As a listener, Rick Godfrey never paid much attention to what the bass guitar was doing. Even after taking up the instrument and decades after that he says, “one reason I like being a bass player is people don’t pay attention to me either.”
Godfrey isn’t doing an aw shucks act. He’s genuinely humble and spotlight averse.
While Godfrey's bass technique may not be Jack Bruce active or Bootsy Collins flashy, his heartfelt tasteful playing is essential to one of Huntsville's all-time bands, Microwave Dave & The Nukes.
Nukes drummer James Irvin says, "There's so many bass players out there who want to be guitar players or they are guitar players. Even though Rick was a guitar player first, he treats bass the way it should be treated, the glue that holds everything together."
Godfrey's concision allows the band's singer/guitarist "Microwave" Dave Gallaher to chase down six-string voodoo. And gives Irvin space for well-placed, electric-math drum rolls. "Dave wouldn't be able to play the way he plays if Rick was really busy," Irvin says. "That makes a big difference."
It all started during lunchbreaks. In 1987, Gallaher - a Chicago-born, Texas-raised, Berklee-School-of-Music-honed musician who’d played in R&B and rock bands from Atlanta to Vietnam - walked into Godfrey’s Huntsville stained glass and woodworking shop. Gallaher was looking for a day job. Upon entering Godfrey’s shop, located on Bob Wallace Avenue, he heard a Robert Cray cassette playing on the shop’s stereo. “I thought ‘Ah, here’s someone else who likes the blues. Alright,’” Gallaher says. Godfrey hired Gallaher to work fulltime in the shop. There, they made everything from ornate doors to church stained glass to beauty-shop workstations.
A couple years in, Gallaher was yearning to form a blues band. Three or four local drummers were interested, but he couldn’t find a bassist. “Every bass player in town was booked way up with work, plus most of them wanted to play much fancier bass than I wanted for the blues,” Gallaher says. “You know, the guys playing the more funky, pop and snap stuff that was current back then in the late ’80s.”
Remember, this was a time when approximately a million bassists doing bad versions of Flea’s Red Hot Chili Peppers licks threatened to ruin bass forever.
A fan of folk-oriented artists likes of Leo Kottke, Godfrey liked to play acoustic guitar around the shop. As Gallaher continued to search for a bassist, one day Godfrey asked, "Do you think you could show me the bass parts and I could try to do them? No strings attached. If it doesn’t work it doesn’t work." Gallaher agreed. During breaks at the shop, they'd play along to a drum machine, to get the basics together. "That was the beginning of the band, Rick's enthusiasm about it, right there," Gallaher says. Mike Alexander, who's since passed away, was brought in as The Nukes' first drummer.
Godfrey had never been in a band before. Yet once The Nukes started playing out - they debuted in 1989 at public radio station WLRH - Gallaher says, “Our popularity surged right off the bat because everybody was so into the blues at that time, primarily because of Stevie Ray Vaughan.”
With his acoustic background, Godfrey was a fan of country-blues artists like Mississippi John Hurt. As a teenager in the late ’60s, he’d become entranced by Howlin’ Wolf’s electric urban sounds. Later, in the ’70s when other dudes his age were rocking out to Kiss, Godfrey was drawn to the Allman Brothers’ progressive blues. He started out attending Lee High School but switched to Huntsville High once zoning changed. “Huntsville High had more hippie chicks,” Godfrey explains with a laugh. As a teen, he sported a waist-length ponytail. On a recent afternoon during this interview, Godfrey’s wearing a flat-cap, circular eyeglasses, beard, green shirt, blue jeans and sneakers. As longtime Nukes fans will attest, his physical appearance hasn’t changed much since the days when TV’s “The Golden Girls” was still in production.
Godfrey grew up in Huntsville, son of Roy Godfrey, an aerospace engineer on Redstone and Saturn rockets and, later, the Space Shuttle program. The Godfreys lived in a home on Monte Sano Mountain. Rick says many of their neighbors were families of German aerospace pioneers NASA brought to Huntsville to build the U.S. space program. "When we played Army, we had real Germans," he says with a smile.
Growing up Godfrey also spent a lot of time in the garage, holding the flashlight for Dad. As a hobby, Roy Godfrey liked to fix anything that broken around the house as well as build projects ranging from boats to telescopes from the ground up. Rick absorbed the ingenuity.
Decades later, as The Nukes were starting, Gallaher watched Godfrey play rack harmonica - using a metal holder slung around the neck, for hands-free playing - while also strumming acoustic. Bob Dylan popularized this technique. Gallaher asked Godfrey if he thought he could play harmonica and bass simultaneously. Godfrey took a harmonica and used a radiator clamp to attach a bullet microphone, the type favored by many blues players, to the rack, along with a harmonica. That worked OK. But it sounded more folk than blues, missing the tone from cupping one’s hands around the mic and harmonica. Godfrey got the idea to alter a toy football and add that to the contraption. Sure enough, it did the trick. He’s been using it ever since. Songs that Godfrey doubles on harmonica became some of Gallaher’s favorite to perform. Covers of Memphis Minnie’s “When The Levee Breaks” and Muddy Water’s “Mannish Boy,” as well as one of The Nukes’ signature studio cuts “Alabama Saturday Night,” adapted from a Billy C. Farlow song.
"Rick's the only person I've ever know who could play bass and harmonica at the same time," Gallaher says, "because it's not like strumming the guitar. You've got to have your mind working in two different directions at the same time. There's no way I could do it."
A photo of Microwave Dave & The Nukes' Rick Godfrey playing bass and harmonica simultaneously. (Courtesy Dennis Keim)
The tuning of his bass is another quiet smart Godfrey innovation. Early on with The Nukes, he played a five-string Steinberger type bass - a no-headstock, very ’80s design. He relished the five-string’s extra low-end. But after playing a standard Fender Telecaster four-string bass he found the Fender’s tone vastly superior. Godfrey decided to put the low four strings from a five-string bass string set on the Fender, so instead of a four-string tuning of, low to high, E-A-D-G, Godfrey’s was tuned to B-E-A-D.
“Somebody from a string company told him it was ‘metallurgically impossible,’” Gallaher says. “But Rick made it work, so since then we’ve always called his bass style metallurgically impossible.”
The tuning doesn't work for everyone though. During one of The Nukes yearly sojourns to Daytona, Fla.'s Bike Week playing for a party-hard throng of motorcycle enthusiasts, Lynyrd Skynyrd bassist Leon Wilkeson showed up during a set. This was maybe 1998. Wilkeson was heavily buzzed. Still his handlers pushed to have him sit-in with The Nukes. Since Wilkeson hadn't brought a bass with him, he'd have to use Godfrey's, so Gallaher was concerned the tuning would trip Wilkeson up. The handlers cussed Gallaher out, saying of course Wilkeson could play any bass. So Wilkeson strapped on Godfrey's bass and at Wilkeson's suggestion The Nukes launched into a cover of Skynyrd's Southern rock anthem "Sweet Home Alabama." It did not go well. "He was one string off the whole song," Godfrey recalls. "It was like the Chinese version."
Microwave Dave & The Nukes have made their mark in Huntsville and beyond. Hot shows at now-defunct local spots like the Kaffeeklatsch Bar. A hit 1995 cover of Bo Diddley tune “Road Runner.” European tours. A string of respected albums, including recordings made with departed Allman Brothers producer and engineer Johnny Sandlin. Accolades from blues magazines. Props from best-selling horror-novelist Stephen King in Entertainment Weekly.
Ask Godfrey about top Nukes moments though, he talks about performances the band's done in unorthodox places. Elementary schools. Tuscaloosa psychiatric facility Bryce Hospital. The Arc organization serving special needs children.
"Kids, especially these days, what they know about music is what they see on their telephone," Godfrey says, "so all the dancing and lip-synching. They don't really connect that with real people making music on real instruments. But when you put that right in front of their face, especially in an energetic way, those kids just get right in there with you. When you see them light up, see a cafeteria full of first through fifth graders, their teachers and the principal all out there dancing, it's just a neat thing to be part of." Of performing at Bryce and for Arc, he says, "You can reach people through music that you can't always reach through medicine and therapy."
The school performances factored in the 2015 creation of Microwave Dave Day, an annual all-local music festival in Gallaher’s honor raising funds for the Microwave Dave Music Education Foundation, which brings more local artists to schools. But how can an archaic music form grab listeners in an era dominated by shiny, laptop-made pop? “Because the blues comes from an emotional spot,” Godfrey says. “It relies more on the content, message and feeling of the song, and that goes into the playing too.”
Godfrey considers The Nukes most recent album, 2011′s “Last Time I Saw You,” their tops, due to the range of material and Gallaher’s nifty use of cigar-box guitars on the recordings. He cites raucous Magic-Sam-meets-The-Who cut “All Nite Boogie” and simmering ballad “The Worst Thing,” as go-to tracks. Live, he’s partial to the trio’s full-band cover of Allmans acoustic instrumental “Little Martha.” In 30 years as a band, Godfrey’s only had to miss shows during two instances: when his father-in-law died and when Godfrey needed heart surgery. Gallaher says the bassist possess “a genius level of common sense. In all these years I’ve known the guy, I think I’ve seen him angry twice, maybe three times.”
During The Nukes first 15 years, four drummers made their way through the band. Godfrey says things finally clicked in 2004 when James Irvin, just 22 at the time, joined the group. "We always had our moments through the years but when James got with us we've been able to really kick ass, every song every night consistently." Irvin still recalls that first time hitting the road with The Nukes, his first touring work with any band. "Rick was driving the late-shift and I was riding shotgun and he just really went out of his way to make me feel at home," Irvin says.
Microwave Dave & The Nukes, from left: Rick Godfrey, James Irvin and Dave Gallaher. (Courtesy Dennis Keim)
Microwave & The Nukes started out a straight-up blues band. But the band's sound is expanding significantly. Irvin, also an exciting singer/guitarist working on a new solo album, is a big fan of Nirvana, The Cars and Elvis Costello and brings pow in the right places. Gallaher and Godfrey in turn hipped Irvin to Ry Cooder's eccentric roots music. Irvin was surprised to learn Gallaher was a fan of '80s ultra-band The Police, and The Nukes now do a couple Police covers. "People still refer to us as a blues band," Godfrey says, "and we still play a lot of blues and have a blues approach to a lot of other stuff, but now we're just a band. We play anything from Captain Beefheart to Jethro Tull."
Long after trends like grunge, gangsta rap and rap rock have faded, the joyous sounding Nukes keep rolling. So how does a working band like this do 30 years and not splinter from petty grudges or inevitable “creative differences”? “It’s really simple,” Godfrey says. “So many musicians, it’s like they’ve got to have a separate trailer to haul their egos around. We have a lot of pride in what we do and to do it well, but it’s coming from the heart instead of the ego. You’re not posing. You’re there to make some real music and make people feel good and forget about their troubles for a little while.”
At this point a busy month for The Nukes is 20 gigs, Godfrey says. A typical one, around 12. Outside of music, Godfrey enjoys refurbishing the Jones Valley area home he shares with wife Martha Baker, a psychologist, who he calls, “my best friend and biggest blessing in my life.”
Once while traversing a Rocky Mountain road during a string of Colorado gigs around 2001, the band’s van’s power-steering pump went out. It was a harrowing cliff-side drive. Eventually they pulled into an AutoZone parking lot. The store didn’t have the replacement part they needed. Godfrey proceeded to determine what parts he’d need to improvise a power-steering pump and sent Gallaher inside AutoZone to purchase them. Now, almost 20 years later, that pump is still in the van, parked in Gallaher’s yard with 656,000 miles on it.
Microwave Dave & The Nukes will perform at Microwave Dave Day 2019, to be held June 30 on Washington Street downtown, between Clinton and Holmes avenues. To attend, a $10 donation to the Microwave Dave Music Education Foundation is suggested. Main stage music schedule: 3:10 p.m. Tyrone Douglas; 3:50 p.m. Brad Edwards; 4:40 p.m. Rob Aldridge & The Proponents; 6 p.m. All Star Jam, part one; 7 p.m. Microwave Dave Day Awards; 7:30 p.m. All Star Jam, part two; 8:45 p.m. Microwave Dave & The Nukes. Additional info at microwavedaveday.com.
