Report Rick Vito
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Mountainview Publishing, LLC INSIDE the Have you mastered the emotion of tone? The Player’s Guide to Ultimate Tone TM All the guitars $10.00 US, January 2005/VOL.6 NO.3 Report and all the tone – The Rick Vito Interview, live Rick Vito from Nash Vegas… At the very least, the mark of a good guitarist is one who resists getting in the way of the song. Truly extraordinary guitarists play for the song, too, but when the red light is on they seem to pull 9 something profoundly unique from within that lingers in our memories with the passage of time. Rick Vito is a great guitarist. He is also a hopeless gear head, which makes his presence on the ACME Guitar cover of this issue perfectly appropriate, if a bit overdue. Works Finally – Danny Flowers meticulously first gave us a nudge in Vito’s crafted pre-wired direction with pickguards with an e-mail mes- the top custom sage that said, pickups, blender “He’s got all the guitars…” pots & more! Should you take the time to 16 sample Rick The Coil Vito’s varied recordings with Chronicles… Bob Seger, Our recommen- Fleetwood dations for Strat, Mac, Delbert McClinton, Tele & Jackson Humbucking Browne and his Pickups, plus four solo wiring diagrams! records, you’ll also be struck by the fact that he is unencum- 19 bered by any Review stylistic short- comings on the The Headstrong guitar. Vito Lil’ King… clearly knows The ‘64 Princeton all the histori- Reverb returns cal nuances of guitar tone cold and how to create them. He may indeed have “all the guitars,” but more important – he has “all the tones,” and regardless of how much gear one may hoard better than ever. over the years, you must be capable of understanding the emotion of tone before you can truly create it. Rick Vito gets this. He could sit in and flawlessly mesh with Django and Grapelli, Willie Dixon, T Bone Walker, Bob Wills, Milton Brown, Ry Cooder, David Lindley or Eldon Shamblin, www.tonequest.com cover story breeze through a catalog of Motown tracks, tear through musical significance for me. Philadelphia in the fifties was southern rock and the California side of slide spawned by the home of “American Bandstand,” which started out as a Lowell George and Bonnie Raitt, and we would still only local show broadcast every day after school let out. When have scratched the surface of his working knowledge of the rock & roll broke out, so did Bandstand, and virtually all tal- guitar. ent in the U.S. came to Philly for national TV exposure. I watched practically every day and took it all in, the music, All of us have the dances, the styles. It really affected me. My mom loved heard one of Rick music and always had records playing, so along with rock & Vito’s most leg- roll, I was exposed to Frank Sinatra, the Mills Brothers, endary session Peggy Lee, and all the pop from the late forties and early tracks – the slide fifties. I remember the 78 RPM record we had of Rosemary riffs on Bob Clooney singing “Come On-A My House,” that scared and Seger’s “Like a fascinated me. Why did she want me to “come on-a her Rock.” As Rick house?” I still love that one! observed, the song has become an My mother had played the lap Hawaiian guitar back in the anthem for Chevy mid thirties as a kid on the radio, and we still had her old trucks and largely Oahu acoustic. I remember taking it out and smelling the forgotten as any- inside of the body. The scent was like nothing else, all thing else, but woody, dark, and compelling. I plunked out a few notes of when you consider “La Cucaracha” on it, as I guess it was still tuned to a chord, the timing of the but the strings were too high to press down so I was stuck original release with that one melody. I have our old home movies from 1957 and the guitar tone and unforgettable hook he created, “Like that shows me doing “Elvis” in our tiny living room with that a Rock” must be counted among the most identifiable and guitar, jumping all around and going wild. That was my first memorable guitar riffs ever recorded. (And in fairness to performance, I guess, as an Elvis impersonator. Seger, we can vividly recall the years when he tirelessly pounded up and down the two lane roads of the Midwest During the summer we went down the shore to Wildwood. playing dumps like the Indiana National Guard Armory, My grandmother had a corner taproom with a Seeburg juke opening for Dr. John the Night Tripper, way before he ever box that lit up and played real loud. At the end of the season cashed a check from General Motors…) we got to keep the records and I still have many of them, including all the original Little Richard ones on Specialty. I Perhaps you’ve noticed that the music business in America really liked Chuck has hit the wall. Flatlined. The big sell out shamelessly rages Berry, Duane Eddy, on, promoting trashy little girls who can’t sing, gangsta and Ricky Nelson. I rhymes and subwoofer mixes while the real players wait it should point out out as best they can making independent recordings and find- that I was also a ing the occasional gig worth playing. Or working in Europe, faithful watcher of where one of our greatest exports (music) is still valued with “Ozzie & Harriet” the reverence and enthusiasm it deserves. As Phil Brown said, so that I could see “The people working in the record business today couldn’t and hear Ricky with hear a car crash.” But we needn’t despair. There are enough James Burton on Rick Vitos in this world making great music to feed our lead at the finale of hunger for cool tunes played with conviction and style if we every episode. will only recognize and support them. So please settle back Since everyone and savor our personal introduction to Rick Vito – a man called me “Ricky” who has indeed held on to all the guitars, and all the tones. then, I felt a real We sincerely wish the same for you in 2005. Enjoy… affinity with that rockabilly thing they did. I’d have to say that both Philly and the shore were very hip places musically TQR: Where did you grow up and how were you first in those days and all the local deejays played the coolest mix exposed to music and the guitar? of R&B, doo-wop, and rock & roll. Without really realizing it at the time, DJs like Jerry Blavat exposed me to a lot of New I grew up alternating between the Philadelphia area and Orleans R&B, New York street corner singing, and some Wildwood, N.J. in the summer months. Both locations had great local music that you wouldn’t hear anywhere else. -continued- 2 TONEQUEST REPORT V6. N3. January 2005 cover story TQR: When and how did you first become introduced to The first real live rock & roll show I saw was around 1959 at the guitar, and what was your very first instrument? the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. For one price you got to see the diving horse, a movie, (“Ma & Pa Kettle On The Farm”) Well, my mother, bless her heart, took that old Oahu and then the stage show, which that day was the Everly Hawaiian guitar to a local music store and traded it for my Brothers. It was loud and cool, kids were yelling, and the first guitar which was a student model blonde Stella, and lead guitar player jumped all around playing (I later found gave it to me at Christmas in 1957. I started lessons in out) a white Supro Dual-tone! I was totally captivated and January 1958 with a man called Mr. Lewis who gave me a excited and knew I had to have an electric guitar after that. I simple melody that I had to learn and figure out what song it finally did get one maybe six months later. was. It hurt like hell to press those strings down, but after a week I got it. It was “Catch A Falling Star” by Perry Como. After I got that first Kind of a mind-expanding way to introduce a kid to music, I electric – a fifties think. But I was a terrible student and gave it up when sum- Gibson 125, I would get mer rolled around, but not before my mom traded the Stella together with a couple for a sunburst Harmony f-hole model. That was definitely an of kids who played a lit- improvement and easier to play. It was probably the begin- tle and we would try ning, though, of this very advanced sickness I have which and learn a few things. forces me to buy and sell guitars with every passing whim. It was very difficult to Blame it on my mom! I got back into it when I was ten. figure out how to play Someone showed me how you play chords under the melody as a unit and I guess we of the song “Summertime,” and it all clicked for me. “Ah, didn’t get very far, but it that’s how you do it!” Then I found I had an ear and could was also fun just play- decipher the chords of most rock & roll songs, and I’ve never ing loud through my lit- put the guitar down since.