Leo Kottke's "Vaseline Machine Gun"

Finding this on Youtube kinda blew my fucking mind, because this footage right here is exactly how I got introduced by Kottke. The sound and picture here are so gloriously muddy and dark I honestly wonder if it wasn't rendered from the very same VHS tape that my Pops had...John Fahey and Steely Dan were on it, too, I remember, just a primitive, deck-dubbed video mixtape of old live footage that was getting re-run on the oddball Canadian stations we picked up in Vermont. And, of course, good old public television: Austin City Limits and Sessions at West 54th were a staple of my early music education. I loved my father's massive library of vinyl, to be sure, but nothing grabs the young imagination like them moving pictures.

When I was first sitting down trying to emulate what I saw here, I was playing a Silvertone with a badly replaced neck and I didn't even know how to tune the thing. I reckon all I manged to do was cultivate some early carpal tunnel and annoy the living fuck out of my poor Dad.

If you'd like to attempt the monster, here's some dubious tabulature -- a lot of accurate notes, though, so a good foundation to build on.

"Goodbye Porkpie Hat" - Greg Howard

Yesterday I posted an interview with Emmett Chapman, the inventor behind the cleverly named Chapman Stick. Branding mistakes aside, the man is a genius luthier and a remarkable musician in his own right, too. Still, I was unimpressed by the Stick for years simply because I never liked what people played on it.

It was Eric Hoffer who said "I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind" -- an insight he apparently arrived at without the benefit of growing up in Vermont. Classical music sounds far better on a damn acoustic guitar, and the lightspeed legato progressive-rock stuff bores me to tears...tears of blood. Charles Mingus, on the other hand? Yes, sing to me.

Greg Howard also excels as a teacher: start here. He's developed a whole personal Academy, from rigorous practice routines to a hybrid notational system to communicate the intricacies of Stick playing on paper. More importantly, though, he brings a fascinating new angle to Goodbye Porkpie Hat in this grainy video right here. Dig it.

The Lost Legacy of Daniel Hecht

The sole reason I know about Daniel Hecht is because he was an old friend of my stepfather. Growing up, I'd been to his house for dinner and I'd seen strange black & white photographs of Daniel looking very much like a cross between a model and a rock star, and then there was that thing...

I actually spent some time playing around with the monstrous hydraulic "custom capo" system you see in that video. It had grown bigger since this video was shot. It was also no longer attached to a guitar and I had no context whatsoever -- as best I understood it, the device was a crude prototype of a robot hand. "Robot Hands" was something I could definitely get with at the time...two hand tapping routines and open chord voicings, not so much.

At his model/rockstar peak, Daniel Hecht was signed to Windham Hill records and leading the vanguard of the "New Age" movement and the steel string renaissance underway in those days. He also played a Somogyi guitar, which cost more than most houses even then. He released three albums then vanished from the scene, a disappearing act that reality could never full adjust for. Today he's basically unknown and I was stunned to find actual video evidence of his existence on The Youtubes. It made something pretty clear to me: this is history that needs to be documented. I aim to do exactly that. Expect to see an interview with the man here in the next few weeks.

Wes Montgomery - "Impressions" Live in '65

For my meager money, Wes Montgomery was one of the all-time greatest artists to touch the fretboard. This live footage is a particularly tasty slice of work, and something I'd never seen until this evening.

The thumb technique is incredible. His attack is so casual and his playing is so accurate that the actual notes seem to become invisible even when the camera is directly centered on his right hand. For further reading, here's a long-form article I was obsessing over many years ago: Wes Montgomery Unedited, presented here courtesy of the Internet Archive's very awesome Wayback Machine.

The Acute Psychosis of Edgar Broughton

I was first introduced to this footage by the BBC documentary Heavy Metal Britannia and fell in love with the unhinged, awkward glory of Edgar Broughton's unique delivery. His ability to wind up off beat is uncanny but the honesty is so compelling I get riveted by this performance every time I see it. As a side note: backgrounds like this need to happen way more often in 2012.

Broughton, it should be noted, is a ranking Discordian Pope who was fond of closing sets with a ritual piece named "Out, Demons, Out!" which was an expansive (and f'ing loud) adaptation of the Fugs composition "Exorcising the Demons Out of the Pentagon."