ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 7, 1997 TAG: 9702070018
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: off the clock
SOURCE: CHRIS HENSON
My younger brother Will rolled into town last week, and he brought his guitar with him. We stayed up past 1 a.m. every night for a week jamming.
I've played the guitar for 20 years now. I know about 30 jazz tunes well enough to play in public, for living, breathing, paying people. I also can play the beginnings of about 100 rock songs. I sing OK. Not great or anything.
Will and I picked up the instrument because my older brother Ned played. Guitars were handy in our home growing up. Like leftovers at your grandmother's house, there was always a vacant six-string lying around.
Now when my brothers and I get together, we have to play music to communicate. We see who knows what song. How fast we can play. What chords we've figured out. We're not ashamed.
The fact is that every guitar player is the same in that respect. Millions of us sit in our living rooms with the TV on and the sound down, strumming the power chords to "Smoke on the Water." We hole up for days practicing new licks, or old ones. When we emerge, squinting and gaunt, we lug our axes down to where there might be people waiting to hear what we've been working on. Or not.
We are the Brotherhood of the Guitar. We are legion. And if we all played at the same time, the earth would explode.
Last weekend we got pretty close. I think I heard more guitar music in two days than I'm allowed. First of all there was Will and I, and our late night guitar madness.
Then, at my friend Frances' birthday party, it was like a convention. Just about everybody brought an instrument, and every room in her house had a gaggle of guitarists competing to be heard. It was loud. It was glorious.
My friend Tom hipped me to a new solo guitar CD by local acoustic guru and guitar brother Stacy Hobbs, called "Seller's Remorse." The title song is about having to sell a treasured instrument. The lyrics are printed on the CD jacket. "My neighbor's been the pawn shop," he says in the song. "And a friend or two. Now, I'm in my own shop and I'm surely missing you."
Stacy doesn't sing the song on the CD. He "forgot to," he says. Instead, he plays it instrumentally, letting his steel strings do all the work. Still, the message is loud and clear: No good can ever come from selling a guitar.
The CD has 20 original, traditional and familiar tunes. They range from ragtime and blues slide, to the Beatles and Irish folk, all confidently played by Hobbs.
In the copious liner notes, he explains not only the meaning of his selections and where they came from, but he divulges secret ways to tune your guitar to change its timbre. He uses a variety of fine acoustic guitars, including one that's more than a half-century old, to give each song its own personality.
You can pick up a copy of "Buyer's Remorse" at your local CD shop or at the Fret Mill.
To round off the weekend, there were the electric improvisations of guitar brothers John McBroom and Bradley Carr of Red Weather, Roanoke's psycho/seventies extended-jamming band. These guys have played together for eons. "Everyone in the neighborhood played an instrument growing up," McBroom says.
The band was inevitable. After other incarnations, lineups and band names, Carr and McBroom teamed up with bassist "Pops" Duncan and drummer Thomas Wilson to form Red Weather. "It was the only name that we could agree on," McBroom says. "It took us about six months to decide on it."
In just three years, Red Weather has recorded two CDs and played dates from Pennsylvania to South Carolina.
It's probably the mind-bending lengthy jams, a la the Grateful Dead, that have made them so popular. "It's something we've always done," McBroom says. "We're probably the least structured band there ever was. We play without a set list."
They might go from the Dead's "Shakedown Street" into "Hard to Handle." They might not. "We just kind of get up there and go 'OK, what do you want to play?' And it just kind of evolves from there."
Red Weather will play Saturday night at the Ghost of Hollywood in Roanoke. That's the old Iroquois Club. They'll have their new CD "All Gonna Shine" for sale, and you can get on their long mailing list.
If you go see Red Weather, go early and check out the opening act, a band called "Clear" from Bristol. It's a rock'n'roll variety show with great vocals and super-tight instrumental work balanced with a sense of humor. And they're nice boys.
They have a guitar player who handles quite a few chords, plays pretty darned fast and clean, and knows more than 100 rock songs all the way through. He's Will Henson. My brother. And, like I said, I am not ashamed.
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