#steve ferguson

[guessimdumb]

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NRBQ - I Say Gooday Goodnite (1969)

Written by original guitarist Steve Ferguson, this brief power pop gem did not get released until 1993. Bassist Joey Spampinato remembered it and recorded with the Spampinato Brothers in 2011.

[ahistorygrad]

“Celebrating the Sounds of Kentucky,” featuring a dress worn by Loretta Lynn, a collection of whiskey jugs, a piece that once belonged to Tewligan’s Tavern, a Crosley jukebox, items worn by My Morning Jacket, Steve Ferguson, and White Reaper, the sign from ear X-tacy that was at 1534 Bardstown Road, and an interior photograph of ear X-tacy when it was still open to the public in the early 2000s. This exhibition was absolutely incredible, and I felt so much nostalgia over the ear X-tacy throwback!

[power-chords]

For some twenty-five years I’ve maintained an obsession with four specific seconds in all the history of rock & roll. Four seconds of a single guitar ripping a hot lick, the opening salvo to a rock & roll song from 1969, a song I don’t particularly love (it’s not my typical go-to music), played by a band I almost never listen to (no disrespect intended). But these scant seconds thrill my ear, lift my spirit, and send me back to my own guitar with renewed enthusiasm, and they capture the singular virtuosity of Steve Ferguson—a great musician from Louisville you’ve likely never heard, which I consider truly unfortunate, because boy is he ever worth the hearing.

The song is “Flat Foot Flewzy” and the band is NRBQ and this was the lead single from their second album for Columbia Records, Boppin’ the Blues. It’s an oddball album, and yet another example from the annals of record executives executing poor judgment: they paired the band with the legendary Carl Perkins, likely expecting a fiery old-school rockabilly extravaganza. What they got was mixed results. One can see how the idea probably looked good on paper, yet “Flewzy” is the best of the lot and Perkins doesn’t appear to even play on the track. The song is all Steve Ferguson to my ear, and it was Fergie who wrote the song and laid down that lick at the opening and took care of the raunchy solo at the break.

The lick: out of the silence a lone electric guitar breaks into a spinning chicken walk of frantic notes, all bends and stuttering slides, and it’s over by the time your brain can react with something as basic as Wow. Or: What? It’s pretty out there, and fast. By the time you can properly think anything, the lick’s history and you’re riding the song, carried on the chugging repetition of the main riff. But chicken walk doesn’t serve the lick justice. Maybe if we’re talking a beheaded chicken and its final furious stomps through the barnyard. Or maybe we’re not talking walking steps at all, but rather the wild spurts of blood pumped out of the open neck by a panicked heart beating triple time. Yeah, it’s a splatter of notes. Only that’s not quite it either. These images imply an ending, whereas the lick in question is an absolute jumpstart—a sui generis non sequitur that points nowhere but ahead.