“The jazz people were laughing when they saw me at the audition with my Telecaster”: Steve Morse reflects on his early guitar journey
Long before Deep Purple, Kansas, or the Dixie Dregs made him a household name among guitarists, Steve Morse was figuring out how to make music work – on his own terms.
In a new interview with Classic Rock, the guitarist reminisces about his early journey, including the very first time he picked up a guitar.
“[I was] about 10 or 11,” says Morse. “My brother brought home a guitar and was learning the three chords for his first lesson. Maybe I could get lessons too? There were group lessons at our music store for $1.50 each. The store rented me a guitar for $5 a month, a Gibson LG-O acoustic. I was left-handed, but the instructor said, ‘We don’t have any left-handed guitars. Try this’ – a regular right-handed guitar. So that’s the way I learned.”
READ MORE: Don’t hold your breath for a Deep Purple reunion with Steve Morse: “A couple of guys in the band were really glad for me to be gone”
That adaptability would go on to become a hallmark of Morse’s playing – and his career. At 16, Morse was admitted to the University of Miami, one of the only places in the US at the time where one could seriously study guitar. But his arrival didn’t exactly go smoothly.
“The music programme at Miami wasn’t ideal,” Morse recalls. “I was very interested in classical guitar. I wasn’t that interested in the jazz department, because I was playing Jimmy Page songs and weird, teenage angsty music. So I didn’t know how that was going to work out.”
“When I got there I didn’t fit in with the classical people. I wasn’t advanced enough. And the jazz people were laughing when they saw me at the audition with my Telecaster – that wasn’t the right presentation,” he says. “You were supposed to have an acoustic hollow body guitar with a pickup on it, like Wes Montgomery.”
“So they rolled their eyes and said, ‘Put him in the rock ensemble,’ which was really a Latin jazz group. There were only six of us in that programme; guitarists like me that failed the jazz audition. So Miami started off really bad, but being around all those other guitarists, suddenly I could relate to them.”
For Morse, that period also marked a shift away from “pure rock” and toward the eclectic style that would define the Dixie Dregs and his later work.
“During that year I wrote a lot and played with people. We did hybrid music, crossing between jazz and rock, using polychords. I ended up writing and presenting ideas that were closer to what Kansas were doing than to what Jimmy Page was doing,” he says.
Morse also admits that he first felt confident he could make a career as a professional musician when he accepted that the music he loved wasn’t destined to top the charts.
“I thought to myself that the music that I liked was never going to be big or achieve the big numbers, but if I worked hard I was going to be okay,” says the guitarist. “I knew I wasn’t destined to be a rich star [but] I knew I could come up with stuff that people would like to listen to. Although I never could come up with stuff that record companies wanted to listen to!”
“I felt like that people were reachable if I could get in front of them. I said to myself, ‘It’s going to be a modest existence, but it’s going to be possible. I have to work hard and be versatile, be ready to play lots of different kinds of gigs.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”
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