By RAR

I'm sure that if you took a poll, the vast majority of Rock and Blues music fans would count themselves as slide guitar enthusiasts. That would also apply to fans of Hawaiian music and Country, though Country music sliding is mostly about the Pedal Steel, which is an entirely different instrument than what people are usually talking about when they talk about "playing slide". Pedal Steel is to the guitar what the Hammond B3 Organ is to the acoustic piano, which is to say much more complicated. To play Pedal Steel, a musician not only has to move a slide across a double-neck guitar, but also has to manage a dozen pedals, a volume pedal, and about eight different knee pedals. It's like driving the freaking space shuttle and not something anyone can do, to any great effect, without years of dedicated study. The Hammond B3 Organ is almost as complicated, relying on an array of valves and things other than just tickling ivories. Playing it well, like my friend Gary Swan does, is an extraordinary accomplishment. I don't even know anyone who plays the Pedal Steel; in fact, I assume that you would have to explore the deepest recesses of Nashville to even spot such a creature, similar to spotting Bigfoot in the wilderness. Those dudes are rare.

What is not rare are guitar players who use a slide as a technique employed on a regular acoustic or electric guitar, and this is probably why I, personally, have a strong negative bias regarding slide guitar players.

It's not that there aren't good ones, it's just that it takes no talent at all to tune a guitar to an open tuning - they usually play in open D or open G - and wiggle a slide along the raised strings above the frets. You could hand an open-tuned guitar to a chimp, push a slide onto his finger, demonstrate the basic technique, and Chita would give you something back that to most people would sound a lot like a slide guitar.

One of the most revered slide players of all time was the late Duane Allman. He started playing slide after he hurt his hand and couldn't play his instrument the way it is supposed to be played, utilizing chord structures and picking techniques that can be used well with standard tuning. (I have something of a negative bias against alternative tunings, as well, because they function as crutches for players who just haven't mastered their instrument. That will bring me heaps of scorn from Joni Mitchell fans, but though I love Joni Mitchell there is nothing that she has ever done with alternative tunings that couldn't be done by playing full chords in standard tuning. Open tunings are just short-cuts, from my point of view, which comes from the place of one who has spent 50 years trying to figure out how to play guitar the "right" way. Note that there is something to be said for open tunings because unfretted strings sound clean and clear, and that is used to positive effect.)

Run-of-the-mill music fans love the Rock sound of a George Thorogood or the Blues of a Bonnie Raitt, though neither of them really do anything that rises above cliché. Most musicians who play the slide are imitating Robert Johnson or one of the other Delta or Chicago Blues luminaries who leaned heavily on the swampy sounds that can so easily be created using the slide technique. Here in the Bay Area, we have Roy Rogers, who doesn't seem to do anything but play slide guitar and after hearing one song you have basically heard his entire reportoire because everything guys like him play are major chords, and for me music has to be a lot more interesting than that. There are slide players who try to add some regular-level nuance by playing with two slides, one on their wrapped around thumb, designed to cover just the fifth and sixth strings, but why? Why wouldn't you just throw the stupid slides away and play minor chords, and augmented chords, and diminished chords, and everything else that real guitar players play? I'm sure slide enthusiasts have answers to all of those questions, but none would satisfy me.

Louisiana slide player Sonny Landreth is certainly one of the more interesting of the sliding lot, but you know why? It's because he puts the slide on his little finger so he can augment his slide playing by using this three free fingers to play melody and connecting notes outside of the slide, interspersing those into his slide playing. That passes for innovation in the slide community. Sonny does this exceptionally well, but you never see him become Django Reinhardt, the Gypsy guitarist of the pre-1950s Jazz era, who was injured in a fire that essentially fused his third and fourth fingers and so he did almost all of his extraordinarily complex jazz using only two fingers. He did not, to my knowledge, say "fuck it", I'll just tune my guitar to D and use a slide, because you couldn't play complex music doing that. Likewise, the talented Landreth never really uses his three free fingers to play Django-level jazz, but rather just touches on added melody notes before leaning hard back into the slide. For my money, he is probably the greatest of all the slide players, but he's still a slide player.

Derek Trucks is the slide player who seems dominant in the slide world these days, but he is just playing support parts and the kind of Rock'n Blues slide that you get a lot of in Southern Rock. It involves a really limited vocabulary, which is actually what his fans relate to. Music fans who don't care about the ins-and-outs of guitar playing do respond to familiar sounds, and Derek Trucks serves these up expertly. But, he's a lot like Roy Rogers and the rest, playing the same licks over and over.

Eric Clapton scored a big reputation boost through the slide guitar he played on The Beatles "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", for which the technique worked perfectly, because slide guitar can be expressive, particularly if you want weeping, moaning and whistling sounds. He played parts created by the vastly under-appreciated George Harrison, whose slide guitar work became a big part of his signature as a player, though he never used the technique as anything other than a tool in his fully-realized arsenal of tricks. Like Clapton, Harrison was an actual guitarist.

Provided below are videos of notable slide players, just so you can check my points of view and tell me where I'm wrong.