Blue Guitar Highway
About this book
This is a musician’s tale: the story of a boy growing up on the Iron Range, playing his guitar at family gatherings, coming of age in the psychedelic seventies, and honing his craft as a pro in Minneapolis, ground zero of American popular music in the mid-eighties. “There is a drop of blood behind every note I play and every word I write,” Paul Metsa says. And it’s easy to believe, as he conducts us on a musical journey across time and country, navigating switchbacks, detours, dead ends, and providing us the occasional glimpse of the promised land on the blue guitar highway.
His account captures the thrill of the Twin Cities when acts like the Replacements, Husker Dü, and Prince were remaking pop music. It takes us right onto the stages he shared with stars like Billy Bragg, Pete Seeger, and Bruce Springsteen. And it gives us a close-up, dizzying view of the roller-coaster ride that is the professional musician’s life, played out against the polarizing politics and intimate history of the past few decades of American culture. Written with a songwriter’s sense of detail and ear for poetry, Paul Metsa’s book conveys all the sweet absurdity, dry humor, and passion for the language of music that has made his story sing.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Contents
- Foreword: A Tough Gig, but It Beats Working
- Guitar Fools
- A Boy and His Guitar
- Buckshot in Short Pants
- Vaseline Machine Gun
- Cry of the Muskrat
- Cats Under the Stars
- One More Saturday Night
- Franklin Avenue
- Electric High Heels
- Party to a Crime
- Robots on Death Row
- Living in a House of Cards
- Whistling Past the Graveyard
- Ferris Wheels on the Farm
- City of Angels
- Mississippi Farewell
- No Money Down
- Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
- Ghosts of Woody Guthrie
- Martini Gulch
- White Boys Lost in the Blues
- From Russia with Love
- Key to the Highway
- Sisu
- Texas in the Twilight Zone
- Slings and Arrows
- Barbeque and Blues
- Iko-Iko
- Slow Justice
- Stars Over the Prairie
- Fireworks on the Fourth of July
- Acknowledgments
- Discography
- Concert Appearances
