f46 The Gunn Laws
American experimental folk rock guitarist Steve Gunn has just produced what might be veteran Michael Chapman’s best album. Steve Hunt finds out how he got from there to here.
B
rooklyn-based Steve Gunn is a musical renaissance man, equal- ly adept as a solo guitarist, a singer-songwriter, an improvisa- tional and experimental musi-
cian or leading his band through a set of killer rock songs – as heard to full effect on his latest release, Eyes On The Lines. He’s also the producer of 50, the new album by Michael Chapman which might just be the best-sounding record of the Yorkshireman’s entire half-century career.
I met up with Steve backstage in Lon-
don’s 100 Club, where he and his compadres Cian Nugent (guitar), Jason Meagher (bass) and Nathan Bowles (drums) later delivered an exhilarating show that began with a solo banjo set from Bowles and concluded with Gunn on his knees, turning all the guitar pedals all the way up. The venue, with its photograph-festooned walls documenting the entire gamut of rock ’n’ roll, seemed an entirely apt environment for Gunn – a self- confessed music obsessive and record nut, who’s ready and willing to talk music. Being just six days after the US Presidential elec- tion, he talked a bit about politics, too. But let’s begin at the beginning.
“I started playing music as a teenager,” Steve tells me. “My parents weren’t musi- cians per se, but they were very musical. My mother was really steeped in the soul and R&B scenes and she saw all the Motown
artists that came through town. My dad was more of a rock ’n’ roller – he was really into Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and all that stuff. Music was a huge part of their life and their culture and how they related to the times that they went through.”
“It’s sometimes key for musicians that they have an older sibling to look up to, and I was lucky enough to have a sister who was into lots of the bands that were playing smaller clubs, coming both from the States and from England, and I just soaked all that up. As I got a little bit older and interested in playing, my parents were pretty supportive. By the time I was twelve or thirteen years old I got less interested in playing sports and primarily just wanted to be in a band.”
“My first instrument was the bass, then the following year I got a guitar and took lessons. Through my high school years I dis- covered local scenes and different bands who were very politicised and DIY – dis- tributing their own records and setting up their own shows. After a while I got inter- ested in bands that were more progressive as I realised a lot of the punk and hardcore groups I’d been listening to were very for- mulaic and I really needed to discover things that were new and mysterious to me.”
“When I went to university, this whole world opened up to me through jazz radio programming and going to a lot of record stores. I moved into a house with some
Steve Gunn, Bridget St John and Michael Chapman
guys who were older than me and had extensive record collections. That’s when I discovered pre-war blues and some of the older British folk stuff and some extremely experimental jazz, and also when I started getting really interested in the acoustic guitar. When you’re that age and listening to everything, you connect things that aren’t necessarily on the same timeline, so I discovered the pre-war blues at the same time as John Fahey and Sandy Bull, and those two musicians really affected me in terms of how I wanted to approach the guitar. Discovering those two opened up the guitar for me in terms of open tunings and fingerpicking and in how much they were influenced by the structures of folk music. Once you get to recognise the sign- posts you can correlate the ideas of medi- tative music with Indian classical, with bluegrass, with Moroccan music…”
“I was in college and really trying to soak all this stuff up when I met a very important person in my life in Jack Rose. Jack, to me, represented someone who was really working hard at his craft and some- one who wood-shedded for a long time before he stepped back out and reinvented himself. He was about ten years older than me – such a good guy, very friendly and also very inspiring and supportive to me. He really showed me how to work hard as a guitar player and also to demand respect for it. He was always standing up for others and standing up for himself too, and I feel musicians really need to do that.”
“When he passed away we were all like: ‘holy shit, now what do we do?’ For me, and for Nathan and some others it was a point where we said: ‘OK, we really have to do this now.’ Luckily, I got a load of solo shows around that time, and that was a really formative time for me as a performer. I was travelling to Europe, riding on trains by myself, playing to people I didn’t know in cafés and just getting by. I wasn’t really a natural singer so it took me a while to find my voice and get comfortable with it and learn to project, and all that stuff. I found that touring was the way to get better at everything, and in between I’d just work on songs and record stuff at home. Jason owns a studio called Black Dirt Studio, and that’s where I made Time Off in 2013.
It was Rose, via his vinyl collection, who first introduced Steve to the work of Mike Cooper, with whom he recorded Cantos De Lisboa, also in 2013.
Photo: Constance Mensh
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