Ode to the Pedal Steel

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.

Songwriter Spotlight: Dennis de Castro, Music Lessons and the Lessons of Music

My mother muttered, “Oh my God” as we turned on to our suburban street in Southern California after she picked me up from baseball practice. I was 14 years old.

This was the day I mentioned in RIP Jerry Jeff Walker or How I Fell in Love with the Guitar. My “cool new guitar teacher” was parked in our driveway, leaning on his decrepit Carmengia, smoking a cigarette. He was a large man with even larger hair that fell in curls to the middle of his back. My mother pulled into the garage and we got out to introduce ourselves.

“Hey, really sorry about parking in the driveway but I have to pop the clutch to start my car so I try to park on a slope whenever I can.” In a daze, my mother wandered inside. This was not the way things worked in suburbia. That was the first day of what continues to be a long friendship between Dennis de Castro and me (and, eventually, between my mother and Dennis as well).

I knew from my friends who were taking lessons from Dennis’ brother that he was not going to start me on “Twinkle, Twinkle” or “Bill Bailey” or give me scales to learn. He would teach me what I wanted to learn. Now it was Dennis’ turn to be shocked. I proudly told him I wanted to learn Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and Tom T. Hall’s “Ballad of Forty Dollars.” To his credit, he didn’t say “Really?” but I was friends with some of his other students and I knew they were not asking to learn songs by 40-something-year-old country music artists. After a few minutes to get his bearings, he listened to the songs, figured them out quickly and then said, “Well, all right. These aren’t bad.” The next week I asked to learn “Fire and Rain” by James Taylor which I think struck him as a little more sane. It was also a bit more complex so he was able to challenge me in the process. 

For the next four years, that is how I learned the guitar. Dennis would occasionally slip a little theory or some scales in to show how the song I was wanting to learn came to be. I never picked enough of that up to be considered a musician but, by letting me roam the world of music in the places that I wanted to hang out, Dennis gave me the freedom to become a very content guitar player with just enough skill to be able to play with and for others without embarrassment, figure out songs on my own and comfort myself with music when the need arose.

After a couple years, I told Dennis I wanted to learn how to write songs. I don’t remember what he said in response to encourage me to give it a try, but I do remember that he played one of his songs. He said it was one he wrote when he was having some rough times and it just sort of poured out. It was written in about 20 minutes. His point was that that was how songwriting could be sometimes and you just have to go with it. I’ve probably written about 100 songs since then, most of them pretty bad. But I probably have about a half dozen or so that “just poured out” and they are the ones that I tend to play the most.

By our last year, Dennis and I were usually just swapping songs for our lessons. It became clear that I had reached a point roughly equal to my ambition as a guitar player. We concluded that it was silly for two friends to get together every couple weeks, play music, talk about our favorite new albums, baseball and the other things we had in common…and then for me to pay him.

Time, distance, family, jobs and myriad other distractions have interceded over the last 40+ years but Dennis and I still see each other from time to time. We play our latest songs for each other, talk about family, baseball and, most importantly, God. Without Him, I don’t think a clean cut kid from classic suburbia and a hippie rock and roller could have found and learned so much from each other. 

That first song Dennis played for me is still one of my favorite songs. It’s called “A Mountain and a Tree.” On a recent visit I asked Dennis to play it so I could share it with you. 

By the way, Dennis has been a big fan of country music for a long time now…

A Mountain and a Tree

Words and Music by Dennis de Castro

I hear you are a lonely man and you don’t know which way to go,

The blues are all around you and all you want to be is home,

Tell me what you’re thinking about, tell me what I really want to know,

It’s so hard to see inside you, you don’t have to hide yourself no more.

And it’s a long way to go when you don’t have yourself a home,

You’re thinking about your young years when all you did was roam,

You keep looking for an answer without using your eyes,

And listening to someone who keeps telling you lies,

Where are you going, what have you done?

Why are you walking, you should be learning to run.

Take a look inside your eyes, tell me everything you see,

Who are you now, who are you going to be?

The colors of your dreams they all have scattered to the corners of your mind,

Get rid of the separation, fulfill your destination and mine.

I am a mountain top touching the sky,

You are a redwood that’s grown so very high,

So plant yourself upon myself and feel our strength combined,

The colors of your dreams they now have definite design,

You lost yourself and found yourself by looking through at me,

I am the man inside you, the man you want to be,

So now we are together, our minds they now are free,

Together with the unity of a mountain and a tree.

Songs from The Road

I did an album of original songs 20 years ago and called the record The Road. I found a box of CDs of the album a couple months ago and decided to tie them in with a Facebook fundraiser for the country of Burkina Faso where Kay and I visited in 2013. I did videos of each of the songs on the album for each day of the fundraiser. Most importantly, we raised $5000 for the cause!

The videos are all available on YouTube and can be found here. The album is available on Itunes, Spotify, etc.

The Music blog

I have been playing guitar and writing songs for over 40 years. In 2001 I released an album of original songs called The Road that is available online.

One of the great blessings of my life is that my sons, J.C. and Cal, play guitar (among other instruments) and sing as well. All three of us do gigs from time to time and J.C. has a terrific blues trio called The Red Petals. I'll post upcoming gigs, news and the occasional album or concert review here.

Me, Cal and J.C.