"Plastic Jesus"

After a busy end to 2017, I finally got around to recording a new tune. Well, not only was 2017 busy, the high action on my acoustic guitar finally became unplayable after years of heavy gauge strings pulling on the neck. It's a shame, it had a nice woody, deep tone, which is why I am going to try to convert it to a short scale bass. After nearly a year of researching acoustics, I settled on a Blueridge, which has a great full sound. To test her out I decided to take a stab at "Plastic Jesus", a popular novelty song written in 1957. It is best known as the song Lucas Jackson sings after hearing of his mother's passing in Cool Hand Luke, but it has been covered by everyone from The Flaming Lips to Billy Idol to Widespread Panic. I was probably most inspired by The Wandering Endorphins' expanded acoustic version which is a lot of fun. I thought about adding bass and harmony vocals, but didn't want to overload a 90 second tune.

My First Dobro

circa 1995 (evidence: pastel couch)

At the age of 14 I got my first guitar, a cheap Yamaha electric and bad Peavy amp. Typical beginner equipment, easy to return if the kid gives up after a month. Well, 2 months later I had a Les Paul - just happened to see a cheap used one at the guitar store and my music-loving parents could see I was hooked.

Typically if a kid wants to go acoustic, they get a regular acoustic guitar. I got a Regal Dobro. I loved the sound of Duane Allman dobro's on "Little Martha" and "Please Be With Me" and Dickey Betts on "Pony Boy", so I just had to have one. I didn't have it for long, the cones started buzzing, which happens as seasons change. But I thought it was broken, so I returned it for a Marshall Amp. It would take 20 years before I replaced the dobro, and damn am I glad to have another one.

Altered Roots Band

Altered Roots Band at Funky Buddha Lounge

Last month I joined Altered Roots Band, founded by singer/songwriter/guitarist/foot-drummer Kenny Karr. After I finally got settled in south Florida, I decided it was time to stop picking songs on my own - I missed playing music with other musicians. Years of jamming on songs I didn't always know at Rocky Sullivan's Monday Jams back in Brooklyn prepped me for quickly picking up the material, especially Kenny's own excellent originals. The concept is "Americana Re-arranged", which naturally attracted me considering all of the acoustic re-arrangements I've been doing with this project.  However, I still get to plug in the PRS pretty often, so it's a really nice mix so far.

The band is rounded out by the excellent Bob Zimmerman (aka, The Mad Scientist) on bass and Emily Carter belting some fantastic lead and harmony vocals. UPDATE: Check out some highlights from an October show.

"Mountain Jam"

When I first started this acoustic project about 2 years ago, I scribbled down about 20 songs I might want to include. The Allman Brothers' "Mountain Jam" was on there towards the bottom, but I don't think I ever seriously thought I'd put together an acoustic version. But while noodling on Jimi Hendrix's "Third Stone From the Sun", which is prominently featured within the winding movements of "Mountain Jam", I figured why not take a stab at it the whole thing.

"Mountain Jam" was a showcase for the whole band, a lengthy instrumental that was born from The Allman Brothers and The Grateful Dead jamming together on a riff from Donovan's "There is a Mountain". For anywhere between 10 and 45 minutes "Mountain Jam" weaves through melodies from "Third Stone From the Sun" to "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" to "What I Say". The version on Eat A Peach (33 minutes, originally split across 2 LP sides) gives everyone in the band a few minutes in the spot light: the melodic and funky drumming of Butch and Jaimoe and even a sweet and bouncy Berry Oakley bass solo. But it was different every night.

The Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers jam at the Fillmore East

As the band's line ups changed and their song catalog grew, "Mountain Jam" would pop up in sets less and less. By the time the Allmans reunited briefly in 1979, "Mountain Jam" was played even less (a truncated version closes an epic 1979 Passaic NJ encore), which isn't surprising since long extended jams weren't exactly en vogue. But even when the band reunited again in 1989, "Mountain Jam" was mostly sidelined save for a tease in the middle of "Jessica". It wasn't until the Summer 2000 tour, the first without without guitarist Dickey Betts, that the band dusted it off so they could give Gregg Allman's voice a rest since Dickey's departure made him the sole singer. It remained in the rotation until the band called it quits in 2014, and was typically an epic set piece that could open and close the same show.

I drew on a few different "Mountain Jam" performances for my version. I needed a framework, so I picked the essential pieces from the band's 2004 In The Studio performance of Eat A Peach as a jumping off point. From there I had to figure out what I could perform and adapt. I wanted to add keys since Gregg Allman's hammond organ is such a presence, but it quickly became too busy. Plus I'm not a good enough keyboard player to justify that much bad piano playing. But I did throw in a few of those keyboard licks on the dobro solo. Same thing happened to the drum section. If I had more time, I might have been able to put together a something more interesting but there is a big gulf between being able to keep a beat and being able to put together a few bars of funky, interesting percussion solo. I initially intended the bass solo to be longer, but as I tried to figure out what to do there I realized I would have just been copying Berry Oakley's licks. So that got cut down considerably. The bass part is actually super simplified. Berry Oakley's bass playing on "Mountain Jam" is relatively busy, moving freely along side Dickey and Duane's guitar themes. I tried playing bass with a little more freedom but it just didn't fit (probably because he was an amazing bass player and I'm not), so I simplified the bass line to something less distracting.

"Rock & Roll"

There has been more lionizing of Lou Reed than maybe any other musician of the past 40 years, especially in his home town, New York City. Along with fellow experimental musician John Cale, Reed infused pop music with an art house sensibility with The Velvet Underground at a time when The Beatles and Beach Boys were just starting to experiment sonically. Cale was soon dismissed and Reed left the band by 1970, just as their final studio album, Loaded, was being finished. Between Lou Reed's mythic status as the sound of 1970s New York, and Andy Warhol's initial involvement, The Velvet Underground is likely still better known for their art house reputation than their actual music.

There have been many rock & roll songs about Rock 'n Roll, but Lou Reed's autobiographical tune is probably the best, definitely the most personal love letter to the music:

"Rock and Roll' is about me. If I hadn't heard rock and roll on the radio, I would have had no idea there was life on this planet. Which would have been devastating - to think that everything, everywhere was like it was where I come from. That would have been profoundly discouraging. Movies didn't do it for me. TV didn't do it for me. It was the radio that did it." - Lou Reed

I  can't remember when exactly I heard the song, probably much later in life than I should have, but Lou Reed's deceptively minimal arrangement immediately jumped out at me from a pretty amazing album. After several jammy songs, I wanted to take a crack at it. Even though the song is mostly acoustic, I had to figure how to strip the song down acoustically without removing the attitude. Also, I just don't have a lot of punk in my voice. I tried to sing/speak it like Lou, but it sounded like a bad imitation. So I tried to put a bit of a melody to it, which I didn't love, so I tried masking it with harmony and back up vocals, similar to the "All Right" answer back up vocals on the chorus. I didn't love it, so I shelved it. I came back to it a few months later, with fresh ears, and thought it didn't sound so bad once I ditched the harmony singing, and wasn't going to get any better.

"Back Where It All Begins"

I like to mix it up as much as possible for this acoustic project and create something different from what I've just done. Last month I finished The Grateful Dead's "Franklin's Tower", which came together fairly easily, which you would expect from a loose jam song. After noodling on my mandolin for a few days, I decided I wanted to feature it in order to add some variety to the instrumentation. I really hadn't used it as anything more than an additive to date, learning chords and parts as they were needed. The mandolin sounded pretty good as the backbone of the Allman Brothers' "Back Where It All Begins" adapting the song to a rootsier palette that still retained the song's bright essence. But recording it right after "Franklin's Tower" presented its own challenges. The two songs are in some ways related - their basic chord progression is basically the inverse of each other, only "Begins" has a more complicated bridge and instrumental section. It was going to be a fun challenge to separate these two songs from each other. (Coincidentally, the Allman Brothers began playing both songs in the mid-1990s)

"Back Where It All Begins" was released on 1994's Where It All Begins at the height of the Allman Brothers' Warren Haynes & Allen Woody era. At the age of 13, I just happened to be getting into the band, so with the band peaking, it was a perfect time. "Begins" was one of my first introductions to witnessing the band play. I tuned in to The Late Show with David Letterman expecting to see Gregg belt out their latest hit , "No One to Run With" (as he had done a week prior on Jay Leno's Tonight Show), only to see the cowboy guitar player singing a much sweeter tune. "Begins" is a mishmash of folk and jam music infused with desert drifter iconography, which is exactly what you would expect from Dickey Betts, yet still be blown away by. "Begins" takes you through 10 minutes of high peaks and quiet valleys. The set piece features Warren Haynes' blistering guitar playing that will make guitar players either want to practice their guitar or burn it (to quote a friend).

Allman Bros on David Letterman; first time I "saw" them play.

The song starts out simple enough, an inverse of "Franklin's Tower" circular major progression up from I and back instead of down to it. This is common in many popular songs ("Louie, Louie", "Wild Thing", etc), so it is a testament to Dickey's playing that he is able to make it unique. Superficially, the bridge could be mistaken for "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star", which I'm not sure is intentional (Dickey would later change a lyric from "and the stars up in the sky" to "tell her one more goodbye" and I always wondered if it was to distance it from the nursery song or was just a more evocative line).

The instrumental section seems simple enough at first glace, but the jump into an E>D chord progression keeps a player on their toes. Well, it kept me on my toes, and to further separate the arrangement from my "Franklin's Tower", I decided to do a dobro solo which was even more challenging. The second solo section bring the song back to the A>D>E>D>A and is more traditional and mercifully more forgiving.

I recorded the tune in its native key of A, but it was too low for my voice, so I moved it to C, which moved the solos to a little more challenging spot on the neck of the guitar. It also meant the harmonies were pushed higher, so they certainly suffered. I won't lie, it got frustrating along the way, but at the very least, it definitely doesn't sound like "Franklin's Tower".

"Franklin's Tower"

I never really got into the Grateful Dead. I've heard some really nice performances from them, but I've also heard a lot of noise, as if 6 people were playing 7 different songs. But just as my appreciation for Bob Dylan grew from covers of his music, so did my appreciation for the Grateful Dead.

Dickey Betts, Jaimoe, Jerry Garcia, 1972

When Jerry Garcia passed away in 1995, as a tribute to his friend and fellow guitarist, Dickey Betts added a tease of "Franklin's Tower" to his beloved, and similarly structured, "Blue Sky". That tease stayed there until he stopped touring in 2014, which is a pretty big compliment. I didn't know what it was when I first heard it, which likely would have been my first Allman Brothers show in 1996 (Wisconsin State Fair!). Eventually I got hip to "Franklin's Tower", which the Allman Brothers covered in full starting in 2000. With Oteil singing, it was likely included as something to give Gregg a singing break after Dickey's departure from the band earlier that year left them with just one vocalist. It turned into a pretty epic set piece, typically going full circle with "Blue Sky" teases by Derek Trucks and Warren Haynes.

After years of a lot of jam band music festivals, I have a softer spot for the Grateful Dead and their music. They may not have the greatest singing voices (nor do I), and have given some totally uneven performances over the years, but they wrote and made a lot of great music. Millions of stoners can't be wrong, and the remaining members continue to sell out stadiums and inspire the next generation of musicians.

Since February is Grateful Dead Covers Project month, I put together an acoustic version of "Franklin's Tower". Naturally, it's deceptively simple - it was a "go to" song for jams I used to take part in at Brooklyn's Rocky Sullivan's, and like he Dead, some were epic and some were not. I was able to arrange some peaks and valleys along the way, and even a quick animation to accompany. Roll away...
#DeadCoversProject