Bart Walker
Waiting on Daylight
Ruf Records
If fat slide tones are your thing—like
the sounds Duane Allman gave us in At
Fillmore East—you’ll dig Bart Walker’s
sophomore solo album. But that’s only one of the cards he has up his sleeve: There’s
nasty Texas snarl à la Billy Gibbons, dirty
riffs that recall Gordie Johnson in Big
Sugar, sassy bends that’d pass muster with
Kentucky Headhunters’ Greg Martin, and
fast, fluid lines that could have sprung from
the nimble fingers of David Grissom or
Doyle Bramhall II.
Walker references these great players and more, but he stirs their sounds into a gumbo all his own. And to top it off, he’s a powerful vocalist—soulful and swaggering.
The songwriting elevates Waiting on Daylight beyond the typical “wannabe bluesman” fare. Walker deftly sidesteps that thorny issue by sticking to lyrics that sound believable coming out of his mouth. Bar fights, lost love, lust, and redemption? Yes. Hoodoo man up from the Stovall Plantation? Mercifully, no.
Produced and engineered by the legendary Jim Gaines (SRV, Carlos Santana, John Lee Hooker, Albert Collins), Waiting on Daylight has a big, punchy sound and Walker’s incendiary licks leap from the speakers like a runaway steamroller.
Must-hear track: “Took It Like a Man”
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The 2018 CCL Deco Custom, in all its Pelham blue glory.
Anyway, we became friends and I started working on him pretty early—my 40th birthday was approaching, and that meant it was time for us to start designing his first solidbody build. If you stopped on this page, it’s because the photo of the finished product caught your eye. Beautiful, right? The 2018 CCL Deco Custom: Never shall there be another.
Old National Glenwood guitars were my design inspiration, but I wanted a slim waist like a PRS and the like. We used a solid block of korina to start, routed like MacGyver to get the knobs and switches where I wanted them. Dale builds all his own lathes and machines (usually out of lumber, y’all), as the task requires. This beast took some creativity—it’s tight wiring under that custom-steel pickguard. Many were the preliminary sketches. Four coats of Pelham blue, 11 coats of nitro. Honduran mahogany neck, Madagascar ebony fretboard with Dale’s signature not-quite-Super-400 inlays. He designed the logo; I just said, “Make it art deco.”
We sourced all the bits and bobs from StewMac and Allparts and Reverb and the like, mostly to get that chrome look I so adore. Graph Tech Ratio tuners, Duesenberg Radiator trem (had to order that one from Germany), TonePros TP6R-C roller bridge. The pickups were a genius suggestion from the builder, Guitarfetish plug ’n’ play 1/8" solderless swappable, which means I have about 10 pickups in the case to choose from: rockabilly to metal. And both slots are tapped, with the tone knobs serving as single- to double-coil switches. I put the selector on the lower horn to accommodate my tendency to accidentally flip the thing on Les Pauls—definite lifesaver.
Reader and guitar enthusiast, Cody Lindsey.
Dale offered to chamber this monster, but I said what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It weighs in at 11 pounds, if it’s an ounce. We carved the neck to match a ’60s SG, so it’s like the mini bat you get at the ballpark on little kids’ day. Easy peasy. 1 11/16" nut, 25" scale, jumbo frets, just 2 1/8" at the 12th fret.
Delivery in its lovely, hygrometer-equipped Cedar Creek case actually happened a month or two shy of my 41st, but hey, you can’t rush these things. We ended up with a studio Swiss Army knife; it does a bit of everything and does it effortlessly. A looker, too. Dale didn’t spend his career doing this kind of thing—he was in IT or some such—and I imagine he’s winding this “hobby” of his down these days, enjoying retirement with a bottle of Killian’s and a lawn chair at Duluth Blues Fest. But this guitar will live on as a marker of his skill and otherworldly patience. It sits at the head of the class in my practice room, welcoming any visitors and bringing a smile to my face every day. And Dale, my friend, I’ll be 50 before you know it....
Cody requested that Dale design an art deco logo for the guitar’s headstock.