the guitar work on early Elvis records, and before that there was Eldon Shamblin (of the Bob Wills band).  I’d buy anything with a guitar in it – any magazine, any record; it didn’t make any difference.

And the Ripley way of farming meant you started driving a tractor around age eight or nine.  There were big tractors for the grown-ups, and little tractors for the little folks.  I did most of my plowing with a little transistor radio strung over my shoulder, and a tiny 10-cent earpiece.

Back then, music was really mixed together, at least in Oklahoma.  You’d hear Buck Owens alongside Ray Charles.  Chuck Berry and Luther Perkins were important to me.  Jerry Lee [Lewis] was exciting, but the guitar playing on his records was great, too.  And the Ventures was extremely important during that period, particu-larly to anyone just starting to play.

And that’s all pre-Beatles.  What’s great about the Tractors is these are the first guys I ever played with in a serious band that started listening to music before the Beatles, like me.  That’s no knock to the Beatles, but most people our age started playing in bands because of the Beatles.

There were instrumental songs by bands besides the Ventures, like “Pipe-line.” When the Astronauts came to Oklahoma, it was a big thing.  One reason the Beatles hit so hard here is because they’d grown up listening to the same things we had; they loved Carl Perkins and James Burton.  It was a real kinship.

Tell me about some of your instruments and bands.
My first guitar was a Jazzmaster.  I worked all summer for 50 cents an hour and bought a calf with that money, and when she had her first baby, I sold them and bought the Jazzmaster and a Princeton tremolo amp.  I’ve been a tremolo freak ever since, and my biggest lament about the music business is that about 15 years ago, they stopped put-ting tremolo on amps (chuckles).

That Jazzmaster was stolen, and I bought a Gretsch Tennessean.  I loved that guitar, as well, and played Gretsches for a long time.  I can look back and see how their tone was world-class, but I loved them because they fed back so easily.  Back then, when we were playing something like “I’m A Man,” you could stick that Gretsch right in front of a speaker, and it’d go WOWOWOWOW.  I’m not afraid to say I liked that sound (laughs)!  I never could play quite like Hendrix, and I was still playing “Tiger By The Tail”…with feedback!

Then there was another significant change in my life: I was having trouble keeping my hollowbodies in tune, so I went on a pretty heavily researched quest when I was 18.  I played a Les Paul for awhile – a triple-pickup black beauty, and I wish I still had it.  I played a Stratocaster for a little bit, then I heard a phenomenal player in a town called Enid, and he played a Telecaster.  I can remember think-ing how great it sounded, but I was saying, “Why didn’t he get himself a real guitar?”  

At some point I tried a Telecaster, and that’s what I’ve played ever since.  My friend and I bought paisley Teles because they were practically giving them away in Tulsa, at a place called the Guitar House, where Eldon hung around.  But we were more lucky than we thought, because Fender had a warehouse right there in Tulsa.  I played that paisley Tele up through Bob Dylan. 

Is it fair to say when you worked on the Shot of Love album and tour, you might have thought you’d made the big time?
Well, my bands did the usual songs; we still did “Tiger By The Tail,” but got into Creedence and Van Morrison, then when we started doing Crosby, Stills & Nash songs we had to go further out of town to play, because we couldn’t sing like that (chuckles).  Then there was the horn thing Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears.  And to be honest with you, when Styx, Foreigner, and Journey happened, I pretty much quit.  I went into the studios.  I met Cale, and he really got my juices flowing about his kind of music.  That happened around ’76, and the next time I was in a band was with Bob Dylan in ’81.  I was in a band with some amazing players.

When did you start building your instruments, and why did you go for that option?
I was Leon Russell’s engineer for a couple of years, and in that pursuit of “how to make a record,” I was placing mics inside Leon’s Steinway.  If you stick your head into a Steinway, and Leon Russell’s playing, it’s the biggest, most wonderful stereo thing you’ve ever heard.  It was my goal in the control room to get that big stereo spread, just like I heard when I stuck my head under the lid.  The frustration as an electric guitar player was that I couldn’t get a big, naturally-occurring stereo spread without effects.  You’d have to put in a chorus, or double the guitars something to give it some movement in the mix.

So I tried to make a six-channel guitar so I could spread the amps across the room and record them in stereo, but I wanted it to sound like a regular guitar; I wasn’t into effects.

Red Rhodes had made a 10-channel pickup for his steel guitar, and he made me two six-channel, Strat-type pickups.  I chopped up my paisley Tele, and made it into a six-channel guitar.

Are you saying you made your first six-channel guitar more for recording than market potential?
I did, and I talked with a drummer from Tulsa named Jim Keltner, who’d played with John Lennon, and he was a Wilbury, too.  He told me he was working with Bob Dylan, and I told Jim I’d love to meet Dylan if there was ever a chance.  Jim called me up one day and said, “Dylan told me to bring some players down because he wanted to go over some songs.”  I only had my chopped-up paisley six–channel guitar, and I thought it might be a bit presumptuous to play through six amps in front of Bob Dylan, so one day on the way to re-hearsal, I bought a Tapco mixer and I plugged each string into its own channel, so I’d have a pan pot for each one, and I played out of two of Bob’s amps.  It was great, because if you wanted your low E to be on the right, you could pan the string accordingly.  I thought it was a real breakthrough, and I toured with Bob for two years.  When we broke for the holidays at the end of ’81, I made a couple of gui-tars with pan pots built into them, so I could just plug in a stereo cord and play.

Then Cale bought one, and Steve Lukather bought one, and Fred Tackett bought one – he was a big L.A. session player back then.  Now he’s a member of Little Feat.  Alan Holdsworth bought one, so it got easy to sell them.  Eddie Van Halen became a big supporter.

When you recorded with your original “Frankenstein” Tele – before you began using the mixer and pan pots–  would you plug into six channels in a board or six amplifiers, or some combination?
I would do it every way I could.  Most of the time, I played through six amps, and sometimes I’d record them each on a separate channel.  Sometimes I’d put up some stereo mics; that was my favorite, but I also went direct, and I even did some experiments where I ran the three bottom strings through octave dividers and ran through three more amps – a total of nine amps at once.  It was bizarre, but it was still in an experimental stage.  I’d bring over guitar players and sit ’em in the middle of the room and let ’em play this experimental guitar.  They were all astounded, which led me to think I could market such an instrument.

Is it fair to say the general perspective among guitar aficionados is your instruments are known from the Kramer association?
I think so.  More people would probably have known about it through the connection with Van Halen, which became the Kramer connec-tion, although all of Eddie’s guitars were custom Ripleys, not Kramers. I think Kramer actually did a pretty good job of taking it to the mar-ketplace.

One of your more recent innovations, the D-neck, apparently goes for a differ-ent tone. 

And that’s my favorite idea out of everything.  There was literally a time when I said, “Eureka!” when I was working on it.  A lot of us love to tune down; I play in D a lot.  The strings feel floppy, and that can be a good thing.

I’m not a luthier; I’m a designer.  Tom Anderson made most of my stuff.  He has his own company now, but he was a Schecter player when I was with Bob.  I designed and soldered and put ’em together, but I can’t take credit for sawing out a piece of wood, because it never did appeal to me any-way.  And he’s the guy making that neck for me.

The great thing about Fenders, and what makes them so different from Gibsons or other traditional instruments, is that all of the other stuff was sort of “luthier things” – carving, sawing, sanding, and shaping.  The design of Fenders was important, but the tool-making was paramount, so they were consistent.  If you did it right, you’d have a batch of necks that could be put on any body from another batch.  If they’d sounded bad, they never would have gone anywhere, but they sounded great.

When you figure out where to put the frets on a guitar and you figure out the scale, there’s a twelfth root of two formula, which is 1.059463, and it hit me one day that I could use that formula to find where an E-flat and a D would be if you wanted to make a longer neck.  What I yelled, “Eureka!” about was figuring out that you could bolt it onto any Fen-der guitar with a 25¹/2″ scale; you wouldn’t have to make a whole new guitar.  

Now I have sort of a family; the one I play all the time is in D, and is two frets longer, but I’ve also got one that’s three frets longer and tuned to D-flat, and one that’s even longer and tuned to C.  You can use the same strings you’ve always used on these necks; you don’t have to think of it as a weird instrument.

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Next month, Steve Ripley (who says he’s now out of the guitar business) discusses his musical ventures with the Tractors.

This article originally appeared in VG June 1999 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.