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For years now I have been writing. Much of what I write sits on my desktop. Some (not much) makes it onto facebook or into a newsletter. I decided to create a space to share some of these words. Why? I suppose because I suspect someone might derive pleasure from them. And it seems rather silly to write for no one, doesn’t it? Did I mention the rejections for publication I’ve received? Well now, if I relied on the gatekeepers what kind of artist would I be? If you are one of those people who might enjoy my words, great! If this is an annoyance please do let me know and I will unsubscribe you. I hope to have a few worthy thoughts whether in fiction or fact or that gray area between. I am inspired by some of the substack authors I have discovered. Ted Goia, for instance, who writes about music with penetrating insight, humor, and poise. Feel free to share your thoughts with me in this virtual meeting place. Here is my first post! I thought I’d drag out one of my fave pieces from the archive about my hometown guitar hero, Danny Gatton.

Please note this essay first appeared in Jazz Times six or seven years ago.

DANNY GATTON’S AMERICAN ROMANCE

An essay on an unusual guitar hero.

Danny Gatton played the guitar like his hands were on fire.

At fourteen he was already playing professionally, and at sixteen shaming men three times his age. He learned everything by ear, never read music, took almost no lessons. His mother would put on Roy Clark- "Hear that," she'd ask? You have to be better." And soon enough he was. A torrent of ideas poured from Danny when he improvised, as if he couldn't get them out fast enough, and he could always see ahead to where a solo was going, like he had a mental GPS, and it gave his sound authority and pinpoint accuracy.

Danny could remember hearing music in his head as an infant, as if angels were singing to him.

September of 1978, The Cellar Door, Washington D.C.'s preeminent music club, and Gatton and pedal steel player Buddy Emmons are trading choruses on the song  Rock Candy Mountain. The band is Redneck Jazz Explosion, and Gatton is in peak form. It's a 12 bar blues played extremely fast, and the audience is barely stifling screams of excitement as the tension mounts, each soloist attacking the timeless progression with their own virtuosic imprint. Close your eyes and you can hardly tell where one leaves off and the other begins. Emmons uses the metal slide to dip, bend, and weave between notes, while Gatton uses the fingers of his left hand to pull off those same sounds, and both of them play a complex idea so fast and clean that it startles you, makes your eyes go wide. Bebop harmony running head on into country twang, pure American ecstasy, as both players pull out tricks to up the ante, and you don't want it to end, it's too amazing, too much fun, like watching two Olympic sprinters, but it's no footrace, it's music.

Danny's shows were a sonic amusement park, a rollercoaster of  six-string hijinks, like the beer bottle used as a slide, foam spraying all over the neck, licks that would bend and distort and create shapes you didn't think were possible, like he had seven fingers.

Except it was also incredibly serious- he was doing things that no one had ever done, playing American guitar music in a way that made other players seem like  puzzled novices. Danny was an encyclopedia of styles, effortlessly conjuring jazz, country, rockabilly, blues, rock n' roll in one solo, the seams invisible. But you never had any sense that he was showing off, or posing as a "guitar hero," because he was the most unpretentious, laid back, who-gives-a-fuck guy imaginable.

How did he make it look so easy, like he wasn't trying? I'd go into a kind of hysteria when he plugged in, early on when no one knew who he was. Young as I was, I still knew that a player like Danny wasn't coming around twice. I thought I could learn to play like him, but I couldn't- no one could, and in fact that sentiment became a D.C. cliche.

Those days you'd pay $3, if that, to see him at some dump like the Psyche Delly Inn, a greasy spoon lunch joint with a charmless music room in back in Bethesda, MD. It was 1974, I was seventeen, but no one carded me. His band, The Fat Boys, might stretch one tune for thirty minutes, the Mystery Train medley or some trifle that he turned into a rockabilly epic like Ubangi Stomp; Danny might take three solos in one tune, all of them completely different. He'd curl his hand over top of the neck and play upside down, then do octaves in 16th notes, get a slapback delay going, bust out the Heineken bottle, splash complex jazz chords inside a rocking blues shuffle, build a ten chorus solo on Stormy Monday that caused young aspirants to shout for joy. He'd moan and cry through Harlem Nocturne, make you shudder with his piercing tone.

When he took his own life in 1994, I was depressed for weeks. It was personal.

If Danny couldn't make it, how could I? I don't mean make it onto the cover of Guitar Player Magazine. I mean make it as a creative human being on planet earth. It made no sense to me that someone who brought this much joy to so many others could succumb to such deep despair inside himself.

The joy of Danny's music still lives inside my fingers. And maybe a touch of the despair, too. If we love someone’s art, allow it inside our hearts, we can’t just choose their victories. We share in their loss, too.

Btw I was in a group for a while that played some of Danny’s music (and our own) called The Spellcasters. Here’s a recently discovered youtube video of the last tune on the last gig we ever played in 2019. Rock Candy! That’s Dave Chappell, Anthony Pirog, John Previti, and Mike Kuhl giving it all we got.