Big Heart Mojo Medicine Bottle Guitar Slide    Item #: BIG MOJO 

About Big Heart Slide
It all began in 1990 during a marathon music party out in the Mojave desert.

The party was thrown at Mad Jack's ranch/junkyard where Mad Jack maintained a bunkhouse nicely equipped with drum sets, a Hammond B3, bunches of amps and a PA. All this stuff was hobbled together from leftovers by Mad Jack and his late night technical associates. But everything worked, more or less, so we just kept playing for 3 days.

The party went on day and night, for about 54 hours, from Friday evening through Oh-dark thirty Monday morning. Afterward, my friend T-Berd and I drove a few miles across the desert along with about a dozen other spent musicians to fall out at her High Desert Retreat for Wayward Musicians. We distributed ourselves from living room floors to garage rooftops and various out buildings, and crashed into the arms of Morpheus snoring in fourteen part cacophony. When consciousness returned to me, it was on low.

Half a dozen of us were stretched out all over Ms.T-Berd's front room. I could see, but that was as far as it went. As a matter of fact, it was quite a while before I tumbled to the idea that there might be an "I" attached to my eye, so to speak. Anyway, what my eyeball was pointed at for about ten or fifteen minutes was the bottomside view of a geegaw cabinet with glass shelves where Ms. T-Berd kept her various treasures, desert-found harmonicas, lizard bones and antique pliers. What my eye was focused on, though, was a clear plastic, heart-shaped bud vase with a dried up rose in it.

Since I couldn't move my eyes, or anything else, for a real long time I lay there looking at this bud vase with no more thoughts than a surveillance camera at a 7-11.

After a few minutes an idea drifted up against my mind like a row boat bumping up against a pier piling. The thought was, "You know, that bud vase might make an interesting guitar slide." Nothing else was going on inside my brain for many minutes so when I finally attained full access to my body I disengaged myself from T-Berd's carpet of musicians, opened the geegaw cabinet, grabbed the bud vase and took it out to the garage. I picked up a saw from the tool heap and hacked off both ends of the bud vase and reamed out the sharp edge inside. Then I grabbed a guitar, tuned it to G and played "Rollin' and Tumblin'" 'til the whole house woke up.

I used that bud vase for a couple of years. What I really liked about it was the fat sound I got when I used the wide arc of the heart. I could get as good a sound with that plastic slide as my friends were able to get using metal or glass and lots better than the Pyrex tubes that were available at the time.

Then in '92 the design company I was running with my partner, Shelly Lutgen, was pretty hard hit by the recession. Our clients were hurting and they passed the feeling along to us. So we looked in our "Inventions" file for something we could ride through the storm and, after throwing out the ones that required exotic materials like Nonobtainium, significant forays into future technologies or over a thousand bucks in tooling, I was again gazing at the bud vase.

Since there was a NAMM (National Association of Music merchants) trade show scheduled only a few miles from our design studio, we decided to get a booth, make a bunch of heart shaped slides, and see what happens. The BigHeart Slide Company was born. The first version of the BigHeart Slide was in aluminum and it sounded great. While we were choosing anodizing colors, the color samples came in the form of one inch diameter aluminum tubes, which made great slides, so we made a bunch of those, too. We named them Queen Bees because the sound they made was this fantastic, intense BUZZ, and in honor of Ms. T-Berd, who at the time was billing herself as the QueenBee (or the Queen-2-Bee, depending on her mood and sense of ascension).

Before we got to the show we started thinking that since the only product we were going to make was guitar slides, maybe we should see if there were more traditional designs that we could make as well. The most obvious choice was a Real Bottleneck. After a few cases of burlesque experimentation we were able to cut the necks off and polish them without maiming ourselves, burning down the building or spending two hours on each slide. So they went to the show too.

The two other slides we presented at that show were the Coricidan Medicine Bottle, or Mojo Bottle for all the Duane Allman students, and the BigHeart Hand Blown Glass Slides that are as beautiful to look at as they are to play.

The show went very well for BigHeart Slide so we had something to do for the next six months. At the next show, in Nashville, we introduced Porcelain Queen Bees and Porcelain BigHearts to a now aroused audience of slide aficionados. The Porcelain BigHearts were the first slides to incorporate a new dimension in slide design. Beside having three different cross-section playing arcs- the knife edge, the wide arc and the narrow arc- the Porcelain BigHearts also had straight and curved surfaces down the length of the slide as well. These arcs let the player to match the radius of his or her guitar fretboard or use a more traditional straight surface- all in one slide. This design idea was also incorporated into the BigHeart Resonator Slide. This is a slide designed especially for getting a strong yet subtle sound out of acoustic resonator guitars like Dobros, Nationals and others.

The next addition to the line was the BoneyFinger. This slide is polished porcelain and is my personal favorite most of the time. I was back at Ms. T-Berd's Retreat when I found, in her front yard, a beef bone shaped perfect for a slide. I'd always been curious about how bone sounded since so many of the blues players I admire, especially Fred McDowell, say they started out using a bone slide. So I polished it up and used it for a while and it sounded great- real breathy and wide, but smoother than I thought it would be. I couldn't deal with the smell of cutting bone though, so I figured I'd have mine and everybody else would just have to fend for themselves as far as bone slides were concerned. A while later I happened to try an unglazed Porcelain BigHeart on a nylon stringed guitar and it worked. It worked even when I sanded the porcelain real smooth. Great tone, smooth, quiet action and no plinks! when I tried it on electric and acoustic guitars it was a monster! It has the same sound as that beef bone but doesn't require FDA approval.

In 2003, the family of Robert Johnson, the world's most reknown Delta Bluesman, asked us to design a slide that captured Robert's sound. So, the next addition to the BigHeart lineup was our Robert Johnson Legacy Slide. These great slides are made from cast bronze bearings originally intended to be used on axles. We hand finsh them, polish them up and deboss Robert Johnson's name on each one. They all come with their own leather carrying pouch to keep them as sharp and smooth as Robert's incredible slide playing.

The latest addition to the BigHeart family comes from another designer--my plumber Joe Patillo. He invented a great little finger tonebar called the FlipSlide, because you can flip it around behind your finger whenever you want to play finger style! It’s a great little slide, especially for lead players who do a lot of switching back and forth between slide and finger fretting.

BigHeart Slides are sold in great music stores all over the world now and have gotten great reviews from both players and guitar magazine writers. We've recently put up this website to help slide guitar players get acquainted with what makes BigHeart Slides different from other slides and to make available many of our Custom and one-off slides that never get in front of the public except at our studio , trade shows or gigs.

We extend our thanks to all the slide players who have supported our efforts and kept us working too damned hard. Thanks to the BigHeart collectors who keep asking, "What's new Lu?" Thanks to the magazine writers who have been so enthusiastic about our slides. And special thanks to the many music stores that take the trouble to order from this weird little company that only makes slide stuff.

-Luther Tatum/ BigHeart Slide