About Walter Becker: Is there any better rock band, for guitar and instrumentation (and intelligent lyrics), than Steely Dan? Gods, they were and are, especially when Skunk Baxter played second-guitar for them, as on Can't Buy a Thrill. Chet is now considered the guitar-god of the last forty years by everyone from Ricky Skaggs and George Benson to Walter Becker and Bonnie Raitt. My own finger-method derives from Chet's: I hold my pick with thumb and forefinger but also use my third and fourth fingers to strum or to pluck. I loved Chet Atkins Goes Hollywood for his incredible self-chorded solos and Chet Atkins Picks on the Beatles, which showed me how Lennon and McCartney's rich melodies could deepen. It was highly uncool to like him then, but I did. Likewise, I worshiped, and still do, the great Tennessee picker Chet Atkins. Telstar was the coolest album, though I owned and wore out a dozen more like Walk Don't Run, Where the Action Is, and Wild Things. Earlier, when I was just starting, I soaked up the great instrumental group, The Ventures. Carlos Santana's Abraxas dazzled me with his lightning-fast fingering of Latin phrasings I can still play "Black Magic Woman" and "Oyo Como Va," two very hard guitar tunes. I loved The Best of the James Gang, which has songs from Funk 49, Bang, and Miami. Joe Walsh's languid guitar licks were heaven to me. For rock-and-roll, it was hard to beat The James Gang. When I was young, I listened to what all my friends were talking about-the Beatles, the Stones, James Brown-but I realize now that what really absorbed me were the guitar-driven bands and musicians of the time. These days I listen to everything from Arvo Part and Edgar Meyer to Birelli Lagrene and Buddy Guy. I still agree with Buddy Rich who, when wheeled into the operating room for a medical procedure and asked if he was allergic to anything, relied, "Yeah, Doc, I'm allergic to country music." The operation was a success. Then we "left." My father's white silence on the ride home (we were too young to drive) clarified his feelings about our disclosure. We played three songs- "Yakety Axe" again, "Alley Cat," and a thumping rendition of "Proud Mary"-after which we announced on air we didn't think country-and-western was cool. Once Firedog and I were banished from a live radio broadcast from Ozarkland at the Lake of the Ozarks, where we'd been invited to be the "featured youngsters" on a weekly musical show. I started bands, played with other bands, even wrote the score for a Missouri Highway Department movie, "The Watching Tree," and recorded the guitar part at a studio in Kansas City. I won first place in 9th grade, playing "Yakety Axe" with my best friend, Tim "Firedog" Gaines third place in 10th grade accompanying on my acoustic twelve-string our school's hippie singer on Elton John's "Your Song" first place in 11th grade, wah-wahing to "Shaft" with an eight-piece pre-fusion band and first place in 12th grade, picking "Dueling Banjos" on banjo with Firedog Gaines on guitar.Īnd more: I played most Saturday nights at Tonanzio's Italian Restaurant with Tom Snodgrass and one or two happy-hours per week, with Tom or by myself, at the local Ramada Inn's lounge, The Library.
I played just about every kind of music for every kind of occasion from weddings and church meetings to college formals, jazz festivals, pit orchestras, pre-disco dance halls, little-town proms and big-city bars.
During this time I traded my Melody Maker for a scorching, sunburst Fender Stratocaster, then traded that one for a guitar I still have, a 1964 Gretsch Nashville Chet Atkins custom-the orange one, if you know guitars. I began to teach the guitar at thirteen and did so through college. I started playing the guitar 1965, at age ten, when Bill McMillan, and later Smoky Burd, gave me lessons in an empty room above Shaw Music. Note: When you embed the widget in your site, it will match your site's styles (CSS).But I'm getting ahead of myself.
#Chet atkins wrote yakety axe code#
Get the embed code Chet Atkins and Mark Knopfler - Neck and Neck Album Lyrics1.The Next Time I'm in Town2.There'll Be Some Changes Made3.Yakety AxeChet Atkins and Mark Knopfler Lyrics provided by