Late Summer, 1970. A 37-year-old session musician named Pete Drake flies from in from Nashville to London's Abbey Road Studios to play lap steel guitar for a week of sessions with George Harrison. The result, the triple LP All Things Must Pass, will be the first solo release from a member The Beatles, which broke up for good the previous April.

Even for Drake, a veteran player who had worked on Bob Dylan's "Nashville" albums (John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait), as well as sessions for Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and Dolly Parton, not to mention such massive country hits as Lynn Anderson's "(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden," Charlie Rich's "Behind Closed Doors," and Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man," the week he spends in London must have been an extraordinary experience. Among those who walk in and out of the studio for those sessions in July and August are guitarist Eric Clapton, keyboardist Billy Preston, Spooky Tooth's Gary Wright ("Dreamweaver," "Your Love is Alive"), fellow ex-Beatle Ringo Starr, Yes drummer Alan White, Dave Mason ("We Just Disagree"), and Badfinger's guitarist Pete Ham.

One day during this week, Drake sits down and demonstrates his "talking lap steel guitar." Before turning into one of the pre-eminent country-rock lap steel session players, Drake had some hit records of his own, most of which centered around a contraption that let his instrument "talk." The title track of 1964 album, Forever, a remake of The Drippers' 1960 hit, this time sung with a talking lap steel guitar, was an international Top 25 hit.

On this day at Abbey Road, Drake sings a snatch of "I'm Just a Guitar (Everybody Picks on Me"), another one of his talking guitar hits. On the clip included on the bootleg compilation Through Many Years, you can hear George Harrison ask him to play "Bridge Over Troubled Water," which Drake does, even though he tells him he doesn't know the words, and "Danny Boy."

Also in the room, uncredited on the sessions: a 20-year-old Humble Pie guitarist named Peter Frampton, who will start his own solo career in 1971.

--from How to Be Inappropriate

"Pete Drake's Talking Steel Guitar" [mp3]

Labels: Creative Nonfiction, How to Be Inappropriate, Riffs, talk box