Take a Break On Me!

Hello, and welcome to “We Have All Been Here Before.” My name is Charlie (with a difficult last name), so you can just call me Charlie Mac, if the hypenated name is too much for you. I’m going to write about things I love – rock music, drums, guitars, etc. What makes me think I have anything unique to say on these subjects? Well, I may not, but I’ve been a musician for over 40 years, have lived through the music scene in the ‘60’s, ‘70’s, ‘80’s (the more recent stuff I tend to gloss over), have played in many bands (none that you have heard of, probably), and may have a unique take on where rock music has been and where it is going. I’m 56 years old (a geezer, to be sure!), live in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, and have a wife and three boys, all of whom are musicians in their own right. After 41 years of drumming, I decided to take up the guitar, after buying an electric for my oldest son. It has been a daunting task, but a rewarding one as now, nearly four years later, I can finally strum some of the songs I grew up on. I feel like a 15 year old again, as I obsessively pore through the Musician’s Friend and Guitar Center catalogs and fantasize about all the cool gear there. What, does this mean I can get a new Strat by the time I hit 60? I can tell you the tube compliment in a ’65 Fender Twin and what kind of equipment the Who used at Monterrey Pop, but I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday… Such are the perils of aging, but I’m not ready to hang up my rock ‘n’ shoes just yet. I am an active musician on drums, bass and guitar, and manage to jam frequently with friends both far and near.

So what I want to do here is, each day I post (and I can’t guarantee that I’ll post every day), I’ll take a look back at what happened in rock music on that day in history, and make some comments on how it affected me or add some information that may not be widely known. I don’t claim to be an authority on every aspect of music, but I have been told that I am a fount of useless rock trivia. Better to be known for something rather than nothing, eh? Well, here goes…

Today in rock history Duane Eddy peaked at number 6 with “Rebel Rouser,” a guitar driven instrumental. Eddy would score many other hits over the next 5 years, including, “Forty Miles of Bad Road,” “Because They’re Young” and “Peter Gunn.” Duane Eddy was famous for his big, twangy sound, made by single-note melodies, low string bending, whammy bar bends and vibrato. John Fogerty called him “the first guitar god.” Well, I don’t know about that, but ” The “Peter Gunn” theme seemed to be the universal “break song” for many of the rock bands in my home town when I was in high school. If you heard “dada dada dada dada…” you knew it was time to hit the snack bar, the head, or the parking lot for a smoke (if you were into that sort of thing). I know it was used in at least one of the bands I played drums in. A monotonous song, really, with an uninteresting drum part, but thankfully short, since, if you’ve just sweated through a 45-minute set, you don’t want to play 4 or 5 minutes of the song or do any solos, you just want to take a break. I do remember the TV show too; with Henry Mancini’s orchestra pounding out the beat… it was the first TV show that used modern jazz numbers to spice up the sound track. I seemed to remember that Mr. Gunn himself (played by Craig Stevens) always got into big trouble, but managed to solve the mystery week after week. So if you hear “dada dada dada dada…” go ahead, take a break, you’ve earned it!

Thanks to www.garylessard.com and www.wikipedia.org for the trivia, and until next time, keep on rockin’!