OK Solberg: 00:00

Wanna again welcome you to The 405 Coffee Break. Guys get you a cup of coffee, glass iced tea, bottled water. Let's see what's going on. Beautiful day.

OK Solberg: 00:08

Spring wheat $6.73 a bushel. 550lb steer calf for fall delivery. Fall's coming up, it's about here. $4.30 a pound all the way up to $4.60 on the top end. And a 100lb fat lamb in Billings $3.10 if they're shiny, but guys there's more, much more.

OK Solberg: 00:31

Okay. Here's a strange little piece of music history, something I just learned yesterday. Sometimes something goes wrong and instead of throwing it away somebody says, hey, that's pretty good. Listen, guys. Back in 1960, Marty Robbins, remember El Paso? Before El Paso, Marty Robbins was recording a song called Don't Worry, and he was doing it in Nashville.

OK Solberg: 00:59

An electronic mixer board failed to work as it was designed and that accident while Marty was recording changed music history. It really did. Now Marty Robbins recorded country western music as you all know, but this electronic accident helped rock and roll music more than it did country western music.

OK Solberg: 01:23

Grady Martin was one of the great Nashville session musicians of the times and during the recording he played a 6 string electric bass and then well something went wrong. A preamp in the recording console malfunctioned and when Grady played his solo, bass solo instead of getting the clean normal sound that he had expected, the instrument suddenly came through the speaker sounding distorted, buzzy, and downright, well, strange.

OK Solberg: 01:56

Guy's you gotta listen to the song yourself. Marty Robbins, Don't Worry. Now normally when something like that happens in a recording studio, someone starts looking for the problem and well, the musicians redo the recording. Grady wanted to give it another take, but others in the studio that day said, hey, wait a minute. That sounds pretty cool. So they kept it.

OK Solberg: 02:24

And that strange distorted sound became part of Marty Robbins Don't Worry. It was an accident but they saved it and it changed rock and roll history. A malfunctioning piece of studio equipment had just created a sound nobody had actually intended to create.

OK Solberg: 02:44

And of course the story doesn't end there. An engineer named Glenn Schottie heard what had happened and became interested in figuring out how to create that distorted sound on purpose and eventually that idea became the Maestro Fuzz Tone, one of the early commercial fuzz effects.

OK Solberg: 03:06

And a few years later well in 1965 Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones used the Maestro fuzz tone on his famous guitar riff of I Can't Get No Satisfaction. The fuzz sound was originally intended as something of a guide for a horn part, but the band heard it and decided that buzzing, that distorted guitar sound was worth keeping, so they kept it.

OK Solberg: 03:35

And the rest, well, like they say, that's music history. Therefore, the next time something goes wrong and you think, well, that didn't turn out the way I planned, don't be too quick to throw it away. You might have just invented something great. and like And I said, I just learned that story yesterday and I knew I had to share it with you.

OK Solberg: 03:56

For those of you listening over the Internet, I'll include the Marty Robbins song Don't Worry at the bottom. You can click on it and hear it and you can easily hear the accident about 1:28 seconds into the song and it lasts long enough you'll definitely hear it.

OK Solberg: 04:13

For the rest of you, well just pull up the song on YouTube it's worth hearing. and it's so much more meaningful when you understand what happened, well, was an accident. What about that then?

OK Solberg: 04:27

I'll close with a bible verse. Ecclesiastes 3:11 He hath made everything beautiful in his time. Ecclesiastes 3:11. Well, I'm telling you, that accidental sound sounds pretty beautiful to me.

OK Solberg: 04:45

So until next time, as you go out there, remember now, don't be bitter.