f46 Steel Break Out
BJ Cole thinks of the pedal steel as a 3D harp and that its possibilities have barely been explored. Elizabeth Kinder converses with the instrument’s visionary.
“B
J Cole is the best pedal steel player in the world,” says Sting. He’s certainly done more than any other player
on the planet to break it out from its country music jail. The pedal steel’s great- est warrior, BJ’s charged in where angels fear to tread and set it free to realise its limitless and glittering sonic possibilities in a plethora of other musics.
So what? I hear you say. Well. The story of the confinement of the pedal steel is the story of lazy stereotyping that is symptomatic of the downward spiral of a sleepwalking society. Wake up to this tri- umph of technology and unlimited har- monic potential and embrace positive change in the way you think about life.
Anyway, more on that later. Though no doubt this was what gave our editor the brainwave of pairing the legendary BJ with folk’s latest sweetheart Olivia Chaney: they’ll be performing together at the fRoots 35th anniversary bash, Bridges, at the QEH on March 14th. It’s a gig BJ’s more than up for: he likes the purity in her voice, which he says has an earthy quality that reminds him of early Shirley Collins.
Given BJ’s approach to music, Chaney’s in good hands. He says that when he enters a session he empties his mind. He arrives with absolutely no preconceptions about what he’s going to play and focuses on inhabiting the sound world when he hears it. The only thing he brings to bear is his virtuosity on the instrument which frees him to play whatever his creativity inspires in him. Like all great artists in any field, he says ideas flow through him: “There is always that feeling when you’re in command of your instrument: you get to that point where you’re a channel. You’re not thinking of this lick or that, or of a musical concept, you’re simply at one with whatever you’re working with.”
BJ’s telling me this as he eats an omelette in my kitchen. “If I’d looked back and thought that I was going to be a pro- fessional steel guitar player in the UK I’d have thought I was mad. It happened real- ly through sheer bloody-mindedness because I had no Plan B.”
But playing pedal steel hadn’t always been his Plan A. When he left school at six- teen BJ had photography in mind. So he worked as an apprentice to a portrait pho- tographer in Enfield where he grew up, before taking a job in a darkroom in the City for three years. He fitted guitar prac- tice around work, for like any self-respect- ing teenager in the late ’50s and early ’60s, BJ also harboured an ambition to play gui- tar like Hank Marvin.
His dad was a music fan and they would listen to a wide variety of it on Two Way Family Favourites, where they’d hear novelty tracks from the likes of Slim Gail- laird next to some great Miles Davis. The Cole household also boasted an eclectic selection of cross-genre 78s and dad owned an acoustic guitar. But BJ wanted an electric one, like Hank. Handily, Cole Snr, a cabinet maker before he joined the Navy, facilitated his son’s interest by mak- ing him one out of the back of a piano. And so “listening to Django Reinhardt and people like that,” BJ learned the electric guitar and wrote tunes by ear. An early defining moment came via the Perry Como show with Santo & Johnny playing their hit Sleep Walk. “Santo was playing a steel guitar – I’d never seen one before. It wasn’t a pedal steel. But I thought ‘What is this thing?! It sounds like Hank Marvin!’”
The duo, he says, “were Italian Ameri- can immigrants living in New York and making doo-wop.” He “picked up from their record a pure love of the steel guitar without any of the baggage of country or Hawaiian music that comes with it.” And aged sixteen, BJ bought his first six-string lap steel guitar. He’s keen to point out that this was not a slide guitar. Slide guitar is guitar- shaped and played in the position adopt- ed for a guitar. Steel guitar is oblong, played in a keyboard posi- tion. It annoys him that people continually con- fuse the two.
As for the ordinary guitar, BJ never played it again, saying: “I was insecure about playing left-handed. I got a steel guitar that was the right way round for me.” Inspired by Hawaiian music he heard in record shops on the Charing Cross Road, BJ immersed himself in learning the form on his lap steel, buying folios of sheet music and finding himself a teacher. I’m intrigued, given the Beatles were trans- forming the world at the time, but he says: “I wasn’t really aware of what was hap- pening at the sharp end of the music busi- ness. I was a bit of a recluse, not really con- fident.” And so the shy teenager focused on his esoteric music practice, quickly out- growing the six strings of his instrument. “My dad made me an eight-string lap steel, which was wonderful. I still have it.”
A year later in 1964, back on the Char- ing Cross Road, BJ recalls: “I came across a record called Nashville Steel Guitar. It changed my life. It had a big picture of Pete Drake playing a Sho Bud pedal steel. The whole cover was just him playing the guitar. I’d had no conception of pedals, no idea of changing the open tuning. I couldn’t believe it. My favourite instrument, the thing I was passionate about just multi- plied by ten! The sound was more than I could ever have hoped for. It was inexplica- bly mysterious and exotic. It was the oppo- site of mundane. I love mystery in life – and the steel guitar is the mystery in music.”
It’s a mystery to me how anybody gets good at it, given the seemingly limitless possibilities of the different chord voicings (over at least ten strings) in every single position through using a varying combina- tion of pedals and knee-levers. But BJ says that far from finding it impenetrable, the pedals made it easier to play the Hawaiian music he was learning which on a lap steel demanded complicated tunings and tricky technique. In fact, the pedal steel was first developed by Hawaiian musicians who’d become fascinated with the harmonic com- plexity of the big band era and wanted to recreate that sound world on their instru- ments. It was only in the ’50s that it migrat- ed to Nashville, and was developed there by great country players like Buddy Emmons. Knee levers came later in the ’60s. BJ thinks the only useful innovation now would be to standardise the tuning (it’s cur- rently E9 or C6) to an E9/B6 set-up across a single neck, which takes care of all the sonic requirements you could ever encounter.
I suggest that the pedal steel is the
world’s only 3D instrument (with the pos- sible exception of the theremin) and that to call it a guitar is misleading. “It is,” he nods in agreement. “It’s a 3D harp. You’ve
Photo: Kenny Laurenson
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