Amazing people Ive crossed paths with: Danny Gatton
6 June 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
In early nineties Guitar Player magazine came out with an cover story on a DC underground guitar legend Danny Gatton calling him the greatest guitar player youve never heard. Gatton had been a fixture and a legend in and around DC for twenty years. I used to see him a bar called Gallaghers (no relation) down on Connecticut Avenue across the street from Irelands Four Provinces, a bar run by an Irishman named John Berry. I would go to the four Ps to get my fill of Guinness and blarney from the brogue-infected barflies then walk across the street and sit in Gallaghers, a long narrow club that held maybe a 100 at capacity.
The club was never full and typically Id catch two sets for a 5-dollar cover, quite the bargain considering for the cost of a few drinks you got to see one of the worlds premier instrumentalist. According to Bach biographer Arnuad Linas, Bach played a weekly gig at a local tavern back when he was in his later twenties. A rock band equivalent, every weekend Johann and his posse of players (Can you imagine how good youd have to be to get picked by Bach?) would play manic chamber music at Zinns Caf in Vienna. He and the boys in the band would drink pint after pint of homemade beer and jam away on the newest compositions the prolific one had penned that week.
Reportedly Bach was quite friendly and quite inquisitive about public reaction to particular piece. I damned well would have made myself an integral part of that scene, had I been around. Bach live? Thats a slam dunk. I sometimes imagined what the reaction would have been by a music freak of that era, accidentally wandering into Zinns and hearing Bach and the boys tearing up some triple time version of Fugue 13 in F-sharp minor from The Well-Tempered Clavier. Dang! That boys good!
The locals would no doubt glare disdainfully at the slack-jawed interloper, Bumpkin! Tell us something we dont know! I saw more than a few tourist types accidentally wandered in on Gatton at Gallaghers and as they sat down and settled in, if they were music savvy, you could see them (the guy usually) going Dang! That boy is good! Well no kidding and thanks for clueing us in on that. Ive always empathized with west coasts surfers posting and enforcing locals only signs and the subsequent vigilante actions. Gatton was so good that you didnt want to share. It seemed only a matter of time before seeing him in a local club would become a thing of the past. We all assumed hed catch fire on the national or international scene at some point and then if we wanted to see him we would have to queue up with the rest of the public to buy tickets for Constitution Hall or the Capital Centre.
Gatton handled a guitar the way Ali moved his fists. Anything on a guitar you could do Gatton could top. Run your best riff and hed turn it into a pretzel and hand it back to you way better than your stupid original. His approach to technique seemed more in the tradition of Kansas City cut session style of pre-bop jazz greats back in the 30s. Whatever you could do, he could do better way better, way, way better. Like a rock and roll Charlie Parker he could play twice as fast, twice as subtle, twice as soulful as the best of the rest. His pure technical skills were light-years ahead of anyone and everyone excepting Roy. Always Roy and Danny. Speak one name and the other name is always raised by those in the know. Yin and Yang. Black and white. Up and down. Two sides of the same coin. Neither one a hair better nor one smidgen worse than the other: just different. Was John Coltrane better than Sonny Rollins? No way. Not better, not worse. Different. Roy and Danny. Danny and Roy. Fate, for some reason had them both come up at the same time in pretty much the same place, they ended up living within thirty miles of each other. Friends and rivals each ruled a definable segment of the guitar universe. Like neighboring mafia Dons they seemed friendly and at ease with each other, a mutual admiration society with both on equal footing. Roy touched me more than Danny on an emotional level.
I prefer music to hit me on an emotional and physically level rather than in a logical and cerebral way. Roy was all feel and heart, Danny was more the cold calculating clinician. Danny was a shape-shifter, a magician. Pick a tune, any tune; pick a style, any style. He would reel it off the best youd ever heard and say, Want to hear it double time? Hell yeah Danny. He blast off once again, solo and perfect. Now you wanna hear it triple time? He could imitate anyone. Roy was not nearly as broad as Danny but Roys blues-drenched approach appealed more to me. Danny was 100-miles wide and a foot deep whereas Roy was 100-yards wide and 100-yards deep. Different. Roy was the Idiot Savant whereas Danny was a turbocharged mechanical engineer.
Gatton was a mechanic in a figurative and literal sense. He lived on a farmette thirty miles outside DC and in his spare time built hot rods. Real good ones. Perfect in every sense. He and Beck both loved candy coated chopped and channeled lead sleds. Danny was a guitar mechanic. The best. He raised the seemingly innocuous chore of setting up a guitar from that of a lawn mower repair mechanic to Black Art. Top players flocked to him with their guitars because after he set them up the players could play better than before Real? Placebo? Who knew? Les Paul once called Danny one of the worlds leading designers of innovative guitar electronics and perhaps the greatest guitar player I have ever seen or heard. High praise from Caesar. Dannys technique was mechanically flawless. Supposedly he taught himself foggy mountain breakdown on his first guitar on the car ride home from the store where theyd just purchased the acoustic.
He built guitar gadgets and one was called The magic dingus box. This was some sort of technologically advanced tape-loop feedback device that hed miniaturized and mounted on his guitar like a nitrous oxide set-up on a street rod. He bought some drunken college kid onstage one night and strapped his guitar onto the kid who protested he didnt know how to play, Nonsense. Said Gatton. Play! The kid begins spastically plunking the strings. Gatton switched on the magic dingus box and suddenly the guitar part Danny played on the previous song starts cracking through the speakers at top volume. The band jumps in on cue with the kid sorta believing hes actually playing. His buddies 15-feet away in the crowd definitely believe hes playing. He kid gets into it and the SRO crowd catches fire, he gets a standing ovation at the end of the song while in full-on karaoke/pantomime mode. His buds carry him around the bar floor on their shoulders as if hed just scored the winning TD at the Super Bowl. True story.
My schoolmate pal Tommy Branch was a Texas juvenile delinquent who sang in rock bands. He sounded like a bullfrog on steroids singing though an electronic megaphone. Tommy had a three note range. (Dorothy Parker once scathingly said of Tyrone Power, He possesses a full emotional range from A to B.) Tom could sing his three-notes loud and powerful and in pitch and with better staccato rhythm than Otis. And in the great tradition of the believable white delinquent punk singers with a chip on their shoulder, what Tom lacked in range he doubled-up on with soul and conviction. For that reason and for his palooka good looks and natural Texas swagger he was in high demand as a rock and roll front man. For some reason Danny Gatton, the musical sophisticate, loved the way Tommy, the musical primate, sang.
For many, many years Tommy was the front man singer in Dannys rock band. Being a shape-shifter Danny always had 2-3 musical projects and collaborations going on at any one time. His rock band was called Funhouse but he also had a crew of country collaborators. He would routinely hook up with top players in every genre to jam, from blue grass to soul, from bebop to hip-hop and all musical stops in between. Danny never seemed tortured like Roy. To the contrary he seemed to have it all together. Danny was the man and had a whole lot of positive working in his favor. Financially able to make a good living off music The Man could not hold him down; no one had a boot on Dannys neck. He made good dough gigging around the red hot Washington Baltimore club scene. He stayed married and had kids and a farm home and plenty of time and money to renovate his street rods and still enough time left over to tinker in the shop on his music related inventions.
It was said that when John Fogarty wanted to put together a comeback band after the success of the album, Centerfield, he called Danny and Gatton said, Thanks but no thanks. He was a truly free man in charge of his own destiny. So why did he go to his shop one night after having a beef with his wife over the food selection at dinner and shot himself in the head with a .22? Symptomatic of deeper psychological currents no doubt. Roy wasnt a shock; Danny was. And so both men joined what Kurt Cobains mom called, The Stupid Club. Both dead in their late forties for no apparent reason.
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