“The Word” on Music
Guitar Music You Should Know: Gene Vincent, Featuring Cliff Gallup on Guitar

by WordMan

If I say “rockabilly,” you’ll probably think of the Stray Cats or the intro to “Ren & Stimpy.” Add visuals — the cool hairstyles, the pink ’n’ black clothes, and the hot rods — and you summon up a place and time.

Beyond the clichés, though, there’s some amazing music. The first wave of rockabilly included great musicians like Carl Perkins and Elvis’s guitarist Scotty Moore. But, as British guitar great Dave Edmunds said (in the September 1983 issue of Guitar Player), “Cliff Gallup was easily the most sophisticated of any of the players of that period.”

Who’s Cliff Gallup? Well, you have to start with Gene Vincent.

Gene Vincent was a popular rockabilly cat, singing about boppin’ with girls in blue jeans. His most enduring hit was his first, “Be Bop a Lula”. His career started in the mid ’50s and was over by the ’60s. He was injured in an infamous crash in Bath, England (after he’d been nearly crippled in a motorcycle accident as a teen) that claimed the life of fellow rockabilly star Eddie Cochran).

At the start of Vincent’s run, for a little less than a year, he had a guitar player in his band named Cliff Gallup. Gallup used that year to create a big footprint, making recordings and approaching lead guitar in ways that influenced some of the biggest guitar heroes coming after him.

Gallup’s first contribution was to expand the electric guitar’s tone by bringing in pedal steel influences. In my last teemings article, I talked about how T-Bone Walker used the electric guitar the way older bands had used horns, both horn sections and soloists. Rockabilly started off with less complex instrumentation than big band jazz — the only horn in rockabilly is the occasional sax — and thus less of a need to substitute horn parts.

One thing rockabilly did have, though, was a strong country music influence, and while there were few horns in country recordings, there was pedal steel guitar. Pedal steel guitar is played with a steel slide gliding over the strings to give the instrument that haunting tone (note especially the part from 1:10 to 1:55 in the linked example). The “steel” in the name comes from the slide; the “pedal” refers to foot pedals used to change string tunings on the fly.

What’s important to the current discussion, though, is the fact that pedal steels have a high, very bright tone, the effect of their solid-body construction (hollow-bodied guitars generally have a warmer tone). That bright tone is enhanced by the way they’re played: pedal steel guitarists use fingerpicks to pluck the strings, creating an articulate sound in which individual notes sound clearly and distinctly.

Cliff Gallup brought that tone to his guitar playing. Listen to the first solo from “Race with the Devil” — hear those clean, fast triplets? But more importantly, do you hear that high, articulate, biting tone? That is very different from T-Bone’s full, round, jazzier tone. Or compare Gallup with Chuck Berry, who is a true T-Bone discipline. Listen to some of his short leads in “Johnny B. Goode.” Notice how “sloppy” the solos at 1:10 and 1:35 are, especially compared with Gallup’s crisp sound.

There are three main reasons for the differences in sound between Berry and Gallup:

• Berry is hitting two or even three strings at once, slurring the notes and focusing more on cool moves and selling the song than he is on precision. This is very different from Gallup’s clean, exacting technique.
• Berry uses a standard flat pick; Gallup used a flat pick and added fingerpicks to his middle and ring finger, a technique very similar to the picking approach of a pedal steel player. The extra picks let him create the articulate effect mentioned above.
• Berry played a semi-hollow guitar and Gallup played a solid-body (actually a chambered solid-body, but that’s a geeky detail) guitar. The two kinds of instruments have different tones, regardless of how they’re played.

The contrasting approaches give Gallup a distinctive sound that is very different from Berry’s. Just listen to the solos in “B-I-Bickey-Bi, Bo-Bo-Go” — jeez what a great song! Listen to how clean and bright his playing is. It’s as though the definition of “rockabilly solo” jumped out of his head, fully formed. Danny Cedrone, who played the famous solo in the classic Bill Haley and the Comets tune “Rock Around the Clock” had a similar crisp attack, but a much rounder, warmer, T-Bone-like guitar tone. So Gallup is a key guy in the setting of the rockabilly guitar template.

Gallup’s second main contribution was to bring musical sophistication to a roots music style. While T-Bone was bringing jazzy sophistication to the blues in the ’40s, I’d argue that in his day, Cliff was bringing similar sophistication to the rockabilly style in the ’50s. Listen to the solos in “Bluejean Bop” and that earlier lead to “Race with the Devil” — wow, what a lot of cool stuff!

We’ve already talked about the pedal steel influence, with its complex chord structures. Another major move towards a more sophisticated sound is Gallup’s use of musical quotes. He drops snippets of “Reveille” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into “Bluejean Bop”; quoting bits of common melodies in solos is a classic bebop jazz move. In these quotes, he starts off playing the familiar melody, but quickly deviates into other cool licks. (Even more impressive, he constructed those leads on the fly, improvising in the studio — being able to drop in musical quotes and go from there is hard.)

Even more unusual is Gallup’s use of chromatic runs. Most people know what an octave is — the eight notes in a standard scale from “do” to “do” in “Do Re Mi.” If you look at a piano, however, you’ll see that there are twelve keys between these two notes. In a chromatic interval, you play all twelve of those keys, including the “in-between” notes that you skip in an eight-note octave.

The chromatic interval is rare in popular music, so it sounds a little strange to most people. When you play a chromatic run, you have to know exactly when and where to use it so it fits the song and doesn’t clash. Gallup does so brilliantly. Listen to his solo in “Race with the Devil” about 55 seconds in — he does a “chromatic climb” where he gets a wonderful, jazzy feel for the solo’s climax right before the end. Licks like that just took people’s heads off — sort of the equivalent of hearing Eddie Van Halen using hammer-on tapping for the first time. It raised the bar.

For all of these reasons, Gallup was a big influence on guitarists who followed him, especially on British blues players. Jeff Beck will tell anyone who wants to hear that his first guitar god was Cliff Gallup (he holds only Django Reinhardt and John McLaughlin up as high). “He was one of the most experimental, wild, end-of-the-world players” was how Beck put it in the September 1983 issue of “Guitar Player.” Beck even devoted a full tribute album to him called Crazy Legs, in which he faithfully recreated Gallup’s leads.

George Harrison’s first good guitar — the one he used on all the early Beatles tracks — was a black Gretsch Duo-Jet that was just like Gallup’s. Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton have also cited Gallup’s influence, and Brian Setzer’s entire sound, music, and technique are built from the Gallup blueprint.

One less direct influence was by way of Buck Owens, an important figure in country music with his “Bakersfield sound”, which puts a smaller group of instruments around an electric guitar played in a clear, articulate style — just like Gallup. Interestingly enough, Owens played with Gene Vincent’s Blue Caps after Gallup left the band. (He wasn’t a replacement for Gallup; my research suggests he played piano.). It’s amazing to think that things came full circle: while country’s pedal steel sound influenced Cliff Gallup, he in turn influenced the path of country music.

A married Gallup decided that life on the road was too much and he quit the Blue Caps after less than a year, although he cut a few more studio tracks with them. With that short tenure, he should just be a minor curiosity, but given the quality of the music and his innovative tone and technique, he is much more.

If this article has piqued your curiosity, do yourself a favor — do a YouTube search for Gene Vincent and listen to the full versions of the songs mentioned here plus others. They jump! They are so fun and so good it is easy to see how such an obscure player had such a big influence.

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Additional links:

Full version of “Race with the Devil”
Full version of “Bluejean Bop”
Full version of “B-I-Bickey-Bi, Bo-Bo-Go”

More reading at AllMusic:
Cliff Gallup
Gene Vincent

Amazon listing for Gene Vincent, The Capitol Collector’s Series

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About the Author: WordMan has been playing guitar for over 30 years (eek), in a variety of semi-pro (and now mid-life crisis) cover bands. He is a guitar geek