There’s a fine line between giving a song what it needs and being so on the nose that it becomes cheesy, and it was along this narrow precipice of taste that Steve Earle, Richard Bennett, and Emory Gordy Jr. found themselves at odds. The three men were working on Earle’s 1986 track, “Guitar Town”. Bennett was the session guitarist, and Gordy Jr. was the producer.
As the name would suggest, “Guitar Town” centers on a narrator who loves traveling and playing the guitar. “Everybody told me you can’t get far on 37 dollars and a cheap guitar / Now I’m smokin’ into Texas with the hammer down / and a rockin’ little combo from the Guitar Town.”
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When Earle and Bennett were discussing the direction they wanted to take the song, they both agreed that adding a bunch of busy guitar solos would be too obvious. “That was the very thing we were not—not—going to do. And I was just a hundred percent with [Steve] all the way,” Bennett recalled in David McGee’s Steve Earle: Fearless Heart, Outlaw Poet.
Then, the producer stepped in.
The Solo in “Guitar Town” Was Supposed To Be Too Obnoxious To Use
After Steve Earle and Richard Bennett decided that a guitar solo would be too expected, they opted to include a solo on a Farfisa, an Italian electronic organ. That’s when Emory Gordy Jr. did what any good producer should do: he pushed the artists to reconsider. The song was called “Guitar Town”, after all. The producer argued that people would want to hear a guitar solo. Bennett, who would have been in charge of laying the solo as the session player, resisted Gordy’s request. Multiple times.
The two men’s debate was fairly light in the beginning. But the more the two continued to mull it over, the more annoyed Bennett became. Finally, a switch flipped in Bennett, and his irritation became clear. The guitarist went to his trunk full of gear and, as he put it in David McGee’s book, “grabbed the most obnoxious thing I could think of first, and that happened to be a vintage, early 60s model Danelectro Longhorn six-string bass.”
“I said, ‘You want a guitar solo? Here,’” Bennett recalled. “[I] plugged in and played the first thing that fell out of my brain, and that was it. That was one of the few things that wasn’t planned on that album. For the most part, everything was almost orchestrated, you know. That album, even though it doesn’t sound it, it was very arranged. Except for the six-string bass solo on ‘Guitar Town’.”
Ultimately, it would appear that Gordy was right. “Guitar Town” from Earle’s album of the same name hit No. 7 on both the United States and Canada country charts. Guitar Town was Earle’s breakthrough hit, paving the way for him to release other career-defining tracks, like “Copperhead Road”.
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