Bucky Baxter could have stepped out of the pages of a Mark Twain novel, perhaps as a confidence man scalping tickets to a county fair. Or better yet, he could have jumped off the screen of a Coen brothers film, as a rakish father-figure dispensing advice of doubtful legal provenance. In real life, he was a singularly talented pedal steel guitarist. His career featured stints with Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, REM, and Sheryl Crowe. But he was more than that. Much more. Bucky was a road dog philosopher, an artfully flawed raconteur, a spiritual folk hero.
His professional exploits were legion. He personally gave Dylan steel guitar lessons. At the end of a tour with Johnny Paycheck, he had previously ordered so much ‘Bolivian marching powder’ from the road manager that instead of being tendered his paycheck, he was presented with a bill. He went on a two week bender in Los Angeles, and emerged from Capitol Studios as the only accompanying musician on Ryan Adams’ lost album, “Suicide Handbook”. He was once reprimanded by a bandleader for asking for advances on his “P.D.” The incensed boss said, “P.D. stands for per diem.” Bucky retorted, “I thought it stood for poontang and dope.”
On a personal level he was wily and unpredictable. He could spend hours recounting the exploits of the Kentucky-born clairvoyant, Edgar Cayce, better known as “The Sleeping Prophet”. Later in life, he was involved in a start-up internet marketplace with the astoundingly sketchy moniker, “Moontoast”. Once, late at night on the streets of Bellingham, I heard him give an impassioned defense of Dick Cheney’s vice presidency. He was hard to pin down, Bucky was.
I had the privilege of touring with him some years ago. He taught me many things. The least of which was how to wrangle the sound of an acoustic guitar.
(The following section is slightly technical, which will be useful to guitarists, but which might be Greek to the rest of you. Either way, this is a good opportunity to reiterate that I never use ‘affiliate links’. That is, I am not paid to recommend particular products. All recommendations are based on preference alone.)
In all endeavors, musical and otherwise, it is good to begin with the goal in mind. It is necessary, then, to define what is possible when it comes to an amplified acoustic guitar. Let us begin here: it is impossible to make an amplified acoustic guitar sound good. It is only possible to make it sound less awful. Electronically amplifying an acoustic instrument is, by definition, a game of compromise.
Imagine sitting outdoors at a brewery on a beautiful Sunday afternoon; the sun is shining, the waitress brings you an ice cold beer, all is well. All is well, that is, until a hungover undergrad with an acoustic guitar begins braying Sublime covers through the P.A. Can you hear that sound in your head? That is the default state of an amplified acoustic guitar. Hot trash. Without intervention, that’s the baseline. The sonorous chords of the instrument are compressed into a tone that is quacky, rubbery, and plinky (all technical terms, of course).
The first step towards better acoustic guitar sound is every musician’s favorite pastime: buying shit. Purchasing a proper signal chain is a pre-requisite for decent guitar sound. An acoustic guitar signal chain looks like this:
Guitar > Pickup > Cable > DI
First, the guitar itself: I recommend a vintage Guild D-25 from the 1970s or 1980s. These still go for $600-1200 on Reverb. They are incredibly durable guitars, made for traveling. They project a balanced sound across the sonic spectrum. That is to say, no particular frequency from low to high is naturally louder than another. Instead, the player himself is able to freely emphasize notes without battling the preferences of the instrument.
Best of all, at this reasonable price-point, traveling with a Guild is not stressful. It’s hard to find fault with a Martin or Gibson guitar, but they are pricey. So it is equally hard to baggage-check one of them on an airplane without having a panic attack.
Tom Waits used to play a D-25. So did Gillian Welch. What more do you need to hear?
Next, consider the pickup. Broadly there are two types: active pickups which require some kind of internal power source, and passive pickups which do not. I strongly prefer active pickups. Yes, it is a pain to change its batteries. But passive pickups fundamentally lack detail and clarity. They rob a guitar’s sonic richness the way a telephone robs a human voice of its character.
The placement of that pickup is important, too. The most common placements are undersaddle and inside the sound hole. To me, the undersaddle sounds rubbery. Instead, I recommend a sound hole pickup. Specifically, the Fishman Rare Earth. This beauty blends the signal of a humbucker pickup with a tiny condenser mic, giving the guitarist tremendous sonic control. For more body, boost the humbucker; for more air, boost the mic.
The guitar cable does not matter. I don’t care what your boomer uncle says. The ultimate fate of every guitar cable is to be forgotten on a nightclub stage during a half-drunk load out. Spend your money elsewhere.
Finally, there is the consideration of the Direct Box or “D.I.”. This element is necessary to transform the unbalanced signal from the instrument’s pick-up (which is carried over a quarter-inch cable) into the balanced signal carried by an XLR cable which can interface with a professional P.A.. These pieces of equipment also come in either active or passive varieties. Although in this case, no internal battery is required, the device receives 48 volts of “phantom power” directly from the mixing board. Again, I prefer active. They’re simply louder and more defined.
For years, I traveled with a Radial J48. Anything made by Radial is worth the sticker price. They can be chucked off the top of a building and still keep ticking. Of late, I have switched to a Neve RNDI. Both the Radial and the Neve sound great, hold their resale value over time, and are durable.
Technical solutions only solve half the problem of terrible guitar sound, though. The other half is more hard won. And to understand it, we need to return to Bucky.
Getting a living legend to play in your band requires some old fashioned horse-trading. In 2010, Bucky’s son Rayland- who is now an astonishingly good singer and songwriter in his own right- was looking to break into the business. The Buck Man agreed to play in my band on two conditions. First, that Rayland could open the entire tour. And second, that Bucky would not ride in our tour van. He would instead drive himself in his own Mercedes E-class, and I would pay for its diesel.
Deal.
With both conditions met, we hit the road with the Baxters. The clubs were small and the audiences were smaller. It was my first headlining tour and there was much to be learned. Among other problems, I was constantly losing my voice and breaking guitar strings. It was the bushiest of bush leagues. Unfortunately, there is no way to transcend amateur status besides putting in those embarrassing hours.
Yet, Bucky remained perfectly poised the entire time. It was something to admire. Here was a man who had played coliseums with Dylan. Now he was playing empty nightclubs with beer-soaked amateurs. Yet he was doing it with style; Ray Bans, a Mercedes, Rodd & Gunn boat shoes, perfect pitch. As Charles Bukowski once said, “To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.”
At the end of the tour, we ended up in New Orleans with a night off. After devouring a meal of fried alligator with the whole band, Bucky pulled me aside and said, “Let’s find a place to talk, Pug.”
We escaped down the sidewalk and slipped into bar that could barely fit a dozen people. I ordered a Sierra Nevada and Bucky ordered a Budweiser.
“You can do this if you want to. You can play music. You’ve got it,” he confided, “But you’re doing three things wrong.”
I was expecting some lighthearted Dylan stories, not a professional intervention.
“First, you’re drinking too much.”
“Should I quit?”
“No. Moderate. Moderate so you don’t have to quit.”
“I can do that,” I agreed while avoiding his eyes.
“Second, you’re choking your own voice. You’re singing from your throat. If you sing from your diaphragm, you’ll never lose your voice again. You should take a voice lesson or two.”
“I can do that, also.”
“Finally, you should never break a guitar string on stage.”
This I didn’t understand. Shouldn’t I be playing with passion on stage? And wasn’t breaking strings a necessary side effect of passion?
“You’re confusing wildness for power. You’re confusing volume for intensity. That’s for amateurs. You can play with power and still be in control. Guitar strings are temperamental. The more wild and violent you are with them, the more they choke up. They don’t ring and chime.”
I began to chafe at this inventory of my shortcomings. I told Bucky as much.
We finished our drinks and retired to the band hotel. The tour continued for a few more night but that was the last time I spoke with him, one on one. After the final show in Austin, Rayland piled into the E-class passenger seat and they drove overnight back to Nashville. (The diesel bill was enormous, trust me).
When I was younger, I had a hard time taking advice. Especially good advice. The kind of advice that makes you die a little death to hear it. A good piece of advice used to force me into certain stages of grief: denial, anger, and finally acceptance. In the post-tour silence, though, I was able to reflect on Bucky’s advice. And after a good long bout of denial and anger, I accepted it. All of it.
An acoustic guitar that doesn’t sound like hot trash is all about how the strings themselves are struck; just in the manner that Bucky described. Emphatically but lightly; passionately but in control; wild but intentional. No amount of retail enhancement can fix a poorly struck string.
In 2020, Bucky passed away in Sanibel Island, Florida. The guitar lessons he taught me, I still use at every show. And the style that he lived with, I still emulate every day.