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Steve "The Deacon" Hunter was born in 1948 in Decatur, Illinois, starting his professional career as a member of
Mitch Ryder's
Detroit in 1971, his guitar sound redesigning the
Lou Reed classic "Rock & Roll," creating a cult hit and giving
Ryder an underground cachet that the '60s blue-eyed soul singer would utilize decades after the group's self-titled Paramount album Detroit was released. One of
Hunter's earliest musical recollections was sitting on his dad's lap while his father worked the pedals on a pump organ owned by young
Steve's grandparents, playing the keyboard and working out melodies the lad had heard. This was before he went to kindergarten. Even at a young age he could tell if tempos were off or if people were singing off-key. For
Hunter, music was always there, always a part of him -- a big old Zenith console radio/turntable would keep the future guitarist transfixed, the patterns on the labels he calls "sort of the first music video."
At the age of 12 he discovered artists who began shaping his understanding and appreciation for the guitar.
The Ventures and
Chet Atkins had a huge influence on him, as did
Duane Eddy, those influences changing as he got more into the instrument and performers like
Jimi Hendrix,
Jeff Beck,
Jimmy Page, and
Eric Clapton started making their appearances on the world stage. He learned several
Ventures tunes as well as
Duane Eddy's work, but it was the versatility of
Chet Atkins and his distinctive style that amazed
Hunter. "That became a very important thing to me. Also, I loved his touch on the guitar. The notes coming out of the guitar always sounded like velvet. I think he was the consummate musician."
Hunter's first band to play in front of an audience was his high-school group the Weejuns, the name coming from a loafer type of shoe. From there it was to a rock and soul group in Decatur called the Light Brigade, the Hammond B-3 player being
Ron Stockert, eventually of the Grammy-winning band
Rufus & Chaka Khan. One of
Hunter's favorite early groups, the Light Brigade, played quite a few five-set-a-night gigs -- a great learning experience for him. He started taking lap steel guitar lessons when he was eight and got into "regular" guitar at 12 or so. The lap steel training went on for about five years, though he picked up the rest of his guitar knowledge all on his own.
Hunter listened and learned from a lot of records, including blues albums from artists like
B.B. King,
Albert King, and
Michael Bloomfield.
Eventual
Ted Nugent bassist
John Sauter, a friend of
Hunter's, was playing with
Mitch Ryder while
Hunter was on the road with the Light Brigade. The group
Detroit was looking for a guitar player and
Sauter thought
Hunter should come up to the city for the audition. Grabbing his guitar, he drove the seven hours to Detroit from Decatur. The rehearsal was in an old abandoned and condemned building in downtown Detroit on Cass Avenue, perhaps the old offices of Creem magazine, as publisher Barry Cramer was the group's original manager. When
Hunter walked into the rehearsal room a Marshall half-stack awaited him -- and this was the first time he had ever seen one. The group jammed on
Cream tunes, and
Hunter of course got the gig, while concluding that the other players were awesome. As key as this epiphany was, another component that would figure into his huge success was meeting producer extraordinaire
Bob Ezrin.
Hunter and
Ezrin took an immediate liking to one another,
Hunter appreciating the way
Ezrin put music together. The
Detroit with
Mitch Ryder band toured, their April 1, 1972, "Get Out the Vote" political performance on a bill with
the Spencer Davis Group remaining an important moment in their history. By this time, activist
John Sinclair had taken over management of the group from Cramer,
Sinclair's eight-page liner notes for the CD Get Out the Vote: Live at the Hill Auditorium April 1, 1972 provided much insight.
By the summer of 1972, the
Detroit band dissolved, though by the next year
Hunter and
Ezrin would be at work on a masterpiece by
Lou Reed, the
Berlin album. On September 1, 1973,
Hunter appeared on-stage with
Dick Wagner, in the first show of the tour that would promote the
Berlin disc and culminate in the release of the
Rock n Roll Animal album. As
David Bowie and
Mott the Hoople would open their concerts with mood music, the
Steve Hunter/
Dick Wagner dynamic guitar duo took it a step further. Check out "Eldorado Street" on
Hunter's 1977 album,
Swept Away, to see if you hear passages from "Intro," the sound that launched thousands of guitarists into a new way of conducting business.
Hunter says it wasn't a conscious effort to infuse the previous "Intro" into "Eldorado Street," but it is good to have a point of reference to see how an artist's craft was evolving. Each night of the tour, the show would open with that
Hunter instrumental, "Intro," morphing slightly from show to show. Even
John Cougar Mellencamp got into the act, nicking the riffs from
Hunter's "Intro" and
Reed's "Sweet Jane" for his "I Need a Lover" on 1978's
A Biography LP.
Where
Mick Ronson and
Mick Ralphs were supplemented by their respective frontmen's acoustic guitars in
Bowie and
Mott the Hoople, respectively,
Reed now had a two-pronged guitar assault as credible as
Keith Richards and
Mick Taylor from the golden era of
the Rolling Stones. As they were reissuing compositions by
the Velvet Underground, music that had already influenced major artists from
Roxy Music to
Bowie,
Mott, and even
the Stones (just listen to the grunge version of "Gimme Shelter" on the album Live'r Than You'll Ever Be to see
Reed's influence on
Keith Richards), this redesigning of a major catalog would have profound ramifications behind the scenes in the music world. It would have even more of an impact on artists like
John Cougar,
Pat Benatar by way of
Cougar, and most notably,
Alice Cooper. Had
Steve Hunter and
Dick Wagner remained with
Lou Reed for the rest of that artist's first stint with RCA Records, how would
Sally Can't Dance and
Coney Island Baby have sounded?
As
Bob Ezrin returned to his work with
Alice Cooper for the
Welcome to My Nightmare album and tour,
Lou Reed fans followed and watched their guitar heroes put their magical sound into
Cooper's work.
Hunter toured with
Alice every year over the next four tours (1975-1978), moving on to the 1979
Bette Midler hit film The Rose and tours with
Peter Gabriel,
Meat Loaf, the Night of the Guitar 1988-1989 European world tour,
Tracy Chapman (1996-2000), and lots more in between. A touch of ennui and musical introspection in the '80s was overcome when
Hunter found the man who wrote Chord Chemistry, the late
Ted Greene.
Hunter felt
Greene was "a complete genius as a teacher and player";
Hunter felt he was the most knowledgeable musician and guitarist he has ever met in his entire life, an innovator who
Hunter considers an important influence in his career.
Hunter released two solo albums,
Swept Away in 1977 and The Deacon in 1987, and has played on recordings by
David Lee Roth,
Yvonne Elliman,
Leslie West,
Jack Bruce, and many others. He reunited with
Wagner for some shows in Saginaw, Michigan, in the new millennium, while earlier '70s tracks that members of the
Rock n Roll Animal band recorded with
Buzzy Linhart were finally released on that artist's 2006 CD, Studio. Bringing things full circle,
Hunter appeared in
Lou Reed and
Bob Ezrin's stage production of the
Berlin album with performances at New York's Arts at St. Ann's in December 2006 and dates in Sydney, Australia, in January 2007.
Following this production,
Hunter became quite active. Over the next few years, he played with both
Lou Reed and
Alice Cooper, and appeared on
Glen Campbell's 2011 album
Ghost on the Canvas. In 2008, he released two albums: Hymns for Guitar and Short Stories. He concentrated on the blues on 2013's The Manhattan Blues Project, which had cameos from
Joe Perry,
Joe Satriani,
Johnny Depp, and
Marty Friedman. A concert album, Tone Poems Live, appeared in 2014, followed by the studio set Before the Lights Go Out in 2017. ~ Joe Viglione