Deke Dickland's Guitar Geek Festival in Anaheim: 1/16/10

This one went simply. I read a write-up of the event in the LA Times. I had nothing going on that day. I decided to attend.

I found the perfect parking spot right in front of the hotel. The only soul in sight was an old, fat, white-bearded man walking slowly out of the lobby doors, carrying an old guitar case.

There was a gold Mickey Mouse statue in the lobby. Someone had slung a music-note-shaped guitar on it. I was DEFINITELY in the right place.

3 PM--DOORS OPEN
- there was a big sign over the door saying "YOU FOUND IT: Welcome to the guitar geek festival!" The line of tattooed dudes, mostly older, mostly with long hair snakes around the bar. I start noting down band t-shirts to research later.

3:15 PM--THE SEEING RODRIGOS
This trio of mariachi-costume-wearing guitarists bragged that, since this is a "guitar geek" event, they'd ditched their drummer. This was probably a mistake. Their dedication to instrument purity was, uh, admirable, but their sound could really have used the grounding. Without it they sounded like they were playing slightly-rocked-up mariachi music on guitars, which they kind of were.

3:30 PM--MESHUGGA BEACH PARTY
Billing themselves as "the world's only all-jewish surf band" these guys wore long Orthodox robes, black hats and big bushy fake beards. They, thankfully, appeared as a full band, with two guitarists, a bassist, a keyboard-playing woman, AND a drummer. And no one was fluff. Mixing surf music and jewish folk tunes sounds like one of those ideas you'd have after drink number one-way-too-many, but surprisingly enough this band cranked it up and never looked back. Plus they shared "cultural knowledge" by reading aloud from a rhinestone studded Dead Joke Scrolls, which were exactly what they were advertised as. That's the kind of cheese that makes me love you forever.

4:15 PM--BUDDY AND SUZY
Sorry. I hadn't eaten yet that day, headed out for an urgently-needed burger and missed it.

5 PM--STEVE TROVATO AND CARL VERHEYEN
Apparently, rhinestone-hatbanded Deke has gotten more requests for the both of these players individually then for anyone else he's ever hosted at his guitar-geek festivals. Now they are touring together, so it works out perfectly for him. They were two rather out-of-shape guys in their forties or fifties, wearing colorful shirts who adored each other. Each one kept trying to out-love the other one, asking for lessons, passing off the lead chords, and asking if their wives were in the audience. I love to see a bromance in the full of it's bloom.

They were master-players, that much was obvious even to a layperson like me. A google search tells me that these two are very in-demand studio musicians. I don't know what songs they were playing, for all I know they just jammed up there for fifteen minutes, but I could have kept watching them for days.

6 PM--"CRAZY" JOE TRITSCHLER
This guy was a sort of Co-MC, helping Deke out and serving as foil and witty banter. He is a funny, funny guy. He played this gig on his "satanic midget guitar." It was satanic because it was high and evil sounding. Somehow the music didn't grate. Engineering new instruments seems to be this guy's stick. He sounds like a punk-rock Buddy Holly.

7 PM--"HONEYBOY" EDWARDS
Had to move my car and missed it. Sad about it too, as this guy is billed as the "last of the Delta bluesmen," a contemporary of Robert Johnson.

7:30 PM--ELECTRIC 12-STRING NIGHTMARE
The rules were simple. Bring your own twelve-string. One guy will tune them all. Reclaim your weapon, crowd onto the stage and play. There were 17 of them total, including one woman dressed up like Tinkerbell (not making it up). The song was "Mr. Tamborine Man" re-written as "Hey Electric 12-string man, please play in tune for me." Crazy Joe conducted with a big board that had the cords on it and a whammy bar as a baton. That's how you know this is a REAL guitar geek event.

It actually wasn't much of a nightmare. It sounded like chaos of course, but it was controlled chaos. Even Tinkerbell was a more-then-competent player. Deke said in conclusion that if he'd known it would sound so not-awful he wouldn't have called it the Nightmare.

7:45 PM--BRIAN LONBECK AND ELAINE FRIZZELL
The only thing I really remember about this gig was that these two are old with a capital O. Elaine had a huge brown wig, massive plastic glasses, and I don't think her hollow-body was plugged in. Brian Lonbeck was singing and playing, but while I remember it being pleasant, it wasn't so pleasant that I didn't ditch to use the bathroom and hit up the bar for the most watery gin and tonic I've ever had in my life.

8:30 PM--HISTORY OF THE STEEL GUITAR
THIS was interesting, and apparently it was attended by all the giants of the steel guitar scene, which is a small scene, but a real scene. One guy explained that the Acoustic Island slide guitar originated when the suer-plantation owners imported South-American cowboys to teach the native laborers how to heard cattle. When the cowboys went back to South America, they left their guitars behind. The natives, of course, had no idea how to tune or play these properly, but one day some guy must have dropped his knife on the strings and noticed the sound it made, which is how the instrument came to be played with a metal bar against the frets. Through further experimentation, it turned out that adding a bullet-shaped end to this bar enabled the instrument to make the full range of notes and octaves. A grammy-winning Island slide player demoed this technique, playing a piece that made me wanna hula dance right there, which would not have been pretty, so I'm glad I resisted the urge. A stand-up bass, jazz drummer, and ukulele accompanied.

Down the line the instrument got more advanced. First it got electrified, as demoed by one guy. Then effects pedals were added, as demoed by that rarest of creatures: a steel-guitar player who has been employed for 40 years. Apparently he is Merle Haggard' band-leader. At the very end of the line was a guy who invents his own steel guitars, who's machine created incredible futuristic kinds of sounds.

Informative AND entertaining. Perfecto.

9:30 PM--JOEL PATERSON AND THE MODERN SOUNDS


10:15 PM--DEKE DICKERSON TRIBUTE TO JOHNNY RAMONE
Best part of the show was seeing all the unhappy old people scowling down their noses at all the noise. If Deke hadn't been the event's MC, he would never have gotten away with it. I guess the supposed demise of the punk-rock generation gap has been greatly exaggerated.

Sponge-Bob's voice actor was the evening's Joey Ramone. He stressed that you need to put the Ramones in context: if you're a 14-year-old in a small town in the midwest and looking for balls-out rock music, and you turn on the radio and hear "More then a Feeling" and other bloodless drek, and then your friend's cool older sister goes to New York for a week and comes back with a Ramone's album that sounds like BLLARRRGHHGHG and off they went.

Thank you Deke Dickland. Thank you, SpongeBobby Ramone. I've tried to be a Ramones fan before. I didn't get it.

I do now. Thanks again.

11 PM--GEORGE TOMSCO AND 3 BALLS OF FIRE
Like Duane Eddy, George Tomsco is another part of an important instrumental group from the sixties, though he's not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and his work, though familiar, isn't as omnipresent as Eddy's. Still, he was a bubbly fifty-something Tex-Mex with an epic mustache and an effortless stage presence who was quick enough to fill in the missing notes when the weird little techno-keybord thing Deke was trying to play died on everybody. My primary impression of this gig was "warm." Everything about it was warm. And the music was great, but saying so is almost redundant right now.

MIDNIGHT--DUANE EDDY
Hey, this guy looks familiar...
Yes, the random guitar-carrying old man I'd spotted as I arrived was none other then the evening's headliner, the Hall of Famer himself. Well HUH.
The only instrumentalist to get into the rock-n-roll hall of fame. I guarantee you have heard his songs before. It was cool to Deke, Crazy Joe, and other parts of the other acts gathering around a man who is clearly a hero to all of them. Deke said that ever since he was a kid, he's dreamed of the day when he will get to play "Peter Gun" with Duane Eddy, who replied "Let's do it." This gig brought the house down. Rocking and heartwarming.

I'm glad I went.