Steve Edge

United States

I learned my initial chops from Dennis (Bones) Hunter.
We grew up in the same neighborhood in Atlanta.

Bones was a baseball player and it looked like he might make it to
pro ball until one evening he stopped to jump off a car and somehow
got both knees crushed when another car crashed in to the one he
was working on, pinning him between the two.

I think we were in our late teens at this point and spent a good deal
of time hanging out with a very nice family of drunks who liked to play
country music on their guitars and have sing alongs while drinking PBR
and smoking pot and generally getting what we called "tore up".

While Bones recouperated from the auto accident on crutches he also went
through most of the 60's and 70's pop music catalog learning every song
on every album note for note.

I had owned a couple of guitars but didn't know how to play anything.
I would pick one up ocassionally but like most teenagers I was too busy
with the insane business of being a teen in the mid and late seventies
to care much about anything else.

My first concert was at the Georgia Tech colliseum where I saw Deep
Purple, and West, Bruce, & Lang. My mother stood in line for the tickets
in the hot sun one day after she got off work at Sears Roebuck on Ponce
De Leon Ave. She rode the bus to get the tickets and then caught another
bus home. For over thirty years now, she has reminded me of that fact at
least a couple of times per year. The night of the show, the crowd had
begun to climb the fence surrounding the colliseum after enough time
had passed in line so that they had grown agitated from the long lines
to get in to the show.

After a couple hundred people climbed up on the fence it promptly fell
down and the crowd rushed in, overtaking the security guards at the doors
and causing great chaos. I will never forget Leslie West belting out
Mississippi Queen....or live "Smoke On The Water" either. All in all,
a great first concert.

One day I was riding through the old neighborhood with a friend, probably
stoned or looking to get stoned, when I heard Bob Dylan's "Tangled Up
In Blue" on the radio. Something about that song drew me in. I was always
drawn to lyrics and around this same period I was attending concerts
regularly, hanging out at a pool hall, and was newly divorced from my
first wife at the ripe age of 18.

It was around this time Bones got religion. Not the typical kind of
religion, Bones got Blues religion. All the rock stars of the era were
turning on the world to the heros of their blues rooted music.
The Beatles, The Stones, Clapton, Zeplin, The Allman Brothers, and
Hendrix, all seemed to know a secret that they were willing to share.
It was in the music itself, and they paid verbal homeage to their blues
roots in endless interviews and media bites which we hungrily sought out.

Bones found this religion and was convinced he must immediately move to
Memphis and become a Bluesman. I was not convinced. I had learned to
pluck a few notes by now on an ancient Sivertone hollow body that I had
converted to left handed. It would not stay in tune. I was reading Author
Rimbaud, and the beat poets, getting high, and writing horrible poetry.
I was also dealing weed to friends to pay my rent and going out to bars
in the Old Underground Atlanta, where people danced and drank till late
night, sometimes to bands sometimes to the pulsing records played through
the giant PA systems. Eventually someone would give this type club a name.
They would call them disco's, but not yet. I wouldn't hear that word for
a couple more years.

When Bones returned from Memphis a year or two later he brought back a
book by Chuck Berry and Maggie, a girl he met in Memphis. Maggie played
guitar and had a great soulful voice and the house they moved into became
a sort of south side Atlanta version of Big Pink, or to put it another
way, a hangout.

Musicians and friends of all sorts came and went and I was there often,
smoking pot, drinking booze, or learning a new chord, or riff. The
first song I could play all the way through was a blues song called
"You Got Me Runnin" by Jimmy Reed. It was a one four five loop so
there wasn't much to remember. At that point my fingers would not
cooperate very well and Bones was constantly disgusted because when
he tried to play melody licks (which he knew by the hundreds) I would
stop playing. He would shake his head and say stuff like "don't stop
godammittt" and other things like "tap your foot when you play and
count, godammittt". He also gave me homework, drew out blues charts,
scales and riffs and made me take them home to study.

The years since have been pretty much the same story, I don't smoke
pot or use drugs. They just make me sleepy, and only ocassionally have
a beer, I'm learning more music, in and out of bands, working, recording,
raising kids, moving, a lot of moving, writing, reading, beaches,
vacations, never enough of the last two.

All of which brings me to the present, marketing a CD I made out of
sheer boredom and waiting on the next vacation, the next beach, the next
riff, and admiring all the guitars I don't have and can't afford,
but maybe one day. :)

Steve Edge
July 2007




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