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Lonnie Mack

With Flying V in hand and a massive sound that predated the proverbial wall of Marshalls by nearly a decade, Lonnie Mack paved the way for generations of blues rockers from Eric Clapton to Stevie Ray Vaughan.

by Keith Wyatt

Before Clapton and Jimmy Page, before Johnny Winter, Duane Allman and Mike Bloomfield, and way before Stevie Ray Vaughan, Lonnie Mack was rocking the blues, hard, fast and loud. As Mack himself noted, "There wasn’t no rock and roll when I started. It came along as I was doin’ it." Mack’s breakneck, vibrato-embellished guitar style influenced all of the aforementioned players, especially Vaughan, who grew up listening to Mack’s early singles and co-produced and played on the guitarist’s 1985 album, Strike Like Lightning. Whether imbuing the blues with a country streak or working hard-core blues into a rockabilly boogie, Mack is a guitarist whose style defies categorization. Trying to define a single influence on his style is like trying to pull a single coat hanger out of a full box—you invariably come up with a dozen.

Background/Influences
Lonnie McIntosh was born in Harrison, Indiana, in 1941. His early musical development was influenced by a rural lifestyle that consisted of family musical get-togethers in the evening, gospel music on Sundays and late nights listening to the radio. In those pre-television days, the radio was a small-town boy’s only link to the outside world. Seated beside the console receiver, Lonnie could, with a spin of the dial, hear Grand Ole Opry country tunes, T-Bone Walker’s sophisticated blues or Les Paul’s jazzy pop.

Even before he was big enough to hold a guitar properly, Lonnie learned a few chords from his mother. Soon after, an uncle taught him Delta-style blues and Travis picking (the thumb-and-fingers style of country guitar playing that was popularized by Merle Travis), while a blind local guitarist and gospel singer named Ralph Trotto provided him with more-formal training. Music came naturally to Lonnie, and it soon dawned on him that playing the guitar might be more than a hobby. "I was about seven and I had a guitar, and I was walking across by the switch tracks," he recalls. The railroad workers, who were on their lunch break, called over to the youngster. " ‘Come on over and play us a tune.’ I went over and played ’em a tune. They put money in the guitar. I said, ‘Hmmm, this could be all right.’ "

Lonnie’s teenage years coincided with Elvis Presley’s Big Bang— the sudden implosion of country and blues that became the soundtrack of young America. Sporting the more professional-sounding surname "Mack," Lonnie formed his first real band, the Twilighters, and began working the clubs and roadhouses of Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio, playing rockabilly, blues, country, r&b and rock and roll—not an unusually broad range for that place and time. Critics might argue the subtle distinctions between stylistic labels, but Mack later defined the relationship in broader terms: "It’s all gut music. It all comes from the same place. If George Jones ain’t a soul singer, I’ll kiss your ass."

As Mack’s skills and reputation developed, he outgrew his Kalamazoo guitar and began looking for a replacement. The owner of a local music store had just returned from a visit to the Gibson factory, and he showed Mack a drawing of a new model. Impressed by its looks, Mack ordered one on the spot without having heard it. Soon he was the proud owner of a 1958 Flying V, serial number seven, to which he promptly bolted a Bigsby vibrato tailpiece.

Figure 1

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Finding the right amplifier took a little longer. The late Fifties were the heyday of the organ trio, and Mack was captivated by organists like Brother Jack McDuff and "Groove" Holmes, who created a thick, swirling sound by playing their Hammond B-3 organs through Leslie rotating-horn speaker cabinets. He tried to match their dense, pulsating tone by placing a fan behind his Fender amp. He was still searching for the right sound when he met Robert Ward, guitarist with the Ohio Untouchables (later to become the Ohio Players). Ward was playing through a Magnatone amplifier in which a circuit simulated the effect of the Leslie’s rotating horn. Lonnie got one for himself, and by pumping it through a Fender head and speaker cabinets, he developed a massive tone that predated the proverbial wall of Marshalls by nearly a decade.

Cincinnati had a small but thriving music business that included the nationally distributed King label and the smaller Fraternity label. Mack was soon playing sessions for artists such as Freddie King, Hank Ballard and James Brown. In 1963, at the end of one particular session for Fraternity, Lonnie was given a chance to record a number that he had worked up for his live show, an instrumental version of Chuck Berry’s "Memphis." Berry’s home-recorded original had featured a quirky, intimate arrangement, but Mack turned it into a guitar-driven sonic assault. From the splat of the opening chords to the huge rhythm tone and screaming vibrato-laden licks, Mack blasted the Fifties right out of "Memphis."

The record climbed to number five on the charts while Lonnie was out on the club circuit. By the time he returned to Cincinnati he was a national star. The follow-up single, "Wham," took up where "Memphis" left off. Beginning with an epic, ascending chromatic chord progression, the tune exploded into interwoven chords and riffs, the Flying V, Magnatone and Bigsby driven to their limits by Mack’s life-or-death attack. After the one-two punch of "Memphis" and "Wham," it was clear that, in 1963, no one alive understood the power and potential of an electric guitar as well as Lonnie Mack.

Fraternity soon released an album that included these singles as well as other instrumentals, such as the hyperkinetic "Chicken Pickin." But The Wham of That Memphis Man also revealed Mack’s formidable vocal abilities. Few white singers had the pipes to go toe-to-toe with the giants of black r&b and gospel, but Lonnie had it all: power, passion and a gut-twisting scream. His remake of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi ballad "Where There’s a Will" began gaining airplay on r&b stations, but in an instance of reverse musical segregation the record was promptly dropped from playlists once it was discovered that Mack was white. His other vocal highlights from this period included covers of Jimmy Reed’s "Baby What’s Wrong," Bobby Bland’s "Further on Down the Road" and an original—the gospel/r&b-infused "Why."

For the next five years, Mack crisscrossed America, performing a nonstop string of one-nighters even as the British Invasion made his rootsy approach and pompadoured image unfashionable. In 1968—before guitarists like Eric Clapton and Johnny Winter popularized blues-rock—a Rolling Stone article describing Mack’s profound influence on the style inspired Elektra Records to seek out and sign him. Mack moved to Los Angeles, but his heart was never at home in Hollywood. His Elektra recordings did not match his earlier successes, and he wound up doing other work, including a stint in Elektra’s A&R department and even playing bass for his labelmates the Doors on "Roadhouse Blues," from Morrison Hotel. Already disenchanted with the politics of the music business, Mack finished his third and final record for Elektra, The Hills of Indiana, bailed out of Los Angeles and headed for those very same hills.

After several years during which he mainly played clubs and fished, Lonnie teamed up with old friend and ex–Madison Avenue jingle writer Ed Labunski. Together they assembled a new Mack-led band called South and made plans to produce a then-unknown Austin guitar hotshot named Stevie Ray Vaughan. Sadly, Labunski was killed in a car accident and both projects were shelved. Aside from a brief, unspectacular affiliation with Capitol Records in the late Seventies, Mack laid low until 1983, when the now up-and-coming Vaughan convinced him to move from Indiana to Austin, Texas, and join the vibrant club scene. Alligator Records took notice, signed Mack to a deal and in 1985 released Strike Like Lightning, featuring Vaughan as Mack’s co-producer and musical collaborator. Mack and Vaughan inspired each other to new heights, and the success of that effort returned Lonnie to the national spotlight for his most successful year since 1963. Mack cooled things down a bit with Second Sight, his next Alligator release, placing more emphasis on his vocal and songwriting skills than on his guitar playing. A brief stint with Epic in 1988 resulted in the eclectic Roadhouses and Dancehalls, but Mack returned to Alligator in 1990 with Live! Attack of the Killer V.

During the past decade, Mack has taken advantage of the growing opportunities offered by cyberspace to reach a worldwide audience. His web site, lonniemack.com, offers paraphernalia, rare live and studio CDs, concert and instructional videos, and replicas of his Bigsby-modified Flying V, all of it autographed by Mack. Lonnie has come a long way from "Memphis"—and he doesn’t even have to leave home.

Style and Technique
Lonnie Mack’s sound, like that of every great guitar stylist, is greater than the sum of its parts. He absorbed ideas from a variety of sources, but like his disciple Stevie Ray Vaughan (whose first-ever album purchase was The Wham of That Memphis Man), he combined them into something that was at once both familiar and new.

Mack evolved a style that erased the distinction between "lead" and "rhythm." His early exploration of Travis picking, modified by Lonnie to include the hybrid flatpick-and-fingers approach, taught him how to manage chords and melodies simultaneously. Influenced by the two-guitar arrangements of Chicago blues artists Jimmy Reed and Eddie Taylor, Mack figured out how to compress the two parts into a solo performance. Where he differed from Travis’ light, clever melodic arrangements and Reed’s relaxed shuffles was in the intensity of his attack, a sound that would not be equaled until Clapton’s late-Sixties explorations with Cream. He could play a flurry of notes and make them all count, filling in the breathy spaces of blues with continuous energetic phrases while retaining a rock-solid sense of flow and structure. In this way, his powerful, edgy sound set the standard for the next generation of rock.

FIGURE 1 is a rhythm figure based on Mack’s "Memphis." Like Berry’s original, it reflects the basics of Jimmy Reed’s style, but Mack whacks the strings with in-your-face aggression that comes from the rock side of the blues-rock equation.

Nowhere is Mack’s unique sound captured more effectively than on "Wham." FIGURE 2 shows the song’s main riff, consisting of Delta blues–style chords played fast and furious. Let the open E and A bass notes ring while you play the upper strings. When fingering the E and A7 chords, fret the E note on the fourth string with your middle finger, then lay that finger flat to play the second-fret barre chords.

FIGURE 3 reveals the influence of Hammond B-3 organists on Lonnie’s playing style. An organist can sustain a single note while playing others, and Mack captures this effect on tunes like "Why" and "Turn On Your Love Light." Use your pinkie to hold down the high E note on the first string while using your other fingers to play the notes on the G and B strings. You’ll need to use hybrid picking or thumb-and-fingers to pluck the strings simultaneously.

Mack also made innovative use of the vibrato bar. Originally inspired by Chet Atkins’ subtle use of the Bigsby, he took it several steps further by bending the high E string and picking it with rapid upstrokes while simultaneously grasping and shaking the bar to produce an intense vibrato effect.

Gear
Lonnie has been more faithful to his original Flying V than most men are to their wives, although, like some husbands, he’s inflicted a measure of abuse. The guitar’s body has been repainted several times, and on one occasion the instrument’s neck was broken off and tossed in the garbage before it was retrieved and repaired.
In later years, Mack has taken to tuning down a whole step and using heavy strings, including a wound G. He generally uses only the bridge pickup, and from time to time uses a capo to reproduce open-string effects in various keys.
Magnatone amps were featured on all of his early recordings, in particular the model 460 with a 2x12 cabinet. Later, he used a model 440 (1x12) running through a Fender Twin head into two Fender Bassman bottoms. In the Eighties, he used a Roland Jazz Chorus together with a Fender Twin. Other than the amp’s own vibrato and reverb, his only effects come from his own powerful hands.

Recommended Listening
Mack has recorded the whole gamut of "gut music" over the years, from blues to blues-rock, r&b, country and country-rock, featuring at various times his guitar, voice or songwriting. Depending on your taste, you can find something of interest in each style and era of his career, but two recordings highlight his influence and enduring legacy:

Memphis Wham! (Ace): Includes The Wham of that Memphis Man with assorted tracks from the Fraternity years. A must-have.

Strike Like Lightning (Alligator): The record that brought Mack back to the public eye, and a testament to the ageless power of rock and roll.