David McLean’s Skinny Devil Music Labs, now celebrating its twenty-fifth year, has helped shape Lexington’s sound for decades. Undermain contributing writer David T. Miller sat down with the guitarist, songwriter and producer to reflect on McLean’s journey, SDML’s growth and Kentucky’s deep well of musical talent.

Miller: Has Kentucky always been your home?
 

McLean: I was born in San Antonio but am an army brat, so I’ve lived all over — D.C., Minneapolis, St. Louis and a lot of military bases. But I’ve been in Kentucky all my adult life, first in Lexington and then Winchester and Richmond briefly before coming back to Lexington around 2000.

Miller: What brought you here?

McLean: I was in bands and then began teaching guitar and working in recording studios. In the nineties I moved out of live performance and touring and settled in Central Kentucky to focus on things like soundtracks and commercial jingles.

Miller: Do you come from a musical family?

McLean: Yes, very. My dad passed up a music scholarship to go into the military. He was a sax and clarinet player primarily but did a little bit of piano. My mom was a music major at Tift College in Georgia before switching to become an English major. If I start talking about Gilgamesh and Greek myth and Dante's “Inferno,” we can put that at my mom's doorstep.

Miller: What’s your earliest musical memory?

McLean: I think it was “Peter and the Wolf,” which I'm guessing was the Leonard Bernstein recording. The first time I think I saw anything like rock music was sitting with my grandparents at five or six years old and David Bowie came on the television doing his song “Space Oddity.” This was, I think, 1969. They were horrified but I was hooked!

Miller: Why “Skinny Devil Music Labs”?

McLean: I had a good laugh years ago when a friend called me a “skinny devil” and I just grabbed that when I was trying to think up a name for the organization I was setting up for all the things I was working on.

Miller: You’ve built Skinny Devil Music Labs into a nationally known guitar instruction program, which organizations such as the YMCA have adopted as a model. How did that happen?

McLean: I had been teaching at the YMCA of Central Kentucky. They were really big in doing some arts programming at the time, primarily under Dave Peterson. He recruited lots of talent not just in music but for dance, art, all sorts of things. The guitar program started small, but we built it up to the point that if you were in Delaware and wanted to start a guitar program you would call us, and we would help get it set up. And we ended up getting recognition from the Gibson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of Gibson guitars.

Miller: Why did you need a system for teaching guitar? 

McLean: Once you're teaching groups you realize how important it is to have a system. Paulie Felice and JD Wright came on board and went over everything in the curriculum with a fine-tooth comb from their playing and teaching experience. The system is a hundred times better now than it was when I was doing it alone. 

Miller: Giving away free lessons and even guitars seems an odd business model. 

McLean: Michael Johnathon of Woodsongs Old-Time Radio Hour does this whole thing about the free music model, or consider Ram Samudrala’s free music philosophy. It’s not always about the bottom line, it's about getting music education — quality education — to people who want it, whether they can afford it or not.

Miller: The SDML model seems to be that no one should be discouraged from learning guitar just because they don't have a decent instrument. 

McLean: We usually have a lot of donations of guitars and are very seldom short on instruments to hand out to people in need. Willis Music, which hosts many of our lessons and recitals, has been very generous, as has the community at large.

Miller: You’re taking the chance that someone really wants to learn to play.

McLean: I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing if people hadn't given me opportunities and trusted me. They handed me the key to their half-million-dollar studio and said, Don't mess it up. (laughs) Or Kathy Currier at Currier’s Music World in Richmond saying, I want you to come teach here, I've already cleared a room for you. I was given a lot of opportunities when I hadn't earned them. People were very generous and that's allowed me to have a career. 

Miller: Can anyone learn to play guitar? 

McLean: Yes, they can learn, that’s the short answer. It will be easier for some than others. Some find after trying guitar that they’d rather try drums or the piano. But guitar is great because all you have to reach is a minimum level of confidence to have a skill you can enjoy the rest of your life. 

Miller: Why should anyone learn to play?

McLean: Playing and studying music have to be good for the brain. You’re engaging gross motor skills and fine motor skills and different networks in your brain to process musical information. But I tend to think of it as art for the sake of art rather than because it helps you with algebra. What’s that old adage about three chords and the truth?

Miller: Have any SDML students gone on to music careers?

McLean: I could name so many! I'm really proud of all our students because their goals might be just to strum campfire songs, but others have professional aspirations and we’ve been able to help them along. Some are playing or teaching music for a living, some are university professors of guitar, some are on the road as working musicians. Some have development deals with record companies. And on and on. It’s fabulous to see them going out into the world playing all different styles of music in education, performance, recording or what have you.

Miller: You helped originate and still help run the Lexington Music Awards, celebrating the musicians who make the city and region such a vibrant musical hub.

McLean: Yes, we just completed our 11th year and our first year at Singletary Center for the Arts on the University of Kentucky's campus, a beautiful theater. We’d been in the Lyric Theater for ten years prior to that. My original plan was to just get the thing off the ground and do it for a few years and pass it off to a nonprofit or something, but it took on a life of its own. We’re very fortunate that Angelee Feltner has come on board and is taking it to the next level much better than I could have on my own. 

Miller: Why do you call Lexington a great town for music? 

McLean: If there's not much going on in a particular musical style, just look across the street and something else is just exploding. Look at the local punk rock world over the years and then turn around and see, just for example, the jazz world. Jim Campbell can walk into Kroger and maybe nobody knows who he is but he's a huge figure in the percussion world. Or saxophonist Dr. Miles Osland at UK, or pianist Raleigh Dailey, and that’s just in more or less a single genre. 

Miller: It seems as if there’s a little bit — or a lot — of everything here.

McLean: Yes, and with older music there’s Ron Pen, who’s retired now, or the traditional music center at Morehead State University, and I could go on and on in many different genres until tomorrow and we wouldn’t have gotten even fifty miles out of Lexington!

Miller: What do you hope the next 25 years hold for Skinny Devil Music Labs?

McLean: The next 25 years? Wow. In the next 25 months I’d like to see the music awards move to the big hall at Singletary and the scholarship plan launched, a few teachers trained and out in the world fully engaged and employed, my personal album projects completed and released and more. But 25 years? I'd like for all of it to have completely outgrown me and for my kids, grandkids and great grandkids — as well as students and anyone who has been affected by our work — to be able to look at what we've done and smile.

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Read more about SDML and David McLean on his blog. McLean performs and hosts open mics the first Friday and second Sunday of each month at Goodwood Brewing in Lexington.