SCOTT JORDAN'S HUMBLER LINER NOTES
One of the music world’s enduring gifts is its cavalcade of brilliant musicians and characters so talented, so unique, so arresting that they spawned nicknames forever intertwined with their art and iconic personalities. Satchmo. The Killer. The Iceman. The Lonesome Drifter and the Night Tripper. Gatemouth, The Possum, and Skydog.
Now imagine a guitarist so unfathomably skilled and versatile that he earned the most stone-cold moniker possible: The Humbler. The origins of that storied tag are in every Telecaster bend, run, and solo from this 1981 club show at California’s Berkeley Square. New wave was the new craze, but Washington, D.C.-based singer Robert Gordon was a young rockabilly apostle. He recorded a pair of independent albums with Link Wray before landing an RCA Records contract and hitting the road. In tow was a hastily assembled band of Washington, D.C. club circuit vets including bassist Tony Garnier, drummer Shannon Ford, and a shy guitarist named Danny Gatton. (Garnier went on to become Bob Dylan’s longtime bassist.)
The tour had just begun when they hit California, and as you’ll hear Gordon tell the small crowd, it was only the band’s fourth gig together. Considering the circumstances and the Berkeley Lounge’s humble capacity of 150 patrons, this May 10, 1981 show had all the makings of a journeyman’s Sunday night gig for the locals.
To understand how it became one of the most coveted bootleg tapes among guitarists, first give credit to the soundmen working the booth that night. Prior to the show, Gatton and drummer Ford walked out for a sound check and started playing ideas off each other, and the few onlookers couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Someone threw a cassette in the mixing board and started recording.
The lore of that soundcheck, and the reaction to it, isn’t hyperbole or an anomaly. I had an eerily identical experience the first time I heard Gatton live in 1991 at Northampton, Massachusetts’ Pearl Street nightclub. A buddy of mine and I went early to grab a bite before the show, and in a serendipitous moment, found ourselves the only ones there for soundcheck. Gatton and his bandmates ignored the lurkers and kicked off the 1964 doowop chestnut “Just Like Romeo and Juliet,” a sugary pop confection with a catchy chorus. But when it came time for the solo, Gatton uncorked a rushing fountain of chicken pickin’, deep blues bends, and elegiac swing excursions that sounded like an exhilarating rollercoaster ride into the heart of American music.
And just like that, three minutes into it, Gatton abruptly stopped mid-solo. He wanted a different tempo and counted it off again from the top. This happened roughly six times. Each instance, Gatton took the solo into wildly different directions, with every pass containing some mindblowing moment unlike anything I’d ever heard. And every time, Gatton halted the band. It was like watching Beethoven write an astonishing symphony in real time, only to mutter to himself and toss his ideas into the wastebasket. My friend and I looked at each other in disbelief.
At the time of the Pearl Street show, Gatton’s guitar wizardry was starting to reach a wider audience. Guitar Player magazine wrote a 1989 cover story heralding Gatton as “The World’s Greatest Unknown Guitar Player,” and he earned a major-label record deal with Elektra Records for 1991’s 88 Elmira St. Subsequent albums with Hammond B3 virtuoso Joey DeFrancesco and an unforgettable New York Stories session with jazz luminaries Roy Hargrove and Joshua Redman further cemented Gatton’s reputation as a singular guitarist who effortlessly traversed blues, country, jazz, swing, and rock ‘n roll.
But it was his supercharged rockabilly licks on this Berkeley show that first earned Gatton his Humbler nickname. It’s one thing to take musical inspirations and blend them into an original sound, but it’s a whole other universe when it’s delivered at the speed of a rocket ship. On the aptly titled “Red Hot,” for example, the band does its damnedest to hold on for dear life while Danny approaches the speed of sound. The truly remarkable thing is that it never feels like showboating. Every lick serves the song and stays true to the original lyrical or musical intent — it’s just delivered at an astonishing pace.
Don’t take my word for it. It was Canadian guitarist Amos Garrett, a musician’s musician who’s played with the likes of Stevie Wonder, Jerry Garcia, and Paul Butterfield, who heard a cassette of this show and gave Gatton his Humbler title. It’s no surprise that it stuck, because no guitarist would dispute its accuracy.
Gatton’s tragic 1994 suicide silenced the artistic voice of a musical visionary. It also prompted Glenn Holley, my friend at the Pearl Street show, to track down a tape of the Humbler bootleg. Glenn was so moved by what he heard that he reached out to Norma Gatton, Danny’s mother, and they released The Humbler officially for the first time on CD in 1996. Glenn has gone on to become a vital steward and champion of Gatton’s legacy; he’s the owner of Gatton’s iconic 1954 Gibson ES 295 guitar and invites luminaries like Marty Stuart, Pat Metheny, and Albert Lee to play it on their New England gigs. He also recently released the universally acclaimed Live at the Holiday Inn 1987, a revelatory quartet set that showcases Gatton’s virtuoso jazz chops.
So it’s especially gratifying that 30 years after its first official release, The Humbler is back and making its debut on vinyl. Long out of print, this reissue is special for a few additional reasons: it’s sequenced with the soundcheck kicking things off, so you’ll hear exactly what made the engineers frantically throw a cassette into the soundboard. As bonus tracks, Glenn has included previously unreleased acetates from a 1968 session of a young Gatton doing “How High the Moon” and “Ode to Billie Joe.” It’s a full-circle moment that captures an early glimpse of Gatton’s sensibilities and foreshadows his genius.
The Humbler lives and endures. — Scott Jordan