Fortunately for his physical and academic wellbeing, Poco came up at the end of his second year of college.Ī close friend who doubled as equipment manager for both the Turtles and Buffalo Springfield had been trying to find a band that Rusty's pedal steel could fit in with. "One time, I remember, during the Frontier Days I hit my peak - $20." By his senior year in high school, Rusty Young had abandoned hopes for a scientific career in favor of music, and was working six nights a week after school in clubs.Įven when he enrolled in Colorado University, his schedule remained unchanged: Classes until two, giving lessons until late evening, playing in a bar until the early morning. Then, by 14, he was working the hillbilly taverns in towns like Cheyenne for $5-15 a night. Rusty played lap steel until 1960, then bought one of Denver's first pedals, a Fender 1000 doubleneck. "They'd sit me up on the bar, give me an orange soda and let me watch the country bands all night," he says. But country sounds came natural to Rusty since his parents loved C&W music, and used to take their young son with them when they went "honkytonkin'". This way they could sell the kids' folks two guitars." But Rusty decided to stick with steel, but with the result that when his friends were into surfing music in '64, the 16-year old was still saddled with an instrument that everyone thought was only good for country music. "At that time," he recalls, "the teachers in Denver liked to start beginning guitarists with it, and then move them to standard guitar. Rusty began with a lap steel when he was seven. He's awkward, but he still plays some nice stuff. Like, Red doesn't have the hands and feet of Emmons. Jerry Garcia is a non-professional, so is Sneaky Pete, Red Rhodes. The non-professionals are players like me, who can do some good things, but aren't really in the class with Buddy and the pros. In this respect, who does Rusty consider "pro" and who "non-pro9" He feels, "The professionals are guys like Jay Dee Maness, Ralph Mooney, Buddy, Lloyd Green, Hal Rugg, Pete Drake, people like that.
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"Gimmicks don't make the difference between the pro and the non-pro," Young says, "technique does." I've seen Buddy Emmons sit down with just two pedals and'play more than guys with all the equipment in the world." Because they came from the pre-pedal era, Rusty feels, players like Emmons were deeply into technique, so that when Buddy converted to pedal steel there wasn't anything he couldn't do. "You don't need all that, you don't need 15 pedals and 85 knee levers. Rusty is the first to say that gimmicks aren't substitutes for technique. We're only beginning to discover the pedal steel's real potential." "All the gadgets," he says, "are just ways of trying to get people to see that the instrument has so many more uses than they think. Though he's only 26 years old, he has 19 years of steel experience and has worked professionally since he was 14. "I'll do whatever it takes to make the pedal steel popular, to show people that it can fit into everything, that it's not just for Hawaiian music." So states Rusty Young of Poco, the man who uses Cry Baby wah, some fuzz, will bar with an aluminum kitchen chair, is experimenting with playing through a ring modulator, will triple-dub on record to lose-the traditional steel sound, is using a new bar to obtain a sitar-like feeling, will play through a Leslie for organ effects, and will turn to an electric dobro with humbuckers and a wah pedal.Īlways on the lookout for new applications of the pedal steel, Rusty has used and discarded more gimmicks than most players see in a lifetime.
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