COURTESY ALLIGATOR RECORDS Dave Hole's unusual slide-playing technique is the result of a football injury suffered while he was still learning his hot licks.

After a quarter-century
of hard work and relative obscurity,
an Australian guitarist revels
in his overnight U.S. success

---

By Burl Burlingame
bburlingame@starbulletin.com

s Perth is a long way from anywhere and everywhere, and there, in the suburban Australian coastal city isolated by boundless desert on one side and trackless ocean on the other, Dave Hole heard microtones in the air.

Not just tones. Not just notes. No, Hole could hear the infinitesimal, ever-so-slight explorations into the shadings of sharps and the colors of flats. It sang fluidly and like a river of emotion, like the acrobatic ease of a bird in flight, the swooping, mournful horsing of slide guitar in the hands of masters on the other side of the world, their names unknown to his neighbors and friends -- Elmore James, Robert Nighthawk, Muddy Waters.

It was called slide guitar, using a metal tube to set the strings, or bottleneck, using the neck of a bottle or a pill jar to do the same thing. In Perth in the 1960s, it might as well have been called magic.

"There was nothing like the Internet to learn about stuff," said Hole, himself now a master of the slide guitar and headlining the Summertime Blues Festival tomorrow night. Back then he was just a confused Aussie lad with a hunger for the blues. "We had rock versions of the blues, you know, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, and we'd read interviews in which they'd rave on about Jimmy Reed or Muddy Waters, but then the credits on the records might read McKinley Morganfield. I'd order McKinley Morganfield records from the local record shop, and nothing would ever come. No one ever told us that McKinley Morganfield and Muddy Waters were the same guy. It took forever to piece it together."

While Hole and his mates -- "just a couple of us blues nuts in Perth!" -- were doing musical detective work, he picked up a guitar and, like every other blues wannabe in the world, learned the structure and riffs by playing along with records in his bedroom while his parents wished he'd do something else with his time. He began playing with bands, scuffling gigs here and there. "Once you're out of Perth, once you're out of the wheat farms, it's a thousand miles of desert," said Hole. "Of course, a million people live there, so it's a real community -- but there aren't a lot of places to go once you're out of town."

Mining camps, mostly, filled with boozed-up boyos ready to tear the house down. "One hundred percent male, blowing off steam, rowdy boys. Can't be subtle." Hole began perfecting an aggressive, multilayered approach to song structure, full of hot vinegar and aggression, raw enough to satisfy the hopping boys in the camps, clever enough to please the band night after night.

He began learning slide guitar the traditional way, with a bottle top over his pinkie finger, and was way happy with how it sounded. Microtones, you see.

"You get into the spaces between whole notes, the tiny inflections that your ear and emotions pick up but a tuning fork can't," said Hole. "It makes the blues blue, makes the guitar sing, like a human voice."

Then, disaster. While playing football, Hole shattered his pinkie. A cast was fitted to his entire forearm. Only his index finger poked out. He couldn't remove the cast for months.

"I didn't want to give up the slide -- it sounded so good! -- so I found a metal tube big enough to fit over my index finger and played over the top of the guitar neck. By the time the cast came off, I was used to it. And kept playing that way."

And joined the small group of blues players who play their instruments "wrong," like Albert King, whose guitar is upside down, or Jeff Healey, who frets it like a dulcimer. Whatever. It worked.

"The sound you get is the soul of the man himself, however he gets it out of his instrument. You're limited, when you're learning, by those you've seen perform, and we didn't get to see anyone in Perth. It was an accident, literally, that got me playing this way. And the rough lads in the crowd loved it. Made 'em sit up and take notice. They'd even stop fighting to listen!"

And so Hole spent the next quarter-century gigging steadily around Perth, creating a legend that stopped at the edge of town and was swallowed up by the desert and ocean.

In the early '90s, on a whim, he recorded a CD using local facilities. "I mainly wanted something to sell from the stage. I wanted to supplement my income, that's all." On another whim, he mailed off a copy to America's Guitar Player magazine, wondering if he'd get any feedback.

Guitar Player went nuts. "Magnificent slide work ... ferocious, fire-breathing. What more could you ask?" the magazine huffed. A copy of the story and the long-distance CD plopped on the desk of Alligator Records President Bruce Iglauer, who was similarly charmed. Alligator promptly signed Hole -- still their only overseas artist -- and released the record in the United States. American artists picked up on Hole, and suddenly, the 25-year veteran of Australia's outback roadhouses was an overnight sensation. Kirk Hammett of Metallica, for chrissakes, waxed flatulent about how Hole's "slide playing kills me!"

Seriously, Hole was elevated into the Slide Hall of Fame, if there were such a thing, and mentioned in the same breath as Bonnie Raitt and Duane Allman.

All of which was humbling and pinch-me time for the hard-working Aussie. "Like a dream come true, mate," he says over the telephone from a place he's not sure about but turns out to be Lincoln, Neb. "Six months of the year, I'm touring, the U.S., Europe, or recording with my blues heroes in Chicago. I could die now and go to heaven. It feels fantastic to get such recognition, and it's still hard to come to terms with it. I don't take it lightly. Pressure's on, mate."

He's still using the same guitar he bought in a Perth shop in 1972, a Gibson No. 345. "I guess I've adapted to it now after 30 years. Why that model? I found out that was what B.B. King played. I'm serious about following the masters!"

Hole has also settled on Fender 4X10 DeVille amps and keeps three, one each in Australia, America and Europe. His only pedal is an Ibanez Tube Screamer, "for that little edge." And he settled on metal slides because glass-bottle slides kept getting shattered in the knockabout mining-camp bars he played in.

Hole's also settled at home. He's been married for 31 years to a woman "who was very supportive in my struggling years, God bless her, and I make sure I'm home in Perth six months of the year. But when I'm there, I'm in her face every moment. She probably sees more of me than husbands who drive off to work every day!"

Playin' the Blues Summertime Blues Festival featuring guitarists Dave Hole and Sean Costello: Show time: 8:30 p.m. tomorrow; doors open 8:15 p.m. Place: South Seas Village at the Hawaiian Hut Admission: $25 Call: 941-5205

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