I don't know why I thought of Danny Gatton this morning . Thinking of Danny made me think of Bruce Swaim .Going to "Club Soda" on a whim to visit Bruce when he happened to be playing with Danny was a surprise deal.Even then , when I drank alcohol,I rarely went out on my nights off. Bruce didn't seem like the kind of guy to play a character in Danny's act with the Fender guitar.On the other hand, he did play gigs with me that weren’t all jazz. I don't know , I can't remember all the gigs but I played and sang a lot of pop things . I would play and sing anything for people. It isn't that Danny was outlandish at all though it was hard to escape that "Elvis","Rockabilly",fifties thing he had with the guitar. Having Previty on stringed bass working so hard ,pulling the strings ,pounding , bullying the instrument to be heard at the volume of Danny’s electric guitar tricks added to the “Rocking”character of that band. Danny was unassuming the night I met him there ,introduced as a friend of Bruce Swaim's. Downing a few beers between the sets backstage,his ability and guitar tricks didn't really affect Dan's regular guy character off stage. He was small and quiet while when he played he became rather large , a monster . The loudness of his ax and the obvious control of the many facets of the Fender guitar made him stand out and become larger among the many guitarist of the world.In the little club where I met him , he was a little guy . It was his band but I was there to see Bruce ,a reliable tenor sax man who I called regularly to play with my bands.Dan and I hit it off right away. I don't know why. I have known quite a few recognizable musicians as regular people over the years. Maybe they want to be treated as regular people and they aren't approached by many people that way. My lack of respect might help.(haha). It's a dirty job but somebody has to do it .It might be something else , too , a kind of comradery , a brotherhood of experiences,or maybe I am just old.
I never saw Jimi Hendrix perform in front of an audience . I did play with Jimi in the recording studio a few times,"The Record Plant",where I rehearsed my own band many times, and met him from time to time in clubs we would frequent and sit in and play when we were in New York . Jimi also was quiet . He wasn't small as he was taller than I am , but he wasn't anything like the act he put on screwing his guitar and playing louder than anyone at the time. By the time I met Jimi he was already swinging with major hits , in fact , he well might have been on the other side of his great popularity that came before “Woodstock”. He wanted to play jazz, to play the blues , and not continue to do his act of tricks.I have no idea if he was able to get away from the exciting character he had invented on stage but that wasn't the person I knew and ,like Danny,it had nothing to do with our conversation or how we responded to one another.Our scene wasn't all "getting high" and groupies though that was a part of it . Part of it was improvising, yet another addiction to hand eye co-ordination.In this addiction , we became closer to past historic musicians. I can understand Bach playing the organ ,improvising till his sight became blurry . I am sure that the same synapse were excited in his brain as he played as were in us and as are excited by the use of cocaine. Playing can be an addiction . Knowing other addicts , perhaps a nod of knowledge , might be a part of making what might be unnatural ,more natural. There was a Spanish term , I think it was "Cokaliso",that illustrated that "nodding" knowledge between cocaine users.
Both these guys are gone now. They didn't do anything I didn't do,didn't feel any more pain or pleasure than I felt . No, I didn't play the guitar like them and didn't strive to the larger characters that ,in retrospective, they have become in their deaths.I don't think I could handle it any better than they did if I had continued in popular music or the character I was in my era of the sixties , the character of sex drugs and rock and roll.I think that even though both Jimi and Danny had achieved recognition as the characters that they invented with their guitars, they were also trying to escape the character that other people assumed they were in life. These characters had both an aspect of "freeing" them and enslaving them . It might have been these monstrous characters that drove both guys to their ultimate escapes. I don't think that Jimi intentionally intended to kill himself ,he was just having fun, but he was tortured by a character that he could not escape, a character that his audience insisted he had to continue.Danny , sadly,did that other number, a final number that unfortunately he shares with other suicides.
In death they are larger as they sometimes were in life when they played . The guitar can be so loud , so threatening , a tool , a prop for the stage . Once , a long time ago , as I played the guitar on stage ,I saw a man approaching my girl across the dance floor . I walked across and through the dancers , still playing with the band . The guitar chord stretching to my amp across the dance floor as I played , I had to shout at the same time ,"Leave her alone!" ,which startled the other guy . We had a few words and he left . While I was still playing the set , he came back with a cop . I came down from the stand to speak with them and found that he was accusing of "assault" with a deadly weapon. The character I was on stage with my guitar in hand was like a character on the screen coming down into the dark movie seats. When I told the cop my side of the story, he laughed,dismissed the imagined assault,and told the other guy to leave.Each moment has a reality from different perspectives.Sometimes an objective point of view can clarify what is real and what is not, sometimes it can never be clarified.
