The Night David Lindley Brought the Whole Instrument Shop ‘Mercury Blues’ Jackson Browne and David Lindley | Guitar Tsars

David Lindley and Jackson Browne

The Night David Lindley Brought the Whole Instrument Shop

There are guitarists.

There are multi-instrumentalists.

And then there was David Lindley, who apparently regarded the phrase "pick up a guitar" as merely a suggestion. 

This is Jackson Browne and Lindley performing "Mercury Blues" during their 2006 Spanish tour, with the remarkable Tino di Geraldo on percussion.

By this point, Lindley and Browne had been musical companions for decades. Lindley had been Browne's guitarist, fiddler, steel player and occasional entire musical department during the seventies and early eighties.

But watch Lindley here.

There is no great wall of amplifiers.

No rock band behind them.

No attempt to recreate the Californian machinery of thirty years earlier.

Just three musicians, a pile of instruments and a song about wanting a Mercury automobile badly enough to apparently require musical violence. 

"Mercury Blues" was already part of Lindley's personal mythology. He'd recorded it on *El Rayo-X* in 1981, turning K.C. Douglas and Robert Geddins' old blues into something altogether more excitable, with Lindley himself on slide guitar.

And here, twenty-five years later, he still sounds like somebody has accidentally given a bluesman access to the contents of an ethnomusicology department.

The tone is wiry.

The phrasing is mischievous.

The rhythm is constantly being nudged sideways.

And Tino di Geraldo is sitting underneath it all, adding percussion that makes the whole thing feel less like a conventional blues performance and more like somebody has opened a window and allowed several continents into the room.

Lindley was one of those musicians who made the distinction between "lead" and "accompaniment" rather pointless.

He could accompany you while simultaneously wandering off with the furniture.

And that's the joy of watching him.

Nothing feels like a demonstration.

He isn't saying:

"Observe my extensive knowledge of unusual stringed instruments."

He's simply making the music sound like this.

Jackson Browne watches on.

The percussion keeps cooking.

And David Lindley, looking like the world's most eccentric geography teacher, proceeds to extract noises from a piece of wood and wire that really have no business being that entertaining.

There are virtuosos who make you admire their technique.

Lindley made you wonder what the hell he was going to pick up next."

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