Dave Hole: Slide Guitar, Australian Style

To the mainstream music fan, the name Dave Hole probably doesn’t register. To a number of casual blues fan, his name may be one of those that they may have heard in passing or perhaps have caught a track or two here or there. But to the hard-core blues fan, the name Dave Hole conjures up aural memories of stinging slide guitar that smacks the ears like a runaway freight train. His gritty, down and dirty vocals, punctuated with an amplified, screaming raw slide work can’t help but make the listener sit up and take notice.

Born in England in 1948, Dave Hole and his family relocated to Perth in Western Australia when he was 4 years old. He was turned onto the blues when he first captivated by a friends copy of a Muddy Waters record. He received his first guitar as a gift from his parents when he was 11 years old and set about trying to learn the instrument on his own. Growing discouraged (teachers were a tough commodity to come by in Western Australia at the time), he gave up the instrument for 4 years. He returned to it at the age of 16.

“I spent from about the age of 6 until 11 just pestering my parents to buy me a guitar because everything that I had heard had a guitar in it and it had a big appeal to me when I was a kid,” Hole told George Nergus in a 2004 interview. “So I got my first guitar when I was 11. I played for about a year and then, like a lot of kids, it ended up being stuck under the bed. When I was 16, I more or less rediscovered it at high school with a friend who was forming a band and I got back into it then.”

As he progressed, he began to try and copy the licks of Clapton and Hendrix. But the blues had him hooked.

At that time, blues records were rare in his part of the country but through sheer tenacity and desire, Hole managed to secure the difficult to find records of Skip James, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Blind Lemon Jefferson, and used them to teach himself the blues. He cites his major influences as Robert Johnson and Elmore James.

In what turned out to be a fortuitous incident, Hole broke the little finger on his left hand playing football. While the finger was healing, Hole found that the only way he could continue to play the guitar was to place the slide over his index finger and place the slide over the top of the neck. “Normally you put the slide on the little finger of the left hand … I had a cast on it. So I came up with this idea, just while I was recuperating, of jamming the slide on my index finer and hanging it over the top of the guitar – quite awkward sort of style really. It took about three months before the cast came off.”

When the finger had healed, Hole found that he liked the tone that he was getting playing in his unorthodox fashion and refused to go back to playing the guitar in the ‘normal’ way.

In 1972 Hole returned to England and settled in London where he secured work in a pub band for two years, his first real work as a professional musician. After two years, he returned to Perth where he began to work the Western Australia bar circuit, bringing his brand of scorching slide blues to his hard partying countrymen.

For the next twenty years, Hole and his band, The Short Fuse, paid their dues and built up a strong following in Western Australia. In 1990, over the course of three days, Hole and The Short Fuse recorded their debut album The Short Fuse, (financed and recorded by Hole himself) with the idea of simply selling it directly to their fans at their gigs. On a lark, Hole sent a copy of the disc to the then editor of Guitar Player magazine, the influential Jas Obrecht. Obrecht gave the disc a listen and then offered a glowing review in the magazine saying ‘Magnificent, staggering, almost beyond belief … Utterly Blues Approved … ferocious, fire breathing slide … what more could you ask?’

Obrecht in turn gave the disc to Alligator Records president Bruce Iglauer. Based on the excitement generated by the disc amongst his staff, Iglauer signed Hole to the label and released Short Fuse. Hole was the first non-American to be signed to the label. The disc became a huge seller for Alligator and launched Australian guitarist towards international acclaim.

“In the end, Alligator Records, which is probably the best known, best credentialed blues labels in the world, contacted me. And that was like a dream come true for me because half of my record collection at the time was Alligator. For Alligator Records it was unusual and something of a risk, really, signing someone from the other side of the world. They still haven’t repeated that.”

The tour that followed almost immediately after signing with Alligator was a whirlwind. “We went almost everywhere in America in nine weeks. I think we had two nights off. Nearly killed us, but it was fun. And gradually we started to get a reputation in America. And I followed that with a tour of Europe also. You know, within that first year after the release of the first album I was all over the world.”

Hole and Short Fuse received acclaim in a myriad of reviews in everything from Spin, Audico, Billboard, NY Magazine, The Denver Post and The Chicago Tribune. As his career began to take off, it wasn’t just periodicals that had taken notice. Kirk Hammett, guitarist for heavy metal gods, Metallica, has said that Hole was one of his favorite guitarists. “His side playing kills me …” When Gary Moore, the recently deceased rock/blues genius, heard Hole, he invited him to accompany him on two European tours, each culminating at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

Thirteen albums later, Dave Hole still tours the world 6 months a year and spends the rest of the year back in Perth not far from the home he grew up in a as youth. Hole is a living testament to doing what you love for the right reasons and success will find you in its time. “Originally I thought I was going to be the next big thing, you know, when I was 16, and turned out to be totally wrong. I was 42 when I made my first record.”