Steel guitar may well be the wailing soul of country music, but there's more to this extraordinary instrument than just that essential essence of honky-tonk. Stop the Panic, the new CD from steel player B.J. Cole and master-mixer Luke Vibert proves just that. This beautifully quirky album glories in steel's many other exotic musical territories from Hawaiian, exotica, Latin and psychedelic Indian to some the very best of pungent cheese. B.J. and the D.J. might be an odd concept - but it works - leaving goateed clubbers both vibed up and chilled out to the most unlikely sounds of this very peculiar machine.
Steel guitar, so the story goes, was invented in Hawaii by a musician called Joseph Kekeku. In 1885, he accidentally dropped his steel-strung guitar while walking along the railroad tracks. When it hit and slid along the rails it made that unmistakable sound and Joseph realised that he had stumbled on something rather special. Of course there were many others making similar noises long before that, notably another Hawaiian called James Hoa who created similar effects with the blade of a knife. But it was Kekeku who was to make a name for himself - touring the US with the Bird of Paradise Revue in 1904. His amazing technique astonished audiences everywhere - with the guitar lying across his knees, he played with bolts, knives and eventually a compact steel bar - the strings raised and open-tuned to a single chord.
Then in 1919 a stowaway called Sol Ho'opii arrived in California. Soon he was recording prolifically for Columbia and Decca and his playing had a major impact on American musicians - ultimately to make the steel guitar an essential part of Western Swing and Country. The popularity of Hawaiian music on the US mainland reached extraordinary levels, and there was even a pop hybrid called hapa-haole which saw English lyrics grafted onto Hawaiian tunes. This was often sometimes plain daft and often downright racist stuff, but it was hugely popular and outsold just about everything else at the time. Bing Crosby, a friend of Ho'opii, later launched yet another wave of Hawaiiana in the 1930s with his million selling Leilani.
There were also other more practical factors in the spread of steel guitar. Gibson began using steel strings on their guitars and mandolins, and as early as 1922, Martin brought out their first flat tops. The Dopyera brothers began producing their brand new Dobros and in 1929 the National Guitar went into production - a pre-electric treasure which ensured that slide guitar would survive, in several genres, well into days of cables and plugs. When electricity finally entered the equation the possibilities only increased further.
According to country lore, the first electric steel guitar was played by Bob Dunn of Milton Brown's group The Musical Brownies. Dunn played the guitar the way Louis Armstrong played the trumpet and it was a revolutionary sound. By the 1930s his crude electric instrument had changed slightly - no longer was it played across the knees, but rather it stood alone on chrome legs. Now it had pedals, knee-bars and additional necks to cope with the limitations of open tuning. And so the pedal-steel was born, and it was to become the very soul of Western Swing and the jazzy rhythms of Bob Wills. From there the new instrument went to Nashville where it was to become as essential as a hat.
There is, however, another important strand to be considered. It wasn't just the Hawaiians who realised that there was something very expressive to be gained by scraping or sliding something along the strings. Black southern musicians had been achieving similar effects within the blues idiom. Again knives, whiskey bottles or, more commonly, small medicine bottles were used to accompany and mimic the vocal. In fact, this was a very old technique indeed, and was in use even before guitars were commonplace as instruments. Back then, a musician made do with what was called a "diddley-bow" - a one-stringed contraption made of wood, wire and an old can.
As late as 1960 Eddie "One String" Jones was playing a "diddley-bow" to great effect in skid row, Los Angeles. He used a three-foot piece of 2x4 with a steel wire strung from a nail at each end, elevated from the plank by two bridges - one a block of wood and the other a pill bottle. The resonator was no more than an empty gallon paint-can. With his right hand he would beat the wire with a whittled stick, with his left he would slide an empty halfpint bottle up and down, using his forefinger and little finger to press on the wire, cut the sound and add yet more rhythm. The result was a quite extraordinary mix of percussion and slide. A CD called One String Blues is available on Takoma Records.
From this "diddley-bow" root came those familiar bluesy wails of Elmore James and all the subsequent top-notch slide-players like Duane Allman, Rory Gallagher and Bonnie Raitt. Through the 1970s slide-guitar, if not pedal steel became a big part of white rock, providing instant and sometimes gimmicky raunch. Back in Nashville, the pedal-steel flourished, despite several potentially serious onslaughts which came with changing trends.
The first arrived when producers, out to sonically centralise Country music and create the Nashville Sound, began ruling out banjos, fiddles and most other relics of the old days. Pedal-steel might have been banished too but, by this stage, it had almost come to be the very sound of Country music. More threat might have appeared in the shape of the Country-Rock groups but they too seemed hopelessly attached to its wailing possibilities. The Flying Burrito Brothers had Sneaky Pete, Gram Parsons before that had J.D. Maness and whatever the trend, legendary figures such as Buddy Emmons played on virtually everything that moved.
So now we have B.J. Cole and Luke Vibert bringing together the influences of all these great steel and slide players from Joseph Kekuku and Sol Ho'opii to Bob Dunn and Eddie "One String" Jones. Throw in the truly exotic sounds of Alvino Rey and mix in the very individual talents of Vibert and Cole and you have one groovingly satisfying record. Strange, but true.
Stop the Panic from Luke Vibert and B.J. Cole is on Cooking Vinyl/Law and Auder Records