What Sneaky Pete Plugged Into

A&M Recording Studios on La Brea Avenue, the fall of 1968. Gram Parsons is twenty-two and certain he is inventing something nobody has a name for yet. The Flying Burrito Brothers are tracking Hot Burrito #1, a slow song about a man who has lost the woman he ran off with. Across from the vocal mic, a soft-spoken stop-motion animator named Peter Kleinow — Sneaky Pete to anyone in the room — is sitting behind a ten-string pedal steel. Before he touches the bar, he reaches down to the floor and patches the output of his guitar into a Maestro Fuzz-Tone.

What comes out of the speakers does not sound like country music. It sounds like a man trying to sing while standing too close to a fire. The notes bend in two directions at once — the steel bar sliding north while a foot pedal pulls the chord south — and then the fuzz box smears the whole thing into the corners of the room. Gram lets the steel cry through the entire chorus. The pedal steel has never been allowed to do this before.

A pedal steel is built like a confession. The strings lie flat on a horizontal cabinet. The player slides a chrome bar across them with the left hand. Beneath the cabinet are pedals that raise individual strings while the bar holds the others in place, knee levers that bend pitches down without the bar moving at all, and a foot rocker that swells the volume. The instrument's vocabulary is not really notes. It is the distances between notes — the slur, the wobble, the cry at the top of a phrase that human voices reach for and rarely catch. Every other instrument in popular music plays pitches and decorates them. The pedal steel plays the decoration and leaves the pitch as the suggestion.

Which is why it can answer a vocalist the way nothing else can. When Ben Keith laid steel into Neil Young's Old Man at Quad Studio in Nashville in 1971, he was not playing a counter-melody. He was playing the weather around the singer — the unspoken thought behind the line, the catch in the throat the lyric refused. When Pete Drake answered Tammy Wynette on Stand by Your Man, he was singing a second part she could not say out loud. Pedal steel is the instrument of the things just under the words.

What Sneaky Pete plugged into that day was not a fuzz pedal in any normal sense. It was a way of letting a country instrument keep up with the rock band Gram was inventing in real time. The fuzz box did not change what the steel knew. It just gave the cry enough teeth to live in a louder room. Gram's voice was already breaking on the take. Sneaky Pete's steel broke with him.

The lesson for any session is small and exact. When you bring a steel player onto a record, you are not adding ornament. You are adding a second singer — one who has agreed to never use words and to never finish a sentence. The verse will say what it says. The chorus will be sung. The steel will speak the part the song was protecting.

Sneaky Pete went back to animating stop-motion puppets between sessions for the Stones and the Eagles in the years that followed. The fuzz-pedal-on-steel idea did not catch on the way it might have. It did not need to. By the time he finished his last pass on that ballad, the instrument had been told it was allowed to cry. It has been crying ever since.