Bruce Kaphan (Interview)

Good morning.

Today we’re listening to Bruce Kaphan, an American pedal steel guitarist from the San Francisco Bay Area. He grew up playing a variety of instruments and settled on the pedal steel guitar when a used Sho-Bud Maverick materialized at the Palo Alto repair shop where he worked. In the late ‘90s he was approached to make a pedal steel ambient “space music” record, which led to the cosmic Americana masterpiece Slider, released in 2000. “Kaphan makes Zen music for dustbowl airports,” Rolling Stone wrote.¹ We’re also playing a subsequent solo LP, Hybrid, from 2010, which opens the aperture further on his eclectic influences. An interview with Kaphan follows the streaming links.

Slider - Bruce Kaphan (60m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Hybrid - Bruce Kaphan (50m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

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Where did you grow up?

I’m a second generation San Franciscan on both sides. My parents migrated first to Daly City, then southward down the San Francisco peninsula to Redwood City, then to Menlo Park. I did a brief stint at UC Santa Cruz, then back to the Bay Area where after stints in Palo Alto, San Francisco, Menlo Park, and Los Altos, I finally settled in the historic Niles District in Fremont where my wife and I currently live just three blocks away from where Charlie Chaplin began his silent film career at Essanay Studios.

When did you start playing instruments? 

I don’t recall precisely. My mother played piano when she was a child; we had the spinet that her parents gave her. I took lessons while I was still in single digits, but I didn’t stick with it—I wasn’t a very good sight reader (and that persists to this day!), which drove my teacher to distraction to the point that she would grab my fingers and smash them down into the keys; not exactly motivating… I really did enjoy playing piano though (and still do, such as my playing is…), but rather than reading previously written music, my preference was (and remains) just to make up my own music. 

Music was still offered in public schools when I was a kid, and I couldn’t wait to get into “band,” which was offered to fourth graders and above. I wanted to play saxophone, but there were no loaners available, and my parents weren’t interested in renting or purchasing a sax for me, so since I was already earning money at that age, doing gardening and helping with a paper route, I went out and bought myself a pair of drumsticks and became a drummer in the school “orchestra.” Eventually this led to acquiring a drum kit and even playing drums professionally into my twenties!

During junior high, my brother took up guitar, so I started to mess around with his. Then in high school, I switched to upright bass in the school band. After high school, I dabbled with mandolin and viola. All the while, not having much money, but liking to play instruments, I kept finding myself buying the cheapest instruments I could find, then to make them more playable, I learned to modify them.

This led to a period in my twenties where I supported myself by doing instrument repairs. I worked at Guitars Unlimited in Menlo Park. One day, a used Sho-Bud Maverick pedal steel showed up in the store. I’d never been more of a country music fan than to appreciate The Beatles covering the previous hit by Buck Owens & the Buckaroos, “Act Naturally,” but when Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline came out and Jerry Garcia was playing locally with The New Riders of the Purple Sage and then he played on Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Teach Your Children Well,” I was at least curious about the instrument. The owners of the store were generous about letting me borrow instruments. I got hooked and I bought it. I was 21 years old when I finally found pedal steel.

 What were your earliest musical inspirations?

My mother’s parents had reasonably good musical taste. I remember rifling through their collection of 78s. Nat King Cole sticks out in my memory. But it was The Beatles above all else that caught my attention first. At the time of their Ed Sullivan Show appearance, I was nine years-old.

From there, growing up in the ‘60s, especially with an older brother who listened to FM radio and was a bit more culturally aware than I was at the time, through him I was introduced to many artists. To name a few: I loved The Doors, Jim Kweskin and his Jug Band, Mose Allison. More locally, my favorites were The Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Bill Graham was producing concerts with the wildest mix of musical styles, so there was incredible exposure to all sorts of music.

I also loved listening to AM radio, which at that time was playing a bunch of African-American music—I loved The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Booker T. & The MGs, all three Kings (B.B., Albert. And Freddie), Stevie Wonder… The list is endless. The Beatles (George Martin?) introduced me to orchestral accompaniment in pop music, and (George Harrison to) Indian music. Growing up in the Bay Area, I was able to easily see concerts with sarod master Ali Akbar Khan, who is probably the greatest musician I’ve ever seen live—his performances were spellbinding.

Meanwhile, I was also listening to a great local classical music station, KDFC, where I learned to LOVE Bach, Vivaldi, and Debussy especially. And then there were a few jazz stations locally. I loved (and still do) Ellington, Miles, Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, and so many others. So I was surrounded by music from all angles.

Slider is such a singular, gorgeous record. It reminds us of the term "ambient country" and contemporary artists like SUSS, William Tyler, Chuck Johnson, Corntuth… but it originally came out in 2000! Tell us what you were listening to / absorbing then that steered you in the direction of this record.

It wasn’t any one thing—it was a long arc—a lifetime of disparate musical influences. Once I became proficient enough at playing pedal steel to be unashamed to drag it onto stages where I was already working as a guitarist, I found myself playing more pop than country, per se. If I recall correctly, the first piece of music I played on stage with it was Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now.” The horn arrangement fit easily onto the pedal steel!

Eventually I started playing country music, because I was trying to support myself by playing music and well, if you play pedal steel... This led to two lengthy “house band” gigs over the course of about seven years, where I played at least four or five nights a week, four to five hours a night. Eventually I got a terrible case of carpal tunnel syndrome in my left hand, which meant that I had to lay off playing guitar for at least a year. This led me to focus solely on pedal steel, and was a contributing factor to leading to my next career as a recording engineer.

Being in the studio has been my best teacher—playback never lies. Playing live can become somewhat repetitive for me (since I’m not a jazz player), whereas the studio demands constant creativity. So rather than learning parts off records and regurgitating them on a stage, I was forced to come up with new things every time I sat down to play. With the influences I grew up with, it was really only natural that I’d want to explore on the pedal steel and being in the studio began to provide an outlet for that. 

My first big opportunity to seriously “explore” on pedal steel was when I joined American Music Club. I knew they didn’t want a bona fide country & western sound, but especially with singer-songwriter Mark Eitzel’s penchant for writing songs in open tunings on guitar, in a sense all the listening to Ali Akbar Khan came into play. With the open tunings, there were frequently drones that rang throughout modal changes. Since the other instruments in that band were drums, bass, and guitars, I was really the only long-tone voice. It became clear that my job was to create floating textures and slow-moving melodic or chordal phrases. The biggest challenge was to do the most with the least. 

Years after I’d left American Music Club, a mutual acquaintance introduced me to Stephen Hill, founder and president of Hearts of Space. He’d actively been looking for a pedal steel player to make an ambient record for his label. I think I was the third steel player he talked to in that pursuit. Since I love writing and producing music for film, when Stephen described what he was envisioning for a pedal steel-centric “Space Music” album, for me the experience was very reminiscent of talking with a film director about conceptualizing the score for a film.

Once I had a reasonable idea of what Stephen was looking for, it was fairly obvious what I needed to do. If I recall correctly, from the time I signed my contract with HOS to the time I handed the masters to Stephen, it was 30 days inclusive of writing, recording, and mixing the album. I’ve never had any project go more quickly from inception to completion. It was as if all of my previous experience had been gestating for years, and it was all just waiting to be born.

Tell us about your journey from Slider to Hybrid, and how the making of Slider and the reception you got led to Hybrid.

For me, sound itself has always been equally important to music. As a result, I was always the guy in every band I’ve been in who was most interested in sound engineering. My interest in sound has led me down the path of working just as much if not more as a recording engineer/producer than as a musician.

I’ve known many musicians who are much more cerebral about music than I am: I mean music theory—they can play circles around me when it comes to having studied one or another aspect of music theory or music history, while at the same time some are not terribly concerned about the intonation of their instrument, or fret buzzing, or their amp might have a slightly blown speaker or it might have a hum problem—whatever. For me, both the sound and the music have to resonate with one another for either to reach their potential. For me, the right sound strengthens the emotional impact of the music and the wrong sound detracts, or perhaps more to the point, distracts from it. And especially as I get older, my aim with any recording is to try to understand the emotional focus of a piece of music, and do my best to harness the musicality and sonic fabric to deliver the most focal emotional experience possible.

When I made Slider, my “rig” (the pedal steel, pre-amplifier, signal processing, and power amplifier) I was using was vestigial to the rig I had built as a member of American Music Club. American Music Club was essentially a rock band—we were loud and accustomed to playing in nightclubs, theatres, and concert stages. In that environment, and as a sideman, whatever self-noise my rig made was generally masked by the overall din.

When I made Slider, where space was the name of the game, and that space was often created by elongating notes as long as physically possible—I’d use my volume pedal to eek the maximum sustain out of a note—the more I pedaled volume into the signal, the more noise would accompany the note. In other words, as I mashed the volume pedal, the decaying note would be accompanied by an increasing amount of noise—a rude blend of 60 cycle hum and buzz. This was an annoyance during the recording of Slider, but since Stephen Hill was anxious for me to complete the album as quickly as possible, I just had to proceed with my rig, such as it was, and do what I could to minimize the noise. This led to some tricky maneuvers in mixing. I vowed to do something about getting a less noisy, higher-fidelity rig built after Slider was finished. 

I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the pedal steel I was using at the time I recorded Slider. By 2000, I’d been playing that particular pedal steel for 18 years. It had seen seven years of at least five hours a night and at least five nights a week of use during stints in two house bands in smoky, dusty honky tonks, then numerous tours of the U.S. and Europe with American Music Club, and then numerous tours of the U.S., Europe, and South America when I was a member of David Byrne’s “Feelings” tour. It even had lighting rigging fall on it when crew was packing out after one of the David Byrne shows.

Without getting too detailed about the mechanics of a pedal steel, let’s just say that the instrument was worn out… Pedal steels actually share some technology with primitive automobiles; the pedal rods connect to the pedals with old-school carburetor linkages! Over time, tolerances change and it becomes increasingly difficult to reliably play in tune, and it’s hard enough to play in tune on an instrument that’s being cooperative. If I was going to make more music featuring the pedal steel, I needed to completely revamp my entire rig.

To that end, I first sought out a new pedal steel. In the strange world of steel guitar, there are a few conferences where steel guitar enthusiasts gather to share music and products. I attended one such conference in St. Louis. One of the premier builders at that time, Bruce Zumsteg, had a couple of demo models of his “Zum” pedal steels available for players to try out. I sat down at one of his instruments and immediately fell in love. The instrument played easily and beautifully, and had more inherent resonance and sustain than any pedal steel I had ever laid my hands on. I had to have that very instrument. In talking to him, I learned that the instrument’s design was a hybrid of a variety of designs that had preceded it. It was designed to be more resonant than its predecessors. The model of the instrument was the Zum “Hybrid.” This is one reason I named the album Hybrid!

Once I had the Zum Hybrid, I went on a quest to find the best elements for every other link in the chain of sound production. I tried out a few different pickups before settling on EMG 40CS pickups, which feature internal preamplification and as a result have significantly less self-noise, while at the same time exhibiting less harmonic distortion; their high frequency response is extended and very clear and sweet.

I went on a similar search for a volume pedal, finding first a Telonics FP-100A, then an all-tube preamplifier, and ending up with a Sarno Music Solutions “Revelation Tube Preamp.” My Slider rig included an extremely heavy Mesa Boogie 2-90 tube power amp, and I recorded with spatial processing generated in my rig, then piped through two speakers, mic’d with two separate mics. For the new rig, I decided to record pedal steel dry (no spatial processing) and use plugin spatial processing on the back end, in the Digital Audio Workstation. I went with an Evans amp that featured a hybrid—a tube preamp (which I didn’t end up using) with a solid-state power amp. And drum roll… the model of this amp was the Evans “Hybrid.” See where this is going?

Soon after Slider was released, the Hearts of Space Records catalog was sold by Stephen Hill to a larger record company. The president of this larger company wasn’t particularly fond of Slider and as such wasn’t interested in having me record a follow-up, yet he didn’t want to release me from the contract I’d signed with Stephen. If I recorded anything while still under contract, it would have belonged to his company, but there was no indication that he’d have any interest in releasing it.

Meanwhile, the voluminous and detailed royalty statements that Hearts of Space issued were replaced with a half page summary that at least from my point of view was something less than transparent. I couldn’t have been unhappier with the predicament. In fact it would have been fair to say I was livid. Eventually, after a long, uncomfortable battle, my attorney and I were able to extricate me from that contract and rights to the recordings on Slider reverted to me. That’s when I re-released Slider on my own new label (Wiggling Air Records). By that time, my new rig was ready to go. Feeling freedom from being released from the contract and having a new rig that sounded beautiful and which had been carefully curated for music featuring pedal steel, I went to work.

I think Slider is my most concise album and I owe a debt of gratitude to Stephen Hill for that. He knew exactly what he wanted that album to sound and feel like. Don’t get me wrong—I wrote the music and I produced the recordings, but Stephen had final approval on the music that made it to Slider. He rejected at least a couple pieces that I submitted—one was an adaptation of Gabriel Fauré’s “Pavane.” Stephen asked me why I’d want to include music written by an “old dead white guy.” I also recorded another piece that included drum kit. That was just too outside the realm of what Stephen thought was appropriate.

When I wrote and recorded Hybrid, I knew it was going to come out on my own label. I did what I wanted, with no need for anyone else’s approval. Considering how diverse my musical taste is, and respecting the audience that had accepted Slider, I did try to make a follow-up that didn’t stray too far from what I understood to be Slider’s strengths to be.

Unfortunately, even Hybrid was somewhat of a bridge too far for some of the people who had taken a shine to Slider, and this included some of the people who had chosen to add Slider to their broadcast playlists. To this date, Slider is still my most successful solo album. As you can surmise from the diversity of my musical influences, taste, and experiences, I find a lot to like in many different genres—this makes it hard for me to correlate my work with what at least some consumers are willing to accept.

What music do you listen to when you're doing busywork, like answering emails, etc.

I don’t and haven’t since I began playing and recording music professionally! Back when I was in the music store in my late teens and early twenties, working with my hands doing instrument repairs and modifications, we’d always have jazz or classical music playing in the background on the radio. Since leaving that job and playing and recording music professionally, listening to music hasn’t been a background activity for me. When I hear music, I can’t help but focus on it.

During the busiest times in my career, I’ve literally worked up to fifteen hours a day in the studio. I’m usually in the middle of numerous projects. I realize that being so deeply involved in producing music means that by definition I don’t have a lot of time to be seeking out new music all the time—I’m too busy mining my own or helping my production partners mine theirs… At least when I work with other artists on their albums, I ask them to bring in samples of other artists’ work for reference, so it’s not like I have no exposure to other artists!

Until the wellspring of music dries up for me, I know I’ll always prefer making new music over listening to the work of others. I don’t say this with any braggadocio—in fact, I’m reasonably sure I’d be a better musician if I studied the work of others more frequently—it’s just that there are only so many hours in the day. When I’ve spent all day creating new music, or playing music, really the last thing I want to do is to “relax” by listening to more music. By the end of the day, I’m usually quite ready to rest my ears and my mind.

Name an underrated artist from the past 50 years.

John Lee Sanders. I first met John when fate brought us together in the 1980s as members of the house band at San Jose’s infamous “Saddle Rack.” John is a musician’s musician and a crowd-pleasing entertainer—a rare amalgam if there ever was one. He grew up in a musical family in Louisiana, went to North Texas State’s famous jazz school, then migrated out to California. If there was justice in the world, John would be a household name. He's an amazingly gifted singer with an incredible range both in pitch and in style. Though he’s had some medical challenges in recent years, in his heyday he was a thoroughly gifted keyboard and sax player. He’s a brilliant composer. He packs more soul into eight bars than some people muster in their entire career. Like me, his musical interests are very broad-based. He’s worked hard on making his music accessible online: go to johnleesanders.com.

Kent Darnielle. I met Kent in the 1980s when I was working as a staff engineer at Dragon Studios in Redwood City, CA. He came in to record some solo piano music. I was blown away by how unique and creative his compositions were, and by his lithe skill at the instrument. Then he showed me his charts. His music flowed seamlessly from one time signature to another. He’d have phrases that seemed to last forever—and there were no bar lines in his charts, which just made his music that much more intellectually interesting to me—it’s like poetry without grammar—it just flowed. Absolutely one of a kind and genius. Like Charles Ives, he chose not to make a career out of releasing his music—he toils in obscurity; he writes and writes and writes some more, but he’s been teaching piano to make ends meet. Other than writing and playing piano on a couple of the cuts on Hybrid (“Maya” and “Silenzi”), and playing on a piece I wrote for a film (“Dorothy’s Adobe”), I’m not aware of anything you could find to hear his work.

What are you working on next?

Just putting finishing touches on Victor Krummenacher’s upcoming release, Block Out the Sun. I’ve lost track of how many albums we’ve worked on together. I contributed a little bit of pedal steel and Weissenborn to this album, and I mixed.

In the near future I’ll be playing some shows as a sideman for a couple of Americana bands whose albums I’ve played a role in recording—Misner & Smith and Noaa Reinecker. Misner & Smith are a duo whose upcoming album “All is Song” showcases Sam’s songwriting, their playing (as well as mine and other guest artists) and their truly transcendent singing. Noaa Reinecker is a singer-songwriter who is what in Nashville they like to call a “triple threat—” great writer, singer, and guitarist.

I’m just in the beginning stages of recording Heart Matter—the collaboration of singer Amy Dabalos and vibraphonist Dillon Vado. Somewhere in the vicinity of jazz meets pop. Super talented!

As for music of my own, I’m hoping to collaborate on at least one track with guitar virtuoso, Jennifer Batten (of Michael Jackson and Jeff Beck fame). It’s up to me to write something, which has been on my to-do list for the past few months.

As for more outlets for my own solo music, my most recent work is the score for Judy Irving’s feature-length film, Cold Refuge. It’s been in limited release thus far, screenings in New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles. It’s my second feature-length film to score for Judy (Pelican Dreams was the first). 

When I first released Slider, Apple’s iTunes was super-friendly for artists—if I recall correctly, I was getting nearly 70¢ per single download. Since those days and the advent of the Spotifys of the world, there’s very little incentive to spend thousands of dollars either in time or money or both producing solo music, when (and I’m not exaggerating), the royalties they pay per stream often round down to $.00000 each! Like I said, I’m not exaggerating. And I know I’m not the only artist to choose not to produce music if the net result of it is that someone else (and only they) will profit from it. So as time allows, it’s my plan to continue to try to find more work creating film scores. I love the work, love collaborating with directors, and my favorite aspect of the work is that it requires every bit of skill that I’ve been honing my entire life—composing, playing, producing, and engineering. It’s fully involving.

1. via the artist’s website