There's a volume pedal effect you got on songs such as "Yes It Is" and "Wait" and "I Need You." Were you using a volume pedal back then?
I think I tried to. There was a guy in Liverpool who used to go to school with Paul and I, and he was in a band called the Remo Four and played with Billy J. Kramer. And he got all that stuff and could play all those Chet Atkins ones where you can play both tunes at the same time—like "Colonel Bogey." He had a volume pedal, and I think we tried that, but I could never coordinate it So some of those, what we'd do is, I played the part, and John would kneel down in front of me and turn my guitar's volume control.
That's like "Peggy Sue" by Buddy Holly. He had a guy kneeling down to switch his Strat to the rear pickup for the guitar solo.
Yeah, that's great stuff, isn't it? That's still one of the greatest guitar solos of all time.
At some point, after the Beatles, you switched your solo playing almost exclusively to slide.
Right. In the '60s, I forget exactly which years, there was a period where I really got into Indian music. I started playing the sitar and hanging out with Ravi Shankar, and I took some lessons for a couple of years. Then after that period, I thought, "Well, really, I'm a pop person. I'm neglecting the guitar and what I'm supposed to do." I knew I was not going to be a brilliant sitar player, because I'd already met a thousand of them in India, and Ravi thought one of them was going to make it as a really top-class player. I still play the sitar now for my own amusement, and I enjoy it, but I thought I'd better get back on the guitar. By that time there were all these people like 10 years old playing brilliantly. I just thought, "God, I'm so out of touch. I don't even know how to get a half-decent sound." The result of that was I thought, "Oh, I'll see what happens here with this slide." And it sort of sounded funkier than what I could with my fingers at that time. It developed from that, without me realizing it Then people would come up and say, "Would you play slide on my record?" I'm thinking, "Really? Are you sure?" Then, I don't know, I started hearing people sort of imitating me doing slide—which is very flattering. But, again, like I was saying about the sound—"How did you get that sound?"—I didn't think it was that good.
Do you think that Indian music and the sitar influenced your approach to slide?
Definitely.
Because you can get all those quarter-tones.
Yeah. See, I never really learned any music until I sat down with Ravi Shankar with the sitar. He said to me, "Do you know how to read music?" Oh, no, here we go again. Because I felt like there were really much better musicians who deserved to be sitting with this guy who's such a master of the instrument I started getting panicky. I said, "No, I don't know how to read music." He said, "Oh, good—because it's only going to influence you." Then I did learn how to notate in what they call the sofa system, which is like the Hindustani classical way of notating. It was the first time I had any discipline—doing all these exercises. They show you how to bend the string. I talk briefly about it in I Me Mine. What they call hammering on with the guitar, there's exercises for that, and bending. Because on a sitar, from the first string, you've got a good two inches of fret, and you're pulling it down. It's like Albert King playing left-handed, and he can pull that E string right across the neck.
It's amazing how that sounds different from a right-handed player pushing the string from the opposite direction.
It's because you've got more strength in your hand, I think, to pull it that way than you have to push. So that was the first time I actually learned a bit of discipline—doing all these little things in conjunction with what you do with your right hand, the stroke. If you strike the string down, it's called da, and if you hit it up, it's called ra. I'd be trying to practice one of these complicated exercises, thinking I'd just be getting it, and Ravi would say, "No, No. Ra. Ra." I'm hitting it one way instead of the other—you know, "Does that matter at this stage?" We don't have that sort of frame of reference in guitar.
Then with slide what I could do is actually hit the string with one stroke and [hums a scale]—do a whole little wobbly bit. And because of the Indian stuff, it made me think a bit more about the stroke side to it and I realized there's so many different ways of playing, say, a three-note passage. You can strike it and go down with one stroke; you can strike it each time; there's a million permutations of that one thing. The Indian music also gave me a greater sense of rhythm and of syncopation. I mean, after that I wrote all these weird tunes with funny beats and 3/4 bars, 5/4 bars. Not exactly commercial, but it got inside me to a degree that it had to come out somewhere.
When I did that tour in '74 with all the Indian musicians, I had Robben Ford on guitar. I think he's brilliant, because not only is he a great blues player and rock player, but he really got into playing all the Indian stuff, too.
The sound of the Beatles was influenced a lot by the changes in instruments—a lot of which were simply because some company gave you guys new guitars. Did Rickenbacker give you a 12-string?
Yeah, I got number two. This friend of mine in England who takes care of guitars, Alan Rogan, just found out that that Rickenbacker 12-string of mine is the second one they made. The first one they gave to some woman, and the second one is the one I got I got another one from them with the rounded cutaways, but I'm glad to say that the one that went missing—I got a lot of stuff stolen or lost—wasn't that original one. That guitar is really good. I love the sound of it and the brilliant way where the machine heads fit so that even when you'...
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