When we first played the Kitchener Blues Festival two years ago we had a great time, but that was one of the longest days I can remember. We rose at 4:00 AM to catch an early flight to Toronto, then rode an hour or more to Kitchener and played an afternoon show at the Tent Stage. By the time we finished there Mark and I were already late for a slide guitar workshop at the Boathouse in Victoria Park. Then the band grabbed a quick bite before playing two sets at the Boathouse that night, a scene I remember as wall-to-wall pandemonium. When I finally got back to the hotel the bedside clock said 4:00 — a 24-hour day.

This year we managed to spread things out a little more. We flew up Thursday evening, played the Tent Stage Friday and the slide workshop and club show at the Boathouse Saturday (pandemonium again – these Canadians are our kind of folks). In between shows we had time to hang with some Kitchener friends and even see a few other bands. But with an outstanding line-up on three stages and our own schedule to keep, I didn’t catch half the acts I’d have liked to.

A high point of the weekend was running into our friend Ted Pecchio, who played bass on Delta Moon’s Clear Blue Flame CD and who is now with J.J. Grey and Mofro. After midnight Saturday night that band was gathering in the lobby of the venerable Walper Terrace Hotel, about to pile into a van and ride to Buffalo to board a 6:00 AM plane.

“Where are you guys going next?” asked the guitar player.

“To the bar,” said Mark. “We’re on a more relaxed flight schedule.”

Driving home from Mobile yesterday, Mark and I put together a list of our top ten favorite slide guitar players (bottleneck or steel). Here’s what we came up with, with a link to a song for each:

Mark:

1. Mick Taylor – Beautiful tone and exceptional vibrato. “Love in Vain”

2. Ry Cooder – To me he’s got the hugest slide sound. His technique and vocabulary are so refined that he’s impossible to copy. “Get Rhythm”

3. Lowell George – For his economy of notes and his use of compression and sustain. His rhythm playing was impeccable. “Rock and Roll Doctor”

4. Mississippi Fred McDowell – He incorporated bottleneck slide into funky, hypnotic, rhythmic riffs. “Write Me a Few of Your Lines”

5. Sonny Landreth – He’s taken everything one step further, doing stuff that no one has ever done before, including fretting behind the slide. He’s influenced the whole next generation of players. “Bayou Teche”

Tom:

6. Blind Willie Johnson – One of the earliest recorded slide players and still one of the greatest. His music was beyond genre and beyond time. “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground”

7. David Lindley – He brought the lap steel, kicking and screaming, into rock and roll in the 1970s, and later inspired a renaissance of Weissenborn acoustic Hawaiian guitars. “Mercury Blues”

8. Jerry Byrd – He recorded with Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, and hundreds of others. He was the absolute master of the lap steel guitar and the source of most of the technique I’ve managed to absorb. “My Little Chickadee”

9. Josh Graves – He established the Dobro in bluegrass music. Yet his sound with Flatt and Scruggs was so gritty and bluesy that Carl Smith once told him, “If they ever figure out what you’re playing they’ll fire you.” “Fireball Mail”

10. The Campbell Brothers – There’s some amazing music being played in the Sacred Steel churches, and the Campbell Brothers — Chuck on pedal steel and Darick on lap steel — are making some of the best of it. “The Judgment”

Of course, this list barely scratches the surface. I can think of many other great players who deserve to appear on it, and probably you can too. If so, please leave a comment. Whose name would you add and why?

Back in the days before eBay I used to love pawnshopping for guitars. In the old brick buildings down by the tracks, the better known brands like Fender and Gibson were rare and usually overpriced. I hunted the lesser known names like Danelectro, Supro, National, Harmony and Kay. And of course the lap steels.

Now and then you could find a pawnshop with a back room packed with things the owner had long ago given up on ever selling. It was a delicate matter to get him to unlock that door, because that room represented his failures, his professional shame. You had to speak respectfully and show a sense of humor and a handful of cash. Once he let you in, you might find nothing but junk, or it could feel like walking into Ali Baba’s cave.

In a small town in the North Carolina mountains, a guy had the remains of a music store. In those days he was mostly doing organ installations in churches, but he still had some shape-note songbooks and a few instruments lying around the shop. There were three lap steels (two classics and one rusted out junker) arranged in a triangle on the wall, suspended by coathanger wire. He and I haggled by phone for months before we agreed on a price for the trio. Once we had set the deal it was like the dam broke. “I’ve got an old brown amp in the back,” he said. “Are you interested in that for another $100?” A tweed Fender Princeton. Of course I was interested.

Then, as I was loading the car, he came rushing out with a moldy yellow guitar case. “Here,” he said. “You like old stuff. Take this too.”

I opened the case and saw a copper-colored solidbody electric from the 1950s. The headstock said Harmony StratoTone, with a picture of a music note surrounded by orbiting electrons. To me, it looked cheap and ugly. “No,” I said, “I don’t want it.”

“Take it,” he said.

I refused. He threw it in the trunk of my car.

The Harmony StratoTone kicked around my house for years, getting no respect. Once it served as part of a front-yard Halloween display, held by a plastic skeleton wearing an Anubis jackal mask, the hips attached by fishing line to an old turntable so the monster’s pelvis rotated at 33, 45 or (look out!) 78 rpm.

Then at Skipper’s in Tampa I saw Damon Fowler play slide on a StratoTone exactly like mine, and the thing sounded phenomenal. The next thing I knew Tom Waits had his picture on the cover of a magazine holding one. Overnight those things became worth a lot of money. Still mine sat in the case.

One day not long ago I put a nut extender on the StratoTone and strung it up like a lap steel. When I sat down to play, I entered a new world, one I’d never suspected. The guitar had a completely different feel from any instrument I’d ever played before. Music flowed out of it effortlessly, like a river. I didn’t have to think about playing, but just swam with the current.

The StratoTone has a big sound with soft, fuzzy edges. To get the full effect, it needs plenty of space around it. When I tried it at an outdoor show with Delta Moon, it sounded blurry. But then I took it to an open rehearsal on a weeknight at Shorty’s Pizza in Tucker, Georgia. Franher was playing upright bass, and Darren had a stripped-down drum kit with no cymbals. In the proper setting, the guitar sounded magical.

When we took a break, Mark stayed on stage, fooling with his iPhone. I asked what he was doing.

“I’m on eBay,” he said, “bidding on a Harmony StratoTone.”

Mark's StratoTone