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Date Posted: 07/ 2/09 9:52am
Author: Bobbe Seymour
Subject: Michael Jackson & Howard Miller

Hello fellow players,

My first flight instructor when I was a little kid, taught me to fly way before I was old enough to solo an airplane. His name was Howard Miller and he was from Statesville, North Carolina. After flying two or three hours with Howard, my father had a music job for the jazz department at New York State Teachers College. This was before interstates and nothing but mountains between Statesville and Freedonia, New York.

My father also being a pilot, talked Howard, our instructor, into renting us a plane and flying us to New York. The story gets better when on the way back, flying over the mountains of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, Howard claimed he was getting very sleepy and asked me to take over the controls and fly a certain heading and altitude that he thought would be sure to get us to Statesville.

Flying above the clouds, my only method of navigation was by what they call dead reckoning, fly a compass heading and a specific altitude. We had no navigation equipment. The airplane was a bare-bones 1949 single engine Piper Clipper. Howard woke up an hour later, checked the altitude, our magnetic heading and his watch and asked me where we were.

I said, “I really don’t know, but I’ve been holding the heading you gave me.”

Remember now, I was ten years old. Howard claimed we should be approximately in the vicinity of Statesville, took the controls back and made a descent through the solid overcast and as we popped out of the clouds, he said, “Yep. There’s the Statesville airport.”

Upon proceeding to land, I felt very proud and vowed from that point on that if I grew up to be a musician like my father, I’d have to have an airplane to get me from point A to B. And I don’t mind telling you that my airplane of today is a lot more fun to get from A to B (usually) than riding in a bus or in the back of a Cadillac limo.

This story is leading into my next revelation. I lost track of Howard Miller for many years. Then a few years ago while flying into Statesville to do a thumb picking show with Thom Bresh, Buster B. Jones and Bob Saxton, I decided to ask around and see if I could find my legendary hero of yesteryear, Howard Miller.

The administration building secretary said she didn’t know him and hadn’t heard of him but she’d make a note to try to find him. A week later I was landing my little Piper in Gallatin, Tennessee and my cell phone went off in my pocket. I answered as I was taxiing off the runway and the girl in Statesville said, “I think I’ve found your Howard Miller. He’s flying his own Boeing 727 and transporting Michael Jackson and Fleetwood Mac around the world on tour and I have his number. He’ll be back in a week.”

I called Howard a week later at his home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His memory was astounding. He remembered me and all the flights we did together, every airplane that was on the field at the time I was a little kid hanging out there and who owned them. The thing that shocked me above all after me having been in the music business for forty years was the wonderful things he had to say about Michael Jackson and how nicely Michael treated everyone on his staff and especially the pilots.

Howard related a story of picking Michael in Charlotte, North Carolina to fly to Tulsa, Oklahoma that night for a show the following day. Upon doing the pre-flight on the airplane and checking the weather en-route, Howard saw that there was a horrible storm in Tulsa and several tornadoes in the area.

As he was sitting in the cockpit doing more pre-flight checks, Michael came in and expressed how important it was to get to Tulsa as fast as possible. Howard told me that he just looked Michael in the eye and said, “We’ve got some severe weather on the other end in Tulsa and it may be very practical to sit here for another hour and let things cool off in Tulsa before attempting to fly in such a hot tornado zone.” He explained to Michael that the 727 is one of the fastest airliners the airlines have ever flown and that he could make the time up.

Michael just smiled at him and thanked him and said, “Whatever you say, Captain.”

Sure enough, Howard got him to Tulsa on time and was very happy at the bonus Michael had given him and the note of appreciation which he still has.

The steel guitarist we’d like to feature this week is Mike Daly. This is the Mike Daly that plays steel guitar for Hank Williams, Jr. and for the former Gibson-Miller band. With road work being down somewhat at the moment, Mike is doing a plethora of demo sessions in Nashville.

With his style and being able to adapt himself to the weird country music of today, he is becoming very much in demand amongst new writers and country music producers.

Mike is a very nice person and is ruining any chance for his son Stevey to amount to anything by encouraging him to be a steel guitarist here in Nashville, Tennessee. The bad thing is, Stevey is coming along very well and also plays several other country oriented instruments; guitar, dobro and who knows what else. He is also working full time as a professional musician at the young age of 24 years old.

I think tomorrow will be safe when it comes to the youth in the country music field.

As promised, I’m going to let you all in on the Gary Rittenberry conversation that we had after the last tips in here. With aluminum, maple and machine shop labor being what it is today, Gary and I have come to the conclusion that it’s pretty near impossible to design and build a steel guitar for less money than the price of a GFI or Rittenberry steel guitar without hurting the quality of the final product.

Materials and labor make it pretty well impossible to get below the magic figure of $10 a pound. With our sale prices, we are managing to keep it down to around $7-8 a pound. Even less at times.

People call us all the time asking for used guitars. When I give them the price of a good used Emmons or Sho-Bud or Mullen, I have to add that they can probably buy a new steel guitar for less money. This proves that steel guitars really are a good investment regardless of some of the ignorance you may read from people that really don’t know much at other places on the internet. Haha. I just had to say that because I read some things that are so far from fact that I have to roll on the floor, holding my sides, screaming and howling with laughter.

I had a request a few weeks ago from a reader that wanted me to mention when a steel player should play the melody as opposed to when they should take liberties with a song by changing the melody and incorporating their own melodies to the chords.

Sometimes after the singer sings the melody and you keep hearing the melody over and over and it comes time for you to do a turnaround or solo in the middle of the song, it may be pretty boring to hear the plain old melody over again. I’m talking pure country music here. If you can come up with some nice, tricky sounding, original melody and take certain liberties with the melody, it may be very tasteful to do so.

If the melody hasn’t been heard for a little while in the song, as happens on instrumentals, and especially during the first 16 bars of the song, it would be very tasteful to play the melody.

Once the melody is established, anything else may be fair game depending on what your audience can understand and tolerate, a certain amount of humor here.

See our monthly specials at www.steelguitar.net/monthlyspecials.html

Your buddy,
Bobbe
www.steelguitar.net
sales@steelguitar.net
www.youtube.com/bobbeseymour
www.myspace.com/bobbeseymour

Steel Guitar Nashville
123 Mid Town Court
Hendersonville, TN. 37075
(615) 822-5555
Open 9AM – 4PM Monday – Friday
Closed Saturday and Sunday

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