well playing that stuff all night. I really grew up as a musician in California, where I learned to play country music on the bandstand with a Telecaster exactly the same way Don Rich and Roy Nichols did—
i.e., lots of club gigs and four-set nights.”
What made you to return to blues as a solo artist?
After Dwight and I parted ways, I decided to start concentrating on myself as an artist, and I realized that as a singer and songwriter I definitely fall on the blues side of the page. I put a record out in ’95 called Working Class in the cracks of working with Dwight, and then in ’97 I did Dogs in Heaven. Then I did an instru-mental record called Daredevil. So I was always dabbling in my solo career, but without having both feet in the pond because Dwight’s career was on fire and we were making records and touring the world. It was a great job and the music was great, but it all ended in 2002.
How did you move on?
I started working with an artist on my Little Dog label who had kind of a late-’50s, honky-tonk Web Pierce thing going—basically a revved-up rockabilly thing. That fell apart in ’06, and that’s when we decided as a family that I was going to change my career from being a producer who plays guitar to a guitar player who produces records. My wife is a recording engineer and producer, and we had a studio that we downsized to our house. It’s a four-car garage, but it’s a $100,000 studio. We floated the floors, tilted the walls, doubled the ceiling, and it’s the best studio I’ve had. It’s very flat sounding, so we can do mastering in there too. I’ve made a bunch of records there over the last three years.
Your style became jazzier and bluesier in the post-dwight era. What was the reason?
Well, Dwight’s career was triads. I don’t means this in a negative way, but the music we played was based on triads, and by moving from that to doing more of a rockabilly thing, then the sixths and the ninths and the diminished chords started to enter into it. So I went from triads to four-note chords, and that extra note sets things up for me to play it. So now, all
of a sudden, playing a diminished scale isn’t so bizarre, whereas doing that in a Bakersfield tune would be bizarre. So it really opened the door for me, because although I had been educated as a guitar player, I was limiting my palette sonically to fit Dwight’s music. I played totally and uniquely for him, and that was completely different than what I did for anyone else.
Whether it was Jim Lauderdale, Lucinda Williams, Rosie Flores, or anyone else, I’ve never played the same way as I did for Dwight.
Was there a certain way you wanted this album to sound?
I wanted more air in this record than I’d gotten on Even Things Up, so my engi-neer Tony Rambo and I started experiment-ing with room mics to make it breathe a little more and sound more authentic. The guitar approach, however, is pretty much always the same: I have an old first-edi-tion POD, and I was fortunate to have a friend at Line 6 named Tim Godwin, who got them to model one of my blackface Fender Deluxes that I used with Dwight—
which were beefed up to be very clean sounding—into the POD. They also mod-eled my Silvertone 1489 with the knobs that go down the side. It was either a ’59 or a ’61. You play through that amp and it’s like instant Maxwell Street Chicago, Johnny Shines or Robert Nighthawk.
so you tracked all your guitar parts through a Pod?
Yes. After we’ve got the rhythm section recorded, I sit down with my Reverend PA-1 and Eastsider guitars plugged into the POD, and I get really close to the tone I want by dialing up the Deluxe for the cleaner stuff, or the Silvertone if I need a dirtier sound.
Once it’s all done, then we decide if we want to blend or re-amp the guitar. That way I can even be more finite in how I cast the record. Things like how big the bass is, where the kick drum sits, and the tone of the snare drum, all affect the sound of the guitar. So if we’re blending with real amps, I’ve got a killer blackface Fender Twin I can use for the clean bluesy stuff, and I’ve got my original blackface Deluxe. I also have a Bruce Zinky-designed Fender Tone-Master that I re-amped through for some of the huskier stuff. I can really split some hairs by doing it this way.
Have you used other modeling systems?
At the end of my run with Dwight I was using a Line 6 Vetta. I figured out I could play almost the whole show thorough a modeled Twin, but instead of showing the crowd my ass every time I had to adjust the tone controls when I changed keys, I just programmed it. But it was just the Twin being tweaked in the same way I’d do it in the studio.
What do you play through live?
I’m using two PODs through a Fryette 50/50 stereo tube power amp that is driv-ing two open-back 1x12 cabinets—one wet and one dry—with Eminence Can-nibis Rex speakers in them.
Can you talk about your work with reverend on your new signature PA-1 revtron rt?
Basically it’s a PA-1 semi-hollow with a block down the middle and a bridge that is screwed into a piece of wood near the block on the bass side. But other than that, there’s no bracing anywhere. When it came out it had P-90s and a Bigsby, and everyone was going, “Oh, it’s like a Gretsch.” But no, it’s not like a Gretsch.
It’s much more of a Silvertone with a playable neck and an angled headstock, so the string tension is right and the frets are right. It’s a player’s guitar, and if you walked into a store and tried it, you’d go,
“If I put my strings on it I could play it tonight.” A couple of years later we put Revtron pickups on it and turned it into a Gretsch-style rockabilly guitar.
How did the reverend eastsider come about?
When I decided that I was going to start playing a Tele-style guitar again, I wanted Reverend to make it. So I talked with them about it, and we went around in a circle about body style and this and that. Finally I said, “Look, if I’m going to play a Tele it’s going to look like a Tele—
it’s not going to look like a spaceship.”
So they agreed to do it, and it’s called the Eastsider because Reverend and I are both from the east side of Detroit. Their old shop was on the corner of the street that I grew up on, four blocks from my house. But that guitar has a compound radius fingerboard, my frets—which are the 6105 Dunlops—and locking tuners.
It’s also got a korina body, which sounds
Pete Anderson
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a little huskier, and there are cavities in the front instead of the back. It’s a little bit throatier than a Tele, but you can really pop it up to make it a great Bakersfield country guitar. I’m using it more like a Cornell Dupree kind of bluesy thing, so it’s pretty easy for me to get it to be sort of dark and stringy sounding.
How is your right-hand technique influ-enced by your country playing?
I was always a hybrid picker. I’d use a flatpick and two fingers and accom-plish everything I needed to do, includ-ing palminclud-ing the pick to do harmonics.
When I started playing more blues, how-ever, I realized that outside of maybe B.B.
King, Muddy Waters, and Freddie King, most of the blues guys used their fingers.
So I was getting more of a modern sound using the pick and/or the hybrid tech-nique, and that was just a little too exact and clicky. So I started holding the pick but never using it, because it felt funny to
not have it in my hand. But I had to stop using it because it became a crutch. So then I just played totally with my hand, and a whole other avenue of stuff started happening because my thumb was hit-ting the strings. I was doing fingerpicking too, so it became more pianistic in that I would pluck a chord instead of strum it—and that got me into more complex chords and chordal playing.
do you mainly use your thumb for melodic playing?
On the album Even Things Up I did a song called “West Side Blues,” and I played all of it with my thumb. But mainly I’m fingerpicking and arpeggi-ating with my thumb and my first and second fingers. I’ll also use my first finger by itself a lot too—using the back of the nail for a bright sound and the finger for a meatier tone.
on “red sunset Blues” what kind of baritone guitar did you play?
That’s a Jerry Jones tuned down to A.
How about the solo on “empty every-thing?”
For that I used an old beat-up Epiphone with Harmony gold-foil pickups. Every-thing else is either of my two Reverends.
do you do anything special to your guitars for slide playing?
I use flatwound strings on my slide gui-tars. The heaviest ones I can get. They sound incredible—real pure. If you want to sound like Santo and Johnny, put a flatwound on the D and use a wound G.
It’s badass! g
guitarplayer.com/february2014
> Pete Anderson plays “Even Things Up” live.
M O R E O n L I n E