Blue Guitar Highway

Electric High Heels

  ELECTRIC HIGH HEELS There are two great moments for a songwriter. One is when the idea or inspiration for a song drops from the heavens; you happen to run into a piece of poetic graffiti scrawled on a barroom wall, or you overhear something somebody says and realize it would be the perfect building block on which to write a song. The other is when you are strumming your guitar mindlessly, trying a new set of chord changes or riffs, when they finally fit together like a railroad man’s handshake. When the calloused grip relents and the fingers open, a melody appears. Now all you have to do is wed the two. I was at Palmer’s one night, an ice-cold Grain Belt in front of me, a shot of brandy on the side. “Spider” John Koerner liked to read his morning paper there and a few times a week came down at night for a few cold ones. He was sitting at the bar minding his own business, as he usually does. As for many musicians in town, John was a true hero to me. I had bought his record Spider Blues in the early ’70s and wore it out. He calls his music “1960s barroom folk,” and twenty years later you could still hear him fairly regularly at many of the joints around town playing his twelve-string, harp on a rack, wearing plaid shirts, blue jeans, and stomping his foot in time like a steam-driving train, occasionally joined by his old running buddy Tony Glover, on harmonica. I saw his glass was empty and offered to buy him a beer and a shot. I had seen him dozens of times, but never had a chance to talk with him. He has one of those ageless faces and didn’t really look any different from how he did on the cover of Blues, Rags, and Hollers, the seminal album Koerner, Ray, and Glover recorded years before. Though shy, he can talk knowledgeably on a variety of subjects including film and astronomy. He had a done a record with Willie Murphy in 1967 called Running, Jumping, Standing Still that Crawdaddy magazine called the only psychedelic ragtime record ever made. It is a certifiable Minneapolis classic. We chatted for about fifteen minutes, and I asked him while I was recalling that record if he would ever play with a band again. He responded very matterof -factly, “Anybody can play with me, but I can’t play with anybody else.”   ELECTRIC HIGH HEELS Spoken like a true Zen master. I went home, paraphrased it, and added it to my now-finished song “Stars over the Prairie”: “You can be with them, but they can’t be with anyone.” Thanks, Spider. Kenny Jacob and I had booked several days at the Carriage House Studios, two blocks from my apartment, and a BB-gunshot away from Franklin Avenue. We were attempting to get eight songs recorded and mixed. We didn’t have a huge budget but enough to get some of the best, and my favorite, musicians in town. I called Prudence Johnson, Willie Murphy, Tom Lieberman, Peter Ostroushko, Eddie Berger, and some others. Because this originally started as a Cats Under the Stars project, I invited Pasty, O’Keefe, Luoma, and Al Oikari to join me. The first group of musicians arrived on a Tuesday night around 6 p.m., got set up, and by 7:30 the tapes were rolling. It was my first time recording in a twenty-four-track studio. The room sounded great, and the engineers were really good. The magic can happen if you are prepared, confident, and have superb musicians. We recorded the rhythm tracks first, and I was amazed at how good it sounded . After the first session, Kenny and I walked out onto Franklin Avenue, the sounds still in our heads, the cars driving by almost in silence, their headlights bouncing off the incandescent and rainy street, the bushes, flowers, and oak trees blossoming in the midnight wind. I am not an arranger. I always trust the musicians to react in an artful and inspired way to the song. The best musicians are very rarely wrong, and the ones on these sessions seemed to understand almost instinctively what to play. For the most part all of the songs and solos were done in one or two takes. Like Allen Ginsberg said, “First thought, best thought...