Danny Gatton and Funhouse – Live at the Holiday Inn 1987
-Dan Forte
“Once you reach the top of the tree, there’s a lot of leaves up there. There is no ‘best’ of anything.”
– Danny Gatton, 1989
On May 10, 1981, I was excited as I headed to see rockabilly singer Robert Gordon at Berkeley Square, a tiny nightclub in the East Bay. I was also curious, and skeptical, to check out some guy that a friend saw the night before and termed “the greatest rockabilly guitarist in the world.”
The two chubby guitarists trading solos were indeed impressive, but one was clearly who my friend had in mind – and yes, he just might’ve been the greatest rockabilly guitarist alive. A few songs in, Gordon introduced rhythm guitarist Lance Quinn and the rest of the band. When he said, “On lead guitar, Danny Gatton,” I think my exact thought was, “Oh, shit!”
You see, a few years earlier I was on staff at Guitar Player magazine, and for the annual Readers Poll we got a slew of ballots listing someone named Danny Gatton in every category. Best Rock Guitarist, Best Country, Jazz, Steel, you name it – all coming from the D.C., Maryland, Virginia area. We figured it was some local yokel whose buddies were stuffing the ballot box, and of course we tossed those votes. Now I was discovering that those fans knew something we didn’t.
Amos Garrett, an awesome guitarist himself, best known for the solo on “Midnight At The Oasis,” was seeing and meeting Gatton for the first time that night. Like me, he soon obtained a cassette of the show that the sound men surreptitiously ran of the set – truncated when the fire department made the club owner cut Gordon off because the joint was double its capacity.
Garrett bestowed the name “The Humbler” on the prized cassette, and it stuck. He explains: “When I was on the road in the early ‘80s, I had a great little blues band. Sometimes the guys would get a little egomaniacal about something they’d done the night before, playing particularly great. If they were getting a little too cocky, I’d whip out that tape and go, ‘Okay, boys, it’s humble time.’ I’d turn up Danny, and everybody’d just shut up.”
The legendary board tape was finally released on CD in 1996, when Glenn Holley teamed with Danny’s mother, Norma. Titled Robert Gordon with Danny Gatton – Live, “The Humbler,” it received much acclaim and sold 25,000 copies before going out of print.
The "Humbler" handle came to refer to Danny himself. Anyone who’s followed Gatton knows he was far from a one-trick pony, brought into full assay via video and now audio of one of the most peculiar gigs imaginable for such a virtuoso. More on that in a minute.
The Humbler is also the title of a new documentary on Gatton, directed by Virginia Quesada. In it, John Sebastian reveals the inspiration for the Lovin’ Spoonful’s 1966 hit, “Nashville Cats.” It seems he and Spoonful guitarist Zal Yanovsky played a big show in Music City. “We go back to the hotel, sitting around the bar. Kidplugs in, starts playing in the bar. The kid is so incredible!”
Bill Kirchen, of Commander Cody & the Lost Planet Airmen fame, is, like Gatton, an inductee in the Washington Area Music Hall of Fame – which stretches from John Phillip Sousa to Root Boy Slim, along with luminaries such was Duke Ellington, Emmylou Harris, and Dave Grohl. In 1990, he was briefly singer and co-guitarist in Danny’s band. Of their first meeting, he says, “Al Anderson of NRBQ referred me to this D.C. guitar repairman. Danny fixed a few things on my Tele, and he was familiar with my stuff, like ‘Semi Truck.’ He said, ‘You wanna play some?’ I thought, ‘I’ll show this friendly repairman a lick or too.’ Then [mimics the famous Maxell “Blown Away” ad where a guy’s hair is blown back by sheer sound]. Nobody played or plays like him. He was a whole different ballgame – just his imagination and breadth of his playing.”
Also in the documentary, Les Paul states, “He’ll have you for lunch. He could do anything the other guy could do – and do it better.”
When a super talent comes along, there are invariably discussions of nature versus nurture, genetics versus environment. In Danny’s case, there were ample helpings of both. In 1988, I got to interview him for Guitar Player magazine at his farm in Newburg, Maryland. “My folks liked big-band jazz and Western swing,” he said. His grandfather and great-grandfather were both fiddle players, and Daniel, Sr., played guitar. But he said guitar didn’t just come naturally. “My folks thought I didn’t have any aptitude,” noting that his sister took to the ukulele more easily than he did. “But after three years, I played real good.”
That interview took place thanks to the instigation and insistence of John Sprung at that time one of the foremost vintage guitar dealers and an authority on Fender amps. He offered to fly me to D.C. and put me up. I think he embarrassed GP into anteing up for the flight.
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Sprung drove me to Club Soda one night, where Danny’s group played rockabilly and R&B, and Gallagher’s the next night for smoking jazz. (Gallagher’s later fired Danny for drawing too many people. The waitresses couldn’t wade through the crowd to sell drinks.) Danny was comfortable and chatty, talking guitars and hotrods. Regarding his penchant for playing different styles all at once, he said, “Always all at the same time.” His confessed idol was Les Paul, and he also mentioned Hank Thompson and Charlie Christian. “George Barnes was also a heavy influence on me,” he revealed. “He had a clean sound, too.” He learned Charlie Byrd’s “Homage To Charlie Christian” and Roy Clark’s “Fingers On Fire.”
He played in Top 40 and rockabilly bands from age 12 and got into jazz, especially Wes Montgomery, in ’63 around age 18. He gravitated to organ trios, citing older bandmate Dick Heintze, who had almost savant abilities, like knowing how fast a car was going by the sound of the tires on the pavement.
He said at 13 he was playing Les Paul tunes and Jimmy Bryant solos. Detecting a mixture of shock and speculation on my face, he declared, “I have the tapes.”
With Danny and the Fat Boys (bassist Billy Hancock and drummer Dave Elliott) he recorded American Music in 1975. Augmenting the trio were Heintze, Quinn, and vibraphonist Charlie Barden, whose son later developed Joe Barden Pickups, which Gatton used on his Telecaster. “The Mercedes Benz of guitar pickups,” he proclaimed.
Next came 1978’s Redneck Jazz, with Evan Johns writing and singing the title song and the legendary Buddy Emmons on pedal steel. Between it and the aptly titled Unfinished Business there was a nine-year gap, because Danny accidentally put his hand through a plate glass window and cut the tendons in his right hand. “I couldn’t play for about a year,” he said, “and after I did start playing gain, I was one too good, needless to say. My chops went to hell.” But that timespan included a stint with Roger Miller (including a 1983 appearance on Austin City Limits) and the very Robert Gordon gig that humbled so many. “With Robert Gordon,” he agreed, “I played all the time, and that was real good, as far as my hand and my mind, being creative.”
Redneck and Unfinished were issued by Danny’s mom under NRG Records. When he eventually got a major-label deal with Elektra, 1991’s 88 Elmira St. and 1993’s Cruisin’ Deuces were Whitman’s Samplers – impressive, but too eclectic for their own good. His jazz side showed up on New York Stories, Vol. 1 and Relentless, with B-3 organist Joey DeFrancesco. It’s been 29 years since The Humbler CD was released and 19 years since the last new Danny Gatton record, Redneck Jazz Explosion, Vol. 2.
The “little jazz group” he put together a couple of years before the GP interview was captured at, of all things, a Holiday Inn brunch in 1987. When a video made its way to YouTube, it elicited a plethora of comments. My favorite is, “It’s like walking in to a Walmart to see Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads politely sharing Hendrix riffs while you shop. That's how rare this event is.”
The September ’87 brunch in Tysons Corner, Virginia, was captured on video by Kinloch Nelson, himself a staggering guitarist of the acoustic steel-string variety. The impetus for the gig was Sia Shad, the hotel’s extremely hip Food and Beverage Director, who previously owned The Gentry in D.C., where Danny played many times. His son, Kenya, informed me, “My dad knew Danny well and had him play a few Sunday gigs at the hotel later on.”
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As odd as it might seem, the brunches gave Danny a chance to play straight jazz in an informal setting. And while the Redneck Jazz monicker attested to the fact that, as he put it, he “couldn’t get the hillbilly out of my jazz,” as he said in ’88, “I learned more about playing jazz in the past two years than I ever knew before.”
His jazz combo expanded and contracted, and on this day featured Chris Battistone on trumpet and the late Barry Hart on drums. Bassist John Previti, who played his first gig with Gatton on December 27, 1976, says, “Eventually, it brought in some fans, but initially it was just people going there for brunch. But it didn’t take long – a few months – for some Danny fans to show up, although I don’t think they ever outnumbered the regular hotel clientele.”
What did it pay, you ask? “It was probably about a hundred bucks apiece,” John recalls. “If that,” Chris adds.
Danny’s arrangement of “Besame Mucho” was obviously inspired by Wes Montgomery’s version on Boss Guitar. Previti affirms, “He knew an awful lot of Art Blakey and Cannonball Adderley material, and of course he loved Wes. He dug sophisticated stuff, with changes all over the place. At Gallagher’s, he’d play a whole set with his thumb, like Wes, just to do it. All chord melodies and octaves. His touch would be different. It was really wild, like he was getting back to something.”
Battistone adds, “He obviously listened to all kinds of stuff. He liked tunes Hank Garland did on that album with a young Gary Burton, Jazz Winds From a New Direction. I also remember him talking a lot about a cassette he had of Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis and Johnny Griffin, with a couple of Monk tunes. Danny talked about ‘Stickball,’ which is another title for ‘I Mean You.’ He would digest that stuff, and it would come out on guitar in a way that was just different.”
“A Smooth One” is a Benny Goodman tune that featured electric guitar pioneer Charlie Christian. Danny chose to use his 1954 Gibson hollow-body ES-295 for the gig, and the round, defined tone he achieves is a perfect balance of highs and bottom. He also shifts into double-time for a few “Gatton-ized” choruses.
Likewise, “Killer Joe” is like switching Quincy Jones’ original LP from 33 to 45. As if sending a message to his guitar-playing fans, Danny slips in a quote from “Cajun,” a variation on “Tennessee Stud” that made its way to Roy Buchanan’s first Polydor album. The friendship/rivalry between the guitarists was complex, to say the least. Buchanan would sneak into clubs Danny was playing wearing disguises or call on the club’s payphone and have Danny leave it off the hook so he could listen from home. The pair would get together at Danny’s place, and of the instrumental on Roy’s 1972 album, Gatton said, “I made it up on-the-spot in the basement.” (He did, however, credit Buchanan with turning him on to Telecasters, after believing that Fenders were basically junk.)
With Battistone kicking off “When You’re Smiling,” it’s a high-spirited nod to Louis Prima – not called “The Wildest” for nothing. At the other end of the spectrum is the beautiful “One For Lenny,” Danny’s homage to Lenny Breau, whom he regarded as “the real humbler.” “When you’re talking about somebody who can play like that, but then turn around and write tunes that are solid and fun to play and good to improvise on, that’s really something,” says Chris. “On the jazz gigs, you saw more of that side of him, playing some ballad off the top of his head. It was a break from the pyrotechnical things that he did well and he was lauded for.”
John stresses, “Unless you played with him, people don’t realize how strong he was, the way he played. How strong his time and how powerful his technique were, how much control he had. He had such a lyrical quality. And that’s the stuff he really loved to do, like ‘Sax Fifth Avenue,’ on Redneck Jazz. To me, his version of ‘In My Room’ is just a masterpiece.” Danny’s take on the Brian Wilson song on 88 Elmira St. is simply stunning.
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Closing the set is Billy Strayhorn’s “Take The ‘A’ Train.” If the notion of Gatton & Co. playing a Holiday Inn is bizarre, hotel guests expecting omelettes and waffles and getting a side of the Duke Ellington theme at breakneck speed must have wondered what alternate universe they’d stepped into. Battistone reminisces, “At Gallagher’s, we’d be playing pretty hard all night, and he’d do the Rocky & Bullwinkle theme as the last tune of the night, and it was 384 on the metronome.” That’s faster than you can count, folks. “But he did it so effortlessly and naturally, it didn’t seem like an athletic event – certainly not for him. I’m not a guitar player, but it was fascinating to watch. The way he played was so magnetic.”
For some technical specifics, Kinloch Nelson elaborates, “I asked Danny if it would be okay to make a video, and he said the place to do it was the Holiday Inn, and I made a special trip down from Rochester for that. I had an inexpensive Radio Shack condenser microphone with a double-A battery, with two little microphones on swivels – so you can make it stereo. That went into a cassette machine with a mic input, so I used the cassette machine as a preamplifier, and the Line Out from the cassette into a VHS tape recorder. I had a rather large, cumbersome video camera, and there was a video line from the camera to the Onkyo VHS machine. So it was recorded at the highest speed you could record on a VHS video machine. There’s a reasonably good dynamic field, no tape dropouts, and very little tape hiss. The $35.00 microphone boasted a flat frequency response, but a rather dull sounding flat frequency response.”
Holley tapped the ears and experience of seasoned mastering engineer Greg Lukens. As Nelson explains, “What Lukens was able to do was isolate frequencies that needed help and bring them forward, and somehow through the process he was also able to enhance the dynamic field. He’s got good ears, and he knows what a good mic should sound like; so if you’ve got a crummy mic, he knows how to make it sound like a good mic. So it sounds very live and believable.”
“The source recording of Danny's performance was distorted due to the misalignment of the recording tape heads inside the video camera it was captured on,” Lukens writes. “With that knowledge, our restoration team was able to take a targeted approach towards delivering the most immersive experience possible – which is something completely new for fans of Danny's who may have encountered this recording in untreated format"
The aforementioned ES-295 is the same model Scotty Moore played on Elvis Presley’s initial sessions at Sun Studio. In an extensive cover story for 20th Century Guitar, Danny told John Sprung, “They are the nicest looking guitars ever made.”
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The one Danny owned was eventually acquired by Holley, who’s not a guitarist nor, for that matter, a record mogul; he’s been in the car business for over three decades. “The 1989 Guitar Player cover story was my intro to Danny,” he says, “and 88 Elmira started my deep dive. I saw him many times, first in Northampton, Massachusetts, on May 14, 1991 at Pearl Street Nightclub, where he played the 295. It blew my mind and caused me to write a fanboy letter that later turned up in Danny's garage.”
He’d be a fool not to keep it in a glass case, but he also regularly shares it with players such as Arlen Roth, Redd Volkaert, Albert Lee, James Oliver, Sonny Landreth, and G.E. Smith. “It's an iconic and historic instrument that needs to be shared,” he reasons. “People are generally freaked out when I ask if they'd like to play it at a gig or backstage. I couldn't handle the guilt of just hanging it on a wall. Sharing it is my way of keeping Danny's memory alive.”
About Gatton, John Rockwell of The New York Times wrote, “Like Mr. Paul, there is a danger of confusing flash and gimmickry with musicality.” So did Danny occasionally cross the line of good taste? Of course! He’d showboat – shred, to use contemporary parlance. But that was part of the fun. Sometimes he’d run over the line, back up, and run over it again.
“It’s more important what not to play. Being selective is the problem. I’m still trying to figure that out,” he admitted. “My attention span is fairly short – which is why I change forms of music and tones and attitude. I can’t play just one thing and be satisfied.”
But he could also dip into various styles without a hint of condescension. “I’m sort of a curator of guitar styles. And I appreciate Link Wray playing ‘Rumble’ as much as I do Les Paul playing ‘How High the Moon,’ in the same way that an artist could appreciate a rock painting as opposed to a Van Gogh. They’re all art forms, whether they’re crude or advanced.”
In June ’93, my instrumental band (“crude” by any measure) opened for Danny at La Zona Rosa in Austin. A daunting proposition, as you can imagine. But he couldn’t have been more gracious – watching our set from the wings and complimenting my arrangement of “Misirlou.” Of course, after his blistering set no one in the audience remembered a single note I’d played – and that goes for me, too.
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Danny was in good spirits, joking backstage, signing posters for Cruisin’ Deuces. Then just 16 months later, in October ’94 came the news that he’d taken his own life, just 49 years old. By many accounts from those close to him, Danny suffered from depression for years. In the Humbler documentary, his wife Jan revealed that she’d previously caught and stopped him in the act, and that wasn’t the only close call.
Whenever a musician dies, the solace fans take away is the music that’s left behind. “We’ll always have his music” is a standard refrain. In Danny’s case, one wishes there was so much more. Glenn Holley offers his reason for releasing Holiday Inn: “Danny’s jazz work was hugely under-appreciated (as was all his music, obviously). This is ‘new’ Danny music that hasn't been released and will add to his legacy and body of work. And he's playing the 295 that I now own. How cool is that?”
Previti states, “I’m appreciating that people are getting to hear this side of what Danny did. Of course, the rockabilly stuff, he was untouchable, but he had that other side. He had so much stuff locked in; you would see him remember things, and it would start coming out in his playing. It was really astonishing.”
As Danny said, there are a lot of leaves at the top of a tree, but he was surely one of them, and eventually he did win Guitar Player’s Readers Poll in the Country category three years running. My favorite Danny Gatton quote came from an interview I did not do. Someone asked him what he wanted fans to get from his music. The man with a zillion notes had two words: “Goose bumps.”
Dan Forte
ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award winning music journalist
All quotes taken from interviews conducted by Dan Forte unless otherwise noted.