Kelly Joe Phelps
Subtlety, grace and depth of emotion all combine in Kelly Joe Phelps’ playing to make him one of the most inspiring acoustic slide players in the world. But last year, illness left him wondering if he’d ever play again. We talk to him about returning to form
and mastering the magical sound of bottleneck acoustic…
You had to stop playing last year because of a nerve affliction in your right arm. How are you now? “Everything’s fine – I still don’t know exactly what happened, or why it happened, but I’ve been touring again since this past September, and everything’s been completely fine. No issues, no problems whatsoever, so I don’t know what that was all about, other than maybe it was time for my body to take a break. I was off for about seven months, I think.
“There was certainly enough time for me to become fairly frightened about not being able to play any more. And I’ve been playing guitar for 40-odd years, so I’d never not played the guitar for so long. But September rolled around, and I jumped back out on tour with my fingers crossed, and everything was fine. So that was very strange, and I came out of it extremely grateful for the gift of music, really.” What first turned you on to slide? “Well, I didn’t listen to that stuff until later than you would expect. I wasn’t exposed to any of that stuff as a kid. And by the time I got into my late teens, I was already immersing myself in jazz music, so I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to slide guitar music until I was close to 30 years old. And the first thing that I remember listening to was all that Robert Johnson stuff. But in terms of hearing something that made me want to play slide guitar, almost all the credit goes to [Mississippi] Fred McDowell. There was something about his playing that touched me in a very deep place. I still don’t understand what that place is, necessarily.
“But as much as I love that Robert Johnson stuff, it wasn’t until the Fred McDowell recordings that the sound of the slide guitar opened up for me and I could, in terms of a kind of vision, see how I might be able to do it.” What are the pros and cons of lap-style playing as opposed to upright, bottleneck slide? You’ve done both… “I feel like the lap style has more restrictions inherent in it. The main problem with lap style is simply because the player can’t fret any notes at all, so every single note that’s played with lap style is either going to be an open string, or it’s going to be a string played with a slide bar.
“It is a great sound, and I had a lot of fun doing it when I was doing that, and felt creative with it and everything. So I don’t have any issues that way, but at some point I thought, ‘Wow, man, there’s really going to be a limit to this. There are only so many notes.’ And because you’re essentially handcuffed by not being able to fret anything, you’re stuck just trying different tunings and playing just a few songs.
“So I saw that as a limit, and more and more I saw it as frustrating. And that’s not to say there aren’t similar things about bottleneck playing, but it is very freeing to be able to fret things, to change chord voicings or fret notes behind the slide while holding the slide on the strings. And because the player can fret things with or without the slide, you can go from minor to major tonalities just by pressing a finger down, so there’s a lot more colour and variation available.
“Another thing I like about it, too, is that there are fewer slide notes, so they have a chance to stand out more. It gives me a chance to really bring out the sense that the slide notes are the melody notes – they’re being sung. So it feels to me like there are enough options with bottleneck that, while it may not be an infinite study, it’s going to be a longer one.” How about tunings – which do you gravitate towards? “Since starting to play bottleneck a few years ago, I got myself going in open G tuning, and kind of stayed with that one. Lap-style stuff I played mostly in open D. But it was one of the changes I wanted to make when I decided I wanted to play slide guitar and have it be bottleneck instead of [lap-style] slide.
“I was going to choose, at least initially, between open D and open G. And even though I know open D well, from having played in it for so many years, I not only wanted a different guitar to do this with, I also wanted a different fundamental sound. Open G is a bit lighter sounding, it’s a bit airier – and open D has a tendency to sound kind of sad! I was looking to avoid that if I could. So I went with G, and I’m still studying that tuning and learning how to manoeuvre within it. I suppose I’ll stay there until I start to feel like I need some other kind of input.” Do you use picks or bare fingers for the right-hand work? “Bare fingers.” How important is right-hand technique in slide playing? “The right hand is really extremely important, because the basic thing in beginning slide guitar is how you get single notes to come out – and how do you not end up with a bunch of notes ringing around and clanging and banging? It can be quite hard at the beginning and, by and large, the right hand is nearly completely responsible for whether that sound is coming out clean and strong, or messy and jangly.
“There’s just so much muting that has to go on, and the picking technique is different to anything else, because a player has to pick notes and then immediately dampen them. Or dampen notes on either side of a slide melody without even picking the strings. And that’s hard to teach, or even describe.
“Damping is huge on the slide guitar: just to be clear, both hands have a responsibility for damping, keeping things clean. But the right hand is especially important there, particularly if the player is a fingerstyle player and playing slide. Just because of having this alternating thumb stuff and two or three fingers going at the same time, and trying to mute – trying to pull out a melody, trying to keep a bassline rolling, all at the same time.” What are your go-to guitars these days? “Well, I’ve really been settled the last few years on two guitars: one for slide and one for straight finger-picking stuff. It’s one of these National Style Os –I’ve had it for years, but I didn’t start playing until a couple of years ago. After I messed around with it and got it set up the way that worked best for my approach, it came to life for me, and it’s really lovely. I’ve got regular acoustic guitars that I’ve set up for slide also, but I haven’t found a comfort in the sound of that for myself – at least not yet – although that’s what I always did when I played lap style.
“But with this bottleneck stuff, this National guitar is really great, and I like the sustain and the body and the sound, and the
“It feels to me like there are enough options with bottleneck that, while it may not be an infinite study, it’s going to be a longer one than with lap steel”
volume of it. For the regular guitar stuff, I’ve been playing a Martin D-35 for the last three or four years. I’ve had a few other guitars come and go, but I played those Martin dreadnoughts more than anything and over the last 30 years – I think the last one I had was an old 70s D-35, that I got in probably 1980.
“So, I’ve had a couple of D-28s and a couple of D-35s and D-18s… it’s those Martin dreadnoughts, particularly. I can’t explain why, because it’s not the kind of guitar that fingerstyle guitar players would usually pick, and there are problems with those guitars in terms of fingerstyle playing, because they load up so heavy on the low midrange. They can be a little bit muddy. But I guess maybe I’ve been playing them so long that I’ve developed a way of playing that also suits that kind of guitar.”
What slide do you use?
“I use a brass slide: it’s the same slide that Leo Kottke has used for years. It’s by a funny machine [manufacturing] company that happen to make guitar slides, called Latch Lake. They’re very slightly hourglass-shaped, which is cool because it compensates for the difference in the string gauges, from the low ones to the high ones. There’s a little bit of radius on the strings
“I would think it would be wise for someone who does play guitar already to, when they start playing slide, just play single-note melodies”
from low to high, so it compensates for that as well.
“It’s nice, because once I got used to that particular slide I realised one of the great advantages to it was I didn’t have to press as hard with the thing – you can use a very light touch with it. Because it’s kind of taking care of all the curves and angles.”
You’re one of the best slide players out there – what are your tips for raw beginners in the style?
“Oh boy. It’s hard to say one thing, but the obvious thing is always going to be, please, be patient with yourself. Maybe one other thing that comes to mind – and I don’t know if I’ve even thought about this before – I would think it would be wise for someone who does play guitar already to, when they start playing slide, just play single-note melodies. Just to get used to moving the slide around. Because along with the damping issues, you’ve also got potential intonation problems with the slide.
“So it might be good for a person to get comfortable with just playing the melody lines and not try to do the fingerstyle stuff, or even worry about that too much. Just try to pull straight melody lines out: you’re going to want to mute the strings on either side, so if you’re playing a melody on the third string, the second string and the fourth string are going to be the ones to keep an eye on in terms of muting.”
So, what’s next?
“I’m going to be touring in the UK in probably mid-September – but, before then, in February I’m going to be gone across the Eastern US, through Canada. In April, I go to Iceland for about 10 days, and then from there to Europe for about four weeks. I’ve discussed lately the possibility of making another recording some time this summer, but I don’t have any material yet, so that may or may not happen. But I scheduled it in a while back just to give me the needed pressure to get some work done!”