GATTON DEAD OF GUNSHOT WOUND
“His family was his uppermost concern,” said bassist John Previti, who started working with Gatton in 1976. Previti had talked with Gatton on Tuesday and said he did not sound at all despondent. “He was unhappy about money problems, and was trying to renovate his house. He was just trying to lead a good life and have a good life for his family.”
In 1991, Gatton signed a seven-album deal with Elektra, his first major label after a half-dozen albums on tiny, independent labels (including one run by his mother, Norma Gatton). He titled the first Elektra album “88 Elmira Street,” after the Anacostia home where he was born and raised, but the album didn’t sell particularly well; neither did its follow-up, “Cruisin’ Deuces,” and the label dropped him.
Gatton admitted once that he had trouble hitting “that commercial nerve,” but he also looked on his situation with understated wry humor. Several years ago, he noted that “I’ve been built up and let down so many times I should change my name to Otis.”
But drummer Dave Elliott, a friend of more than two decades and a former band mate, said he had sensed a low-level depression “since I first knew Danny. He knew what the music business did to him and for him. … But this can’t be blamed on family or the music business — Danny had something much deeper to do something like this. It’s not the blues, it’s depression, and there’s nothing you can do when it gets to that point.”
Brent Gatton said there was no particular incident that might have set his brother along the path he ended up taking. “A whole lot of little things just piled up on him and he just snapped.”
There had been some high points in recent years, including Fender’s manufacturing of the Danny Gatton Signature Guitar, the most expensive custom guitar in its line. Gatton, who had a lifelong passion for cars as deep as the one he had for guitars, traded the original model for a ’34 Ford truck worth $18,000 — and insisted he got the best deal. He was a frequent poll winner — from 19 local WAMMYs (from the Washington Area Music Association) to Guitar Player’s reader’s poll (he was named best country guitarist in 1993 and was a runner-up this year).
But there had been some hard times as well. It would seem that his biggest blow came when he was dropped by Elektra, but Previti says Gatton was “relieved — we’re not pop stars and it was a big load off him.” Gatton recently released a critically acclaimed small-label offering teaming him with jazz organist Joey DeFrancesco and was working on a live recording with his current trio.
Last year, Gatton’s bassist, singer and close friend of more than 20 years, Billy Windsor, died of a heart attack.
Given Gatton’s dislike of traveling, opportunities to work were somewhat limited. “There are just too many gigs that beat you up,” said Previti, noting that Gatton might be willing to work four-day weekends, or two weeks at most, but that he did not want to be away from home for long.
“Danny was always searching for security for his family,” said Gatton’s drummer, Tim Biery. “More than anything on this Earth, he loved Jan and Holly.”
In recent years, Gatton had made moves from being a guitarist’s guitarist to becoming something of an entertainer, but too many people seemed overwhelmed by his skills. As Guitar Player had noted, Gatton was “so stylistically diffuse and so relentlessly virtuosic in styles that are usually mutually exclusive, that it may be off-putting to people to have so much coming at them so quickly.”
“Technically, no one could touch him,” fellow musician John Jennings said yesterday from Nashville, where he was preparing to perform with Mary Chapin Carpenter. “No one. He did things that one shouldn’t be able to do on guitar and he was learning to emote to meet his technique and that’s what so sad, that we won’t get a chance to hear that.”
For someone who had received so much acclaim, Gatton was burdened with a surprising sense of insecurity. When Patrick Day told Gatton about the Arizona gig and the high fee, “Danny couldn’t believe they would pay that ‘just for me.’ He’d tell me he had a hard time even facing the audience: ‘They just look at me and I get nervous.’ ”
“There was no single instrumentalist in any style, on any instrument, that did what he did,” added Previti. “He was in a class by himself — no question, he could do anything he wanted to. Even after all these years, Danny continued to come up with stuff I never heard before, and it was always amazing to me. I never took it for granted.”
Neither did Danny Gatton. He’d been musically intensive since the age of 2, and a virtuoso by 10 (teachers, including the fabled Sophocles Pappas, told his parents lessons were useless because Gatton could hear anything once and play it). Instead, he remained a populist student, listening to the radio and his family’s records, absorbing blues, rockabilly, jazz and western swing, country and other blue-collar-roted music of the ’50s. Gatton always paid homage to the great guitar stylists who originally inspired him and ultimately joined them as inspiration to others. He started playing in bands at 13, graduated from teen clubs to nightclubs and even became, briefly, a hired guitarist in the bands of assorted country and rock-and-roll mini-stars.
But Gatton also retired several times, stopped playing in public and worked in a Waldorf metal shop. Rumor had it that when Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty came out of his long retirement, he offered Gatton the guitar slot in his band. Gatton never called back.
“He was so talented you’d think his whole life would revolve around guitar, but it didn’t,” says Dave Elliott. “He was more of a person than a musician. Danny’s whole approach didn’t have anything to do with being a star — he played for his soul and his guitar. I guess being a regular guy and a musician just doesn’t work.”