I paid twenty-five dollars to get my start and carried the guitar home in a paper bag on a city bus. I found a sad, worn-out little 1950s Magnatone steel hanging by a bent tuning peg in the window of a pawn shop. After saving up my teenage pennies I went shopping. But after hearing Steve Howe’s work with YES on the album, Close to the Edge, I decided I needed to try a lap steel with its different sound. I played on whatever electric I had at hand, low action, light strings, and all. And now, the tale.īack in the early 1970s I started playing bottleneck slide with a Coricidin bottle like I had seen Duane Allman use.

I'll be aided by the fact that the subject of this discussion does indeed carry the name of a bear… and it didn’t get away. I’ll be doing the same thing here, telling the story of my fumbling, longtime stalking of a bear. Pilots' tales are very much akin to this, always telling how the hapless subjects of the stories managed to get their landing gear back on the ground despite their screwups.

That allowed a glorious tale to be woven with humility, while tamping down over-weaning ego. The good storytellers managed to shape their tale of the stalking and eventual acquisition of a great bear into a story of triumph that happened despite their own screw-ups and shortcomings. The ancients relished telling each other about the one that didn’t get away.

Truth be told, we of the modern Internet age play out much the same rite that our ancestors did when we tell our stories around the campfires of the guitar forums. Telling tales of stalking bears around the campfire is an ancient rite. The Rather Extended Hunt for a Lap Steel Home

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