Steve and Marty

Everyone's streaming list wrapped up this week and, yeah, mine was Steely Dan again. I try not to listen to Steely Dan on random, or in streaming format. I don't want to burn myself out, and also I have a much-better sounding miniplayer filled with high-quality Steely Dan rips which I travel with, so, all set.

But Steely still topped off the list because, who clicks past a Steely Dan song?

Second was Sam & Dave, usually they're third.

Third was Booker T. and the MG's, usually they are second.

That isn't new, and like Steely Dan, I can tell you when it happened, when it clicked, when my head wrapped around its Stax. When the brain changed.

Oct. 1995, 'Get Shorty' due for release in a week and dad is awfully excited, among his compact disc purchases is the (truncated) Booker T. collection on Rhino. He listens to it on the way home, crunching over into the driveway as I make my way back from the second month of sophomore year of high school. I say please and thank you and disappear with the disc and yes it messed me up.

Here's the part where I remind everyone that electrician Leo Fender did not play any instrument, let alone guitar, yet the Telecaster he created is still considered the most versatile of the electric guitar's many formats. That's some statement, considering the indisputable fact that the electric guitar is the third-most important invention of the last 112 years (behind transistors and EZ-open beer tabs).

Steve Cropper used a Telecaster on those Booker T. records, on the Sam & Dave records, on the Stax collection which is the most-listened to album on my phone. He plays guitar in my favorite movie, he played those chords behind Otis Redding at Altamont, the tape I walked around the beach with the summer after finishing high school. A year later, when Napster hit, I deluged our network with Booker T. and the MGs downloads, files so tiny, tone so pure.

A week or so after I was formally introduced to Booker T. on disc, 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness' was released. Two full discs of the alluvial Cropper's utter, celestial, opposite. What a great album, MC&TIS, fuzzy and loud and To Space and Beyond and Back. I haven't listened to it all the way through since around 1996, which is probably for the better, but I listened to it fully about once per day for a year after the Tuesday it was released.

All with Cropper's notes in my mind, that little Booker T. disc, which dad never noticed not leaving my room. I wanted to fuzz out, I wanted to Spaceman Spiff with my guitar, but Billy already made it to the moon. There was no out-fuzzing 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,' and to the best of my knowledge Billy Corgan's three-decade career since posed in recognition of such.

All in the same month, the same month Chicago traded for Dennis Rodman and my family moved to Indiana, I picked up my amp, my first real amp. A Tube Amp. I traded my brand-new'ish solid state Princeton Chorus to a bartender I'd worked with (at a bar) for three years – I was 15, it was a fun childhood – for a Fender tube amp head. That's all I knew about it. "Fender tube amp head," I'd get the speakers later.

I'd learn more. The amp was made among the "red knob Fender" line of the late 1980s and early 1990s, so-called for the reasons you'd guess, Fender outfitting the product with red knobs over the typical black knobs to save a fraction of a cent. The schematics were compiled by experts who deserved better, working as best they could among limited budget – they weren't the ones choosin' knob colors.

My version, a rackmounted (!) amplifier-only with no speaker, is the rarest of the unloved group. It's not bad, or great, and I'll illustrated the point: Radiohead's guitarist plays a red knob Fender, pretty cool, but so does Nickelback's.

Not only did not I not learn about the red knob ignominy until decades later, but I didn't know it had red knobs even after living with it for years. Marty the bartender, perhaps embarrassed, marked over them with permanent black marker. I've since twiddled the knobs so much the red bled through, see attached photo (it does lean that way).

Initially I used the amp, and its fuzz, to go to the moon with Billy. This novelty wore off around the time 1995 turned to 1996, Calvin sledding away from us. By summer I was through with fuzz, and could taste Cropper's tone. Like some evocative sense memory you presume is something special, Mom's Home Cooking, but instead it is the waxy scent of whatever they were putting into chewy granola bars back then, plus freshly-cleaned Formica.

Foundations of several different magazine empires were built on guitar players tweaking hertz, the 32,000 different ways to make a Tube Screamer sound like Stevie Ray Vaughn, the money spent in that search. I needed to get my amp – "Marty" – to sound like 'Mo' Onions,' but I knew no effects pedal was the answer.

Come the current century and the magazines are outta business, free opinions once harnessed on moderated forums sprung loose on social media, then YouTube. Guitarists chattered onward and I was outward, playing the same electric guitar through another small amp, a $75 purchase I'd long abandoned Marty for.

Then Yahoo laid me off, which meant I could Google things without guilt. I found out that my small amp is beloved, cherished, and that red knob Fenders were an abomination (though, useless for me but great for the guy in Radiohead, they handle pedals well).

Then I found a Jimmy Vivino comment on a social media, discussing the amplifier Steve Cropper's toured with since the late 1980s. Of all the choices, Cropper uses a red-knob Fender. Jimmy was blown away, and reminded us not to trust consensus.

I was taken aback myself, my Marty was Cropper-worthy, Cropper-accredited. Cropper's rig was the same as mine, no pedals, turning it up until onlookers are annoyed before minding the volume on the guitar itself.

His commitment to the amplifier, amid hundreds of alternative choices aiming for a "Steve Cropper tone," confused me only briefly. Cats jumped on and off my amplifier for three decades, Marty still purrs. It doesn't sound (the least bit) like Steve Cropper's old amps, but it runs.

Marty's lived in three states, been cranked to 10 in five different states (Marty's clean channel still doesn't distort). Marty's been mistreated, stuck in a cold garage through colder weather and clumsily shoved onto a closet shelf with little regard for the Sovtek power tubes I re-installed sometime around the spot my brokeass blogged out of my parents' basement in 2004-05.

That Steve Cropper chose a red knob Fender among any other amp to tour with, any rented backline available, kinda makes sense. I raised a family up and out of the house with this amplifier as prominent furniture, guests warned at children's birthday parties to mind its sharp edges.

Earlier this year I took my wife and parents to watch 'The Blues Brothers' in the theatre, I think my encouraging words were, "I want to hear Steve Cropper's guitar on those big speakers." I noticed new things on the wide screen as opposed to its many short-scaled, cable TV viewings, like the leftover red Holiday Inn shag on Cropper's amplifier during the country and western scene. Hilarious.

Holiday Inn was in his rearview mirror, Cropper coulda taken the shag off. Painted over them like Marty the Bartender hiding his shiny, red, knobs.

But nah, what looks good once looks good forever, the shag stays. The tone ain't in the shag, anyway. In the 1960s Steve Cropper changed everything while running Fender's basic guitar through Fender's smallest amplifier, and I don't know anyone who's sounded better.

(Walter Becker and his freshly-released outboard equipment on "I Got the News" is excluded due to RIAA curve technicality.)

Your sound is already with you, it is in the room. It'll start up the second you stop reading this, cease taking in something else's thoughts, filling headspace with what people will call their "content."

You do not consume content. You entertain yourself with media, but you are not at a trough, and the human at the other end is not baking you a digestive pill developed by the good people at DuPont, brimming with all the required nutrients and protein made essential by modern living.

When the entertainment stops, your sound will pick up again because you make good sounds, cool sounds, sweet tones.

Your brain, noodling through its day like some druggie at Guitar Center (HEY), is ready to nail a three-minute take on the first try. That's not hum you're hearing but your own static, that's good, that means you're electric, and all frequencies count.

KNOCK ON WOOD

Got the Epiphone Les Paul, paid it off, Thanks to You. It is perfect, unplayed, I pulled out the pickups to find they were a set type ("Burstbucker") I wasn't expecting, a glorious surprise, I thought I'd purchased a set of dogs. Yes, I've played 'Whole Lotta Love' on it, but not when my wife is home.

This morning the neighbor's cat came to our lawn again and my cat kicked its ass so badly we found the neighbor cat's collar dug two inches deep into the snow. Happy December. Thank you for reading!