If you were bored enough to wonder what to include on a recording to make it more probable that I will like a song and keep listening, I will save you some time trying to figure that out. Undoubtedly, the answer is a pedal steel guitar. Long a staple of country music, in the last few decades it has been featured in country rock and rock bands (e.g., The Eagles, Allman Brothers, Marshall Tucker, The Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Son Volt, etc.) and even blues acts (e.g., Robert Randolph and David Lindley have stretched the pedal steel way beyond its traditional boundaries).
I owned a pedal steel guitar for about forty years. When I first got it, I had already befriended a gentleman in Southern California who was a terrific player. He started to teach me the basics but, unfortunately, after a few lessons, the heart ailment that already had him on disability took him. To be clear, he was a wonderful person and the loss of him as a pedal steel teacher was secondary. Nonetheless, for many years I did not touch the pedal steel because it made me think of him and, frankly, I found it intimidating.
We had a neighbor when we lived in Houston who would never hold himself out as a pedal steel expert but he was certainly competent. When I asked him whether I should give it another try at the age of 42 he laughed and said, “Sure, why not? But you have to understand, trying to learn pedal steel is like playing ping pong in a hammock.” That was enough for me to set it aside for another couple decades.
I tried to encourage J.C. to take it up but we were surprised how hard it was to find a pedal steel teacher in Houston. We figured Texas would be overrun with them. Beyond that, we realized that learning the pedal steel at the age of twelve was probably asking a lot, no matter how game J.C. tended to be about things.
Last year, I stared at the pedal steel in my music room. I had turned it on twice in the last seven years. I finally admitted to myself that I was never going to achieve the gorgeous sounds of Dick Meis, Buddy Emmons, Paul Franklin, Jr., Bruce Bouton, Lloyd Maines, Leo LeBlanc and other legendary pedal steel players. So it made the trip to Denver and into J.C.’s basement. After taking on the violin, guitar, mandolin and banjo, the pedal steel did not seem as daunting all these years later. Over the last year, as time allowed, he started learning what many say is one of the hardest instruments to learn, but he is making great progress. And our visits to Colorado have become even more fun, as evidenced by the videos below.
One final word on pedal steel players. As near as I can tell, there are as few pedal steel players as there are lots of guitar players. Every pedal steel player I’ve met seems to know every other pedal steel player. Dick Meis used to host a pedal steel jam at a cavernous bar near our home when we lived in Golden, Colorado, many years ago. There would be 15 to 20 players sitting at their pedal steels in a huge circle taking turns playing classic country to blues and, occasionally, jazz. Every few songs someone would play a song that they all knew and they would all play. The “Wall of Sound” would have humbled Phil Spector. If you ever get a chance to go see a bunch of pedal steel players jam, particularly in an enclosed setting, do it. It will be unlike anything you’ve experienced musically before.