Pete Drake

We haven’t ruined your day with scary videos recently, so we thought we better remedy that with this creeptacular vintage video of Roddis Franklin “Pete” Drake doing his 1962 “talking steel guitar” hit, Forever. 

I had no idea that this sort of thing was going down in 1962 – 8 years before Wendy Carlos did her thing with the Moog vocoder, but Boing Boing set me straight. 

Drake was a record producer, record company founder and musician whose steel guitar playing was heard on hundreds of hit recordings including such chart toppers as Lynn Anderson’s Rose Garden, Charlie Rich’s Behind Closed Doors, Bob Dylan’s Lay Lady Lay and Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man.

There’s not a synth in site, yet this is still spectacularly awesome. 

Says Boing Boing’s Mark Frauenfelder: ”This is where David Lynch got his ideas.”

Update: Richard Lainhart left a comment, noting that Alvino Rey designed and used the first talkbox, in 1939. Rey’s greatest fame may be as one of the key guitarists of the exotica movement, because of “the other worldly Theremin-like sounds he coaxed from his console guitar”.