Every week, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 43-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Over on Facebook, I recently posted a photo of myself playing guitar at the International Pop Underground Convention in Olympia, Wash., in 1991. Someone made a comment about not knowing I played guitar. Somehow this wasn’t terribly surprising because I’m known for other things, yet it did get me thinking about songs I’ve played on, live shows and other bands I’ve been in, if even for five minutes, where I played guitar.
Guitar was fundamental growing up, but we got off to a rocky start. There was an acoustic guitar around the house, and my first instinct was to lay it flat and bounce chopsticks on the strings. I must have recorded this on the reel-to-reel tape deck that unfortunately my mom threw out along with all the tapes.
At 15 or so, being a big Led Zeppelin fan, I wanted to take electric-guitar lessons, but that was for some reason deemed impossible (by the teenage instructor at the strip mall) unless one started on acoustic. So I did that, but was less than satisfied with the experience. When I finally did lay my hands on an electric guitar, it was heavy and awkward. Various things happened as a result, including laying it flat on a vintage ironing board and setting an EBow on the strings, as well as laying it flat on the stage to play with my feet. As a wearer of smooth-soled Hush Puppies, I decided to carve a pointy pattern into the rubber of the right shoe to catch at the strings almost like a pick. The other shoe was left smooth, to act as the slide on the strings. It may have looked like performance art or sheer mayhem, but I got some decent sounds this way.
It almost goes without saying that I wasn’t interested in conventional tunings or chords. A large dark cloud of tedium lived over both concepts. For the most part, I found that using the bottom of a glass candle holder as a slide was optimal, usually without an EBow
As far as getting sounds that work with what else was being played, yanking the headstock back to find a good place by ear was the most effective method.
“Drilling” from Dovetail (K, 1992) (download):