Ricky Wilson, 1978 PHOTO: K.Bennett
What a special honor it was to have been Ricky’s first guitar tech. What he was doing was unique in concept, technique and execution and he had great patience with me as I had to learn, quite literally overnight, the precise details of my duty in this regard. It was no secret that I had signed on to the first US tour to preserve mine and Cindy’s on-going courtship. What might have been known to a lesser extent at the time was how much I had altered the truth when Mo, the sound engineer and crew chief (I was the only crew member) had called a week prior to my departure from Athens to try and talk me out of taking the gig. Although I know ultimately that Ricky always had Cindy’s best interest in his heart, my relationship with his sister in no way softened what he required in order to perform on stage night after night in city after city for months on end. Nor did I want it to. Looking back, I think my rookie status was actually a positive in Ricky’s mind. He obviously believed that my ability to handle the learning curve presented to me was less stressful in the scheme of things than his having to give an experienced guitar tech, and a complete stranger, instructions that might run counter to time honored standards (such as six strings on the guitar) that such a pro might bring to the job. Ricky’s familiarity with me was perhaps the thing that best over rode my ignorance of the tasks before me, given his profound reticence. I had experienced first hand the attitude of some guitarists who were, for whatever reason, offended by Ricky’s idiosyncratic approach to the instrument, as if an EADGBE tuning had been carved on stone tablets and six strings were a sacrament. One must remember, this was 1979, before alternative tunings were common. Ricky was in front of that wave. Of course the deep root of their being so tightly wound up about one man’s creative technique was their bitterness over being technically proficient, excellent even, yet completely overlooked and left behind, one person’s excellence indistinguishable from
that of the next. Ricky was not just a guitarist, he was a rocking paradigm shift. I don’t know whether Ricky was ever bothered by such individuals. Who knows. Their subset became smaller as the B-52’s became bigger. Ricky and I didn’t talk much, his shyness often reflected in my own askew social malfunctions and those misfires reflecting back off of his and back to me again and so forth until a nervous feedback loop was formed. But there was no animosity, just chronic awkwardness. True to form, Ricky rarely said two words to me in the tuning room before the show, where he would come in each night to check the tunings of the freshly restrung and tuned guitars. I changed the strings, stretched the new ones and tuned and retuned six guitars every single night, one of them, a double neck. Although Ricky did not invent alternative tunings for the guitar, he certainly took it to an extreme. In the tiny tuning room before the show, he would sit in complete silence and check the tunings using a small Korg meter which the band had used from day one, all beat up and held together by duct tape and luck. This after I had already stretched the new strings and tuned them using the fancy new Conn strobe tuner, a technological marvel of its day. Fast, easy and spot on accurate, it was my best friend in my new world of daily string changing and nightly travel via rental truck. Those moments alone in the tuning room, along with the biological bond that he shared with Cindy, both in terms of family and on stage, inform my perception of Ricky and define those early years on the road working as his tech. I am confident that those shared moments of silence in the tuning room, the eye of each evening’s hurricane, were a lot more relaxing to Ricky than they were to me as he began testing each string with meditative concentration. He would sit and select a guitar, pluck a string and then stare straight ahead into the void as the vibration faded away into the silence of the room like a stone tossed into a
sonic pond. Sometimes he would listen long after it seemed the sound had decayed. As he confirmed the validity of each string, he would occasionally raise an eyebrow ever so slightly or give the most subtle of shrugs. Body language that I learned to pick up on and which I lived for in those moments. He would focus on certain strings on certain guitars, and using the little Korg analog tuner, he would throw those strings, which I had tuned to digital perfection, off of A440 ever so slightly. In other words, I had to get it perfect so he could then deviate from there to a place that only he could find. Then, once he had finished he would stand up and with a shrug and the slight shadow of a smile he would leave, heading back to the dressing rooms. Every now and then he might stop at the door, raise that eyebrow slightly and with a wan smile say “good job”. Man, those were the moments I cherished out there, roaming across the world as we were and trying to deal with not only Ricky’s guitars but the entire back line and Kate’s keyboards. Doing a good job for Ricky and contributing to the success of the shows in my own way were inseparable goals. After Ricky checked and tweaked his tunings I would begin to transport the seven guitars, two of them double necks, all with different tunings, to the stage area where I had earlier set up a base of operations. From there I would alter the guitar tunings and string variations during the show, as they changed with each song. We couldn’t travel with fourteen guitars so I had to subtract strings and retune using the Korg, as per the set list dictate. Ricky used only five strings on his guitars, sometimes only four, and always the heaviest gauge possible. For those of you who might ask, 0.18 was the lightest, 0.58 the heaviest. During the show he would punish the strings using an extra heavy pick, staring intensely at some point on the stage floor or a million miles beyond, thrashing away as a constant rivulet of sweat dripped from the end of his nose like a trickle of water off of a mountainside.
He hit hard, holding nothing back, creating his unique chording with his thumb over the top of the fret board and hitting down while pulling up on the higher two strings, usually tuned in unison. Pushing down and pulling up thusly, he pulled out dynamics like lava from a volcano. Ricky created the illusion of two guitarists in this way and combined with Keith Strickland’s excruciatingly exact drumming, he produced an infectious rhythm. His was no wimpy sound and in fact his tone and his chops rivaled any guitarist, anywhere, in any type band - punk, metal or in between. The reason that I had to change the strings every single gig was related to the fear that Ricky had that he might break a string mid-song. He didn’t have that many on the guitar to start with so if one broke the whole delicate balance of his unique tuning would go out of whack and he would stop playing and of course so would Keith and the song would be over. The fact that his contribution to the artistry of the instrument goes unsung in the compendiums and yearly collections of the “100 greatest guitarists” only serves to illuminate the limited scope and specious credibility of the so called experts responsible for these lists. But Ricky would be the first to tell you, or indicate in some manner anyway, that playing the guitar, (regardless of his genius approach) was not all that he was about or even his main thing. He was engaged in so much more. Always reading, researching, traveling, cooking, sailing or seeking some new avenue of life experience. But his relation to the guitar and of course to Cindy, now my wife of many years and the mother of my children, are the points of view by which I hold Ricky in my mind. And it is through our kids, whose wry smiles and naturally flowing talent feel so familiar, that he indeed shines on. A gentle, bemused soul, Ricky brought his own customized standard to whatever he did.
Very private, Ricky was always somewhat enigmatic to me. But the one thing that was never obscured, always as crisp and bright as an October New York City morning, was his love for his friends and for his family, especially his little sister. I believe he was always cognizant of the central role he played in her life. Ricky will always be the wise, loyal and protective older brother in the vast timeless universe that is in her heart. And I will always be his guitar tech, forever striving for a glimpse of that slightly raised eyebrow. KB 03.19.17
Ricky checks the tunings before the show, Greek Theater, LA 1979 PHOTO: L.Goldsmith
Memorial Hall, UGA, Athens, GA 1978 PHOTO: T.Allen
Cindy and Ricky Wilson, 1978 PHOTO: K.Bugden
The B-52’s, New York City 1979 PHOTO: Unknown
Agora Ballroom, Atlanta, 1979 PHOTO: Unknown
CBGBs NYC, 1979 PHOTO: K.Bennett
New Haven, CT 1978 PHOTO: T.Hearn
First New York Times review, 1978
Atlanta 1980 PHOTO: T.Allen
US Festival, California 1981 PHOTO: K.Bennett
Sydney, Australia 1980 PHOTO: K.Bennett
Tuning notes 1979, K.Bennett
Lake Mahopac, New York 1980 PHOTO: L.Goldsmith
Ricky and Keith, Saturday Night Live 1980 NBC
Ricky and Keith, CBGBs, 1978 PHOTO: K.Bennett
Ricky and Cindy, Rio 1985 PHOTO: K.Bennett