Red Guitar
On the Wings of a Song
In the fall of 1980 I once again headed south for another run at Nashville, this time in a van my folks had helped me finance. I landed at the home of Eddie and Lori Blakely who lived in Old Hickory and were kind enough to let me camp in their driveway a few weeks. They had migrated to Nashville from North Carolina, to follow Ed’s dream of becoming a studio musician. He was an excellent guitarist and such a cool cat….he knew lots of musicians and we had some wild jam sessions in his basement. The song ideas started coming to me right away, and one of them was Red Guitar.
Ed Blakely Nashville, Tennessee
Now there are many reasons to write songs….to tell a story, to express an emotion, to right a wrong, to understand yourself or educate others. Some songs provide all those things and more. Some of the songs I have been lucky enough to imagine also provide a vehicle for musicians to groove on and sail off onto solos that take you right along with them. Red Guitar is one of those.
Another songwriter friend of ours named Thom Schuyler had connections at Briar Patch Publishing, owned by Eddie Rabbit. They had a nice demo studio in their garage on Music Row, and on October 14 Thom, Eddie and I went in with their engineer and recorded four songs. First Ed backed Thom on a couple and then he accompanied me on a couple. I chose Red Guitar and another new one called Stone Crazy. These were not complicated arrangements with lots of overdubs….just two guys and guitars trying to nail down the song idea. I let Ed do his thing and he cut loose with some great riffs to really make the song come alive.
Fast forward ten years to 1990. I was back in Iowa, back at Junior’s Motel studio in Otho, Iowa with four of my favorite musicians and owner-engineer Kirk Kaufman trying to record an “album” in one night. The songs I picked were more bluesy, jazzy, and rock than I normally played. ( See Substack post Prayin’ For Rain ). As the night went on we got settled in and things started clicking, so I pulled out Red Guitar. Kris Karr on drums and Todd Mason on bass locked in to a solid groove with Denny Osburn holding everything together with his funky piano playing. Then Dave Steen went to work on guitar, and blew us all away with an extended solo that took everyone higher and higher. That whole night was all captured on tape…live to 2 track, and is still available as the Dogtown Blues on all streaming platforms.
The song has lived on in the repertoire of the various incarnations of the Billy Buffalo Band, and usually surfaced late in the evening when our hard core country fans were too buzzed to notice or care as we rocked on through extended versions with lots of solos. In 2009 I once again found myself back at the studio in Otho, this time with a talented young singer named Briana Adams who had come up to Iowa from Texas to get a taste of the recording process. She is the niece of my drummer pal Dolor Adams, and we enlisted the help of Dave Steen on guitar and Brian Nelson on bass. She demoed three of my original songs….including Red Guitar….and did a fine job. She is still in the music biz….working out of Winchester, Texas as a solo performer and sometimes with a band.
L to R Dave Steen, SS, Briana Adams, Dolor Adams at Junior’s Motel studio in Otho, Iowa Photo by Kirk Kaufman
In 2019 I went down to a place called Caddy’s here in Gulfport, Florida with our son Colby for an open mike night. During my three song set a guitarist named Ron Clausnitzer jumped up on stage beside me and joined right in. As I racked my brain for something to play that would be easy to follow, and give him some room to show off his licks….it came to me…..Red Guitar. And it just happened that he’d brought his red sunburst Stratocaster! Colby shot this video on his Iphone.
I’d love to hear any new versions of this song. If you need help learning the song, please refer to my “instructional video” which can be found on my YouTube channel along with lots of other historical material.
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