Danny Gatton: ‘He’ll have you for lunch. He could do anything the other guy could do—and do it better.’ –Les Paul

By David McGee

LIVE AT THE HOLIDAY INN

Danny Gatton and Funhouse

Gress Records (released August 29, 2025)

To those familiar with the late Danny Gatton’s extraordinary guitar mastery, let’s leave it at the word of another extraordinary guitar master, Les Paul, as featured in a new Virginia Quesada-directed documentary on Gatton. In his succinct style, Paul says of Gatton: “He’ll have you for lunch. He could do anything the other guy could do—and do it better.”

For those unfamiliar with Gatton’s artistry, there are many good places to start, beginning with his 1975 debut album, American Music, but the most recent is the release of Live at the Holiday Inn, recorded during a 1987 brunch show at the Tyson’s Corner (VA) Holiday Inn. Gatton’s Funhouse lineup featured drummer Barry Hart, bassist John Previti, and Chris Battistone on trumpet. And those new to the Gatton legend should take full advantage of this album’s added-value component, namely the super in-depth liner notes by award winning music writer Dan Forte, himself an exceptional guitarist with a depth of knowledge about music history to rival his friend Gatton’s. So for a quick summary introduction to Gatton’s breadth and depth, chew on this from Forte’s informed essay:

He played in Top 40 and rockabilly bands from age 12 and got into jazz, especially Wes Montgomery, in ’63 around age 18. He gravitated to organ trios, citing older bandmate Dick Heintze, who had almost savant abilities, like knowing how fast a car was going by the sound of the tires on the pavement.

He said at 13 he was playing Les Paul tunes and Jimmy Bryant solos. Detecting a mixture of shock and speculation on my face, he declared, “I have the tapes.”

‘Bésame Mucho,’  Danny Gatton with Funhouse—John Previti (bass), Barry Hart (drums), Chris Battistone (trumpet)—live at the Holiday Inn, September 27, 1987. Video shot by Kinloch Nelson.

For content it should be noted how fully he absorbed and understood the wide world of his initial influences. His Funhouse bandmate John Previti, speaking of the Holiday Inn gig captured here, showcasing more of Gatton’s jazz style, told Forte: “I’m appreciating that people are getting to hear this side of what Danny did. Of course, the rockabilly stuff, he was untouchable, but he had that other side. He had so much stuff locked in; you would see him remember things, and it would start coming out in his playing. It was really astonishing.”

So what will you hear on this invaluable document? First, you’ll likely be impressed by fluid, precise picking and the rich tone he elicits from his 1954 Gibson hollow body ES-295 guitar (Scotty Moore’s preferred model at the time he backed Elvis on the King’s first Sun sessions) ; beyond this, perhaps the scintillating detours he makes in improvising on the songs’ original melody—check out the winding, dangerous, multi-stylistic and tonal curves of his fleet-fingered soloing on a near-nine-minute barn burning encounter with “Secret Love,” for which Mr. Forte offers a sublime explanation: “So did Danny occasionally cross the line of good taste? Of course! He’d showboat–shred, to use contemporary parlance. But that was part of the fun. Sometimes he’d run over the line, back up, and run over it again.” It should be noted, on this particular cut drummer Hart is a powerhouse of percussion in driving the whole enterprise to the finish line, and trumpeter Previiti comes in for a rousing solo in the stretch run.

Another Kinloch Nelson video from Danny Gatton’s Holiday Inn gig in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, September 27, 1987.

The gems herein are multitudinous but include: “Besame Mucho,” sounding less like the original bolero evergreen and even less like familiar pop versions by the Coasters (a minor hit for the group in 1960), Dean Martin (1962 album cut), and/or The Beatles (Let It Be and various anthologies now) than a cool jazz workout inspired, as Mr. Forte notes, by Wes Montgomery’s version on his 1963 Boss Guitar album, with Previti stepping in adding a rather heated trumpet solo where Montgomery’s organist, Melvin Rhyne, contributed a frisky, lyrical take on the melody in the Jimmy Smith mold; a favorite here is “One for Lenny,” Gatton’s moody homage to a fellow six-string wizard, Lenny Breau, with whom he shared an affinity for seamlessly blending multiple stylistic references, with Previti adding swinging ambience to the proceedings when Gatton lays back, adding more understated embroidery in the form of bass string runs, and repeated cascading runs as the song winds down; and a furious, album closing dash through Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the A Train” that comes at you faster than the legendary A train itself—and is a smoother ride to boot—but will leave a listener limp from the energy precision, and urgency of an all-but-unclassifiable Gatton solo leading the way that must have pushed drummer Hart’s stamina to the very edge of its limit, and one can only imagine how it affected the noon brunchers’ digestive process. From Charlie Christian’s Benny Goodman era, “A Smooth One” is a tuneful romp through the tonal beauty of the ES-295 with Previti’s spotlight trumpet solo up front adding a carefree ambience to the mood before Gatton returns to take the song in multiple harmonic and textural directions and (possibly) slyly dropping in fleeting pop and country quotes before a jaw dropping speed-picked sortie about three-quarters of the way through before turning down the heat a tad (listen closely for what sounds like a couple of bars of boogie-woogie in here) to bring the exercise home.

From 1992, Danny Gatton scorches an early Elvis medley of ‘Mystery Train,’ ‘My Baby Left Me,’ and ‘That’s All Right, Mama.’  Posted on YouTube by GretschTelecaster. Hold on for dear life!

From American Music Shop, 1991, ‘Liza Jane,’ featuring Vince Gill (vocals, guitar) with Danny Gatton and Albert Lee on guitars, Pete Wasner on keys, Mark O’Connor on fiddle.

By all accounts, Gatton appreciated but was too worldly to take seriously the accolades coming his way. To Mr. Forte he summarized his attitude towards all acclaim, to wit: “Once you reach the top of the tree, there’s a lot of leaves up there. There is no ‘best’ of anything.” Of his own favorite Gatton quote, Mr. Forte cites the guitarist’s answer to another journalist’s query as to what he wanted fans to get from his music. As Mr. Forte puts it, “The man with a zillion notes had two words: ‘Good bumps.’”

Job done.

Long suffering from depression, on October 4, 1994, Danny Gatton was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Newburg, Maryland.