Hydra: The Myth, the Legend — and the News That There’s Another One Out There
At the turn of the century I had, for a while, been playing a slide on my bass guitar. I did it with a singer/songwriter named Alice Texas and I did it with Ollabelle when that band started after 9/11. Once I actually put slide bass on a record, on Ollabelle’s first album for the song Soul of a Man, I realized that I was going to be playing slide bass frequently for shows.
When doing it live I’d have to de-tune my bass for that one song. They call it “cross tuning” for a slide. If you just play across the strings of a regularly tuned bass, it doesn’t make a good chord. So I’d de-tune one of the strings so that I could get something that made sense with a slide.
And that was cumbersome. We were playing tightly choreographed opening sets, for instance opening for Diana Krall, and it was nerve wracking to try to get the bass de-tuned for one song and then retuned for the next. So I decided to have a dedicated instrument, to make a bass lap steel.
Nobody was making such a thing. I’m not sure that anybody’s making one now. I figured it couldn’t be that hard. It’s just a slab of wood with strings stretched across a pickup. So I went to Home Depot and bought two pieces of wood and glued them together. I could get much more technical but to make a long story short, I bought a cheap jigsaw and proceeded to cut the thing into a rough shape. I borrowed a palm sander from somebody and sanded it by hand. I decided if I was going to make an instrument, I might as well make it a double neck with a guitar neck and a bass neck. Why not have ’em both? So I had a bass lap steel and a guitar lap steel together in one.
I added some pieces from a cheap lap steel that I bought for parts, a student model from the Musician’s Friend catalog. I also used some pieces of old basses that I wasn’t playing. I didn’t have overlays to put down for the scale length that I had chosen. I just had to make pencil marks showing where the notes are on the body of the instrument under the strings. It’s as close to precise as I could get it, but I guarantee you it’s not correct.
I learned to play the thing in tune as well as I could. And it sounded pretty good! My wife named it the Hydra because it was a multi-headed beast. I put rubber stoppers on the bottom so it could lean without a stand. I carried it in a double shotgun case that I bought at Dick’s Sporting Goods. I put a carrying handle right on it, taken off of a cheap little amp that I had. All that’s missing is a bottle opener and it’s ready to play any honky tonk around.
Few people know this, but in 2015 I ended up making a second one in collaboration with John Ward, a friend of mine and Peter Cole’s. John is an expert guitar builder in Westchester. That second one ended up going in the original shotgun case to my friend Jared Samuel, and he’s been in possession of it. That second one is a single piece of beautiful mahogany. It’s more legit looking, thanks to John. I just sort of roughed out the body and then John took it and made it into a really nice instrument.
But I still love my first one. It’s still doing me right.