Original Crazy Joe interview by Michael Ross, Guitar Player, March 2008
 

Did you play any other kind of music before Rockabilly?

Well, when I was a teenager, I would make these home recordings playing all the instruments myself.  My concept back then was kind of a James Brown rhythm section with Hendrix guitar, all overdubbed in my parents’ finished garage.  I didn’t get into rockabilly or country until later, although I did play a little jazz.  I was in the OMEA All-State Jazz Ensemble when I was a junior in high school and attended a rhythm workshop at Capital University’s Conservatory of Music around the same time.  I realized very quickly that playing jazz wasn’t for me, although it’s still probably what I listen to the most.

What made you interested in this kind of music?

I saw a group called the Amazing Royal Crowns in concert by complete accident when I was eighteen and just starting on my electrical engineering degree at Wright State.  I mean, when I was a kid, oldies radio still played music from the 50’s and 60’s and my parents certainly had a lot of that stuff, but this was different; it was exciting.  The guitar player, Johnny “The Colonel” Maguire, was playing a big Gretsch guitar drenched in reverb, wearing a jacket and tie with sunglasses and a fedora; it was coolest thing I’d ever seen or heard in my life.  Later, I got into the Reverend Horton Heat and that’s when I started Crazy Joe and the Mad River Outlaws.  Then I discovered Deke Dickerson and that’s when I knew I had a lot to learn.  

What is that amazing-looking guitar that you play?

That guitar is a Casey Simmons Custom Trifonic model, built right here in Dayton.  It’s the finest instrument I’ve ever come across without question.  The amazing thing is that Casey has no formal training as a luthier; in fact, my guitar was only the third he’d ever built at the time.  Regardless, I’ve never owned a better guitar in my life, and everything, including the binding, inlays, German carve, and lacquer finish, was all done by hand.  It’s solid white limba with a big V-shaped black limba neck.  It weighs close to thirteen pounds because it’s as wide as a Gibson ES-335 but solid all the way through.  I designed the shape and told Casey I wanted a big, heavy Cadillac of a guitar with a giant neck and my name inlayed on the fingerboard.  That’s certainly what I got.

What kind of amps do you use?

Well, I am a nerd, so naturally I’d want to use some weirdo homemade thing, right?  I built my amplifier on an old WEST chassis and it uses a pair of triode-connected push/pull 6CA7’s running about 75 milliamps per tube, right at their dissipation limit.  It gives about fifteen class-A watts.  I’m using a special transformerless reverb driver with positive feedback, special anode-follower mixing circuitry for the wet and dry signals, and it’s all built using Teflon-insulated silver-plated wire, oil capacitors, and carbon-composition resistors, wired point-to-point on silver turret lugs.  Usually I run through a blue-sparkle Kustom cabinet – well, now it’s kind of greenish-blue – with two JBL D130F-6’s, but for the album I ran the amplifier through a secret direct box and an early-50’s RCA BA-86A1 limiting amplifier, just to grab occasional peaks.  I also have a Kustom cabinet with three JBL’s that I use when I can get away with it.

Then there’s the Rig of Death, which is pictured under the tray of the new CD.  I wanted the most ridiculous guitar rig possible, so I put together a system with an Altec A-5 Voice of the Theater horn speaker and two Presto disc-cutting amplifiers, bi-amplified at 500 Hz.  The front-end is a Crown 800 tube tape recorder for echo with a rare 14” reel extender panel, and that goes through a heavily-modified Fisher SpaceXpander for spring reverb.  The thing has the most terrifyingly loud, deep, cavernous sound imaginable.  I used an earlier version of this rig to open up for the Reverend Horton Heat several years ago, and you should’ve seen his eyes when he saw it. [laughs]        

You use heavy strings (gauge?) and light-gauge picks - why?

I actually started using heavier strings when I got into fingerpicking.  The light strings I’d been using just felt like rubber bands, so I went up to a set of .012’s with a wound-G and instantly loved them.  Suddenly, the guitar sounded “right” to me and felt a lot more natural to play, even on the fast flatpicked stuff, which I didn’t expect.  Now when I play a guitar with lighter strings I feel like a bull in a china shop.  I got into light picks for an entirely different reason.  When I first started playing rockabilly, I had been playing blues and stuff for so long it was difficult not to be really heavy-handed with my picking hand, so I thought I’d try a lighter pick.  I got so used to them that now even a medium-gauge pick feels too heavy to me, even on the heavy strings.  I just like the clean articulation, I guess.  The Dave Biller theory is to use the stiffest pick possible so it doesn’t flex and theoretically the player has 100% control.  Well, Dave’s one of the best players in the world but when I try that approach, it just clunks against the strings and slows me down.       

Is that the electric uke on "I Knew You'd Be The One?"

No, that’s the Trifonic with an out-of-phase pickup setting.  I don’t want to give away all my wiring secrets, but basically it’s two of the three pickups in parallel and then the third in series with a control to attenuate it slightly.  It gives you the out-of-phase tone with very little volume drop and a little more sparkle.

What kind is it? How is it tuned? Does it have steel or nylon strings? What kind of pickup do you use for it?

Well if you’re talking about the electric ukulele, it’s something I built in eighth-grade shop class out of solid walnut with the help of my great shop teacher, Mr. Allen.  He actually helped me build my first solidbody guitar prior to that.  It originally had four strings but wasn’t very playable; it had no truss rod and the fret ends were like daggers.  So I had Casey build me a six-string octave-up neck for it so I could do the Joe Maphis-style double-six lines.  The problem is that we made the scale too long, so if you try to tune it all the way up to high-E, sometimes the string breaks before you even get it up to pitch; so I tune it down a step-and-a-half to C#.  It has G&L MFD ASAT pickups, the same as my Trifonic; they’re what I grew up with and I still think they’re the best pickups ever made.  I used the electric ukulele on the upper harmony and the second and fourth solos of Remington Rock, which is a take on the old steel guitar number Remington Ride.  I don’t know if Herb Remington has heard it yet, but I hope he doesn’t beat me to a pulp [laughs].  In my mind I was thinking of Tiny Moore [electric mandolin player with Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys in the late 40’s]. 

How did you make the record so authentic sounding? Mics? Tape? Digital? Echoes? Reverb?

My opinion is that if you want to sound like the classic recordings, you don’t necessarily need the exact vintage gear they used back then; it’s actually much more important to consider the engineers’ training and ways of thinking.  They didn’t have piles of different compressors and EQ’s and microphone preamplifiers; in fact, if they had any limiters at all, it was usually only on the disc cutter.  They used whatever preamps were in the console, which was usually custom-made or a modified radio broadcast mixer.  And they bought the best mikes they could afford and the newest recorder they could get.  For The King of Nerd-A-Billy, I used a ¼” four-channel Crown [analog tape] deck running 15 inches per second and tried to run the shortest signal path possible, usually connecting the output of a tube mike preamp directly into the machine and then mixing down straight through a very simple console.  For vocals, acoustic guitars, and some drums, I used a Microtech Gefell UM-92.1S tube mike with a PVC capsule, which I think is the finest alternative to a Neumann U-47 available.  For vocals, it was often the microphone plugged directly into an RCA BA-86A1 limiter and straight to tape.  For drums, it was typically a single small-diaphragm AKG microphone.  Electric bass was always through a transformer-coupled direct box, and electric guitar was direct as well; there’s a hole on the guitar where the sound comes out, so we might as well use it!  [laughs]      

Did you record everyone together and/or what did you overdub?

 Most of the rhythm tracks were recorded live, mixed in real-time through a mono tube mixer to one channel of the recorder, and then vocals or whatever added to the remaining channels.  Depending on the arrangement, sometimes I just played acoustic rhythm guitar on the live track.  A few times I did do a sub-mix to a second analog tape recorder and then added more tracks, but I tried to avoid doing that whenever possible.  For the final mono mixes, I went through my console straight to hard disk, where the fades were cleaned up and the song-to-song levels tweaked; no “mastering” in the modern sense, certainly no overall equalization or limiting, and only the occasional 3 dB of console shelving equalization on individual channels if necessary.  I do tend to use a lot of reverb on my recordings, I suppose like Bill Porter in the early 60’s.  I just try to make things sound as natural as possible, and to that end simplest usually is best.