Burnside

Led Zeppelin’s heavy-footed take on James Brown, “The Crunge”, clearly wasn’t recorded in Portland. Not only would Plant have easily found “that confounded bridge”, one preening backbend too far over his bellbottoms and he’d have tumbled off any number of them, straight into the Willamette River.

Bridge City, baby.

Speaking more to Jimmy Page’s stretched-low guitar strap swagger, we bring you Burnside, our tribute to those weathered hunks of rusting metal straddling the town’s central tributary like a hasty burst of staples punched in by some gigantic colossus the likes of which Plant rhapsodized about in his weirder, J.R.R. Tolkien-esque lyrics.

Bridges, after all, are indispensable and transporting — in music as well as daily life. As a practical matter, every guitar strap is a bridge connecting player and instrument, with load-bearing capacities that similarly depend upon the quality of construction, materials, and design. And if you don’t think a guitar strap affects tone, perhaps you haven’t played a third encore after nearly as many hours wielding a 50’s Les Paul. Not that it actually matters how, where, what, or why you play. Every shared bridge still serves singular journeys.

And, of course, music itself is the ultimate bridge. Between people. Between cultures. Between generations and eras. Between the heart and the feet. Between ourselves and our emotions. Between our imagination and our potential. Between one inspired artist and millions of listeners across countless places and moments in time.

Structurally speaking, the bridge, or middle eight, is nearly always the most transcendent part of a good song — emotionally lifting us up before dropping us back down on the other side; escaping the chorus-verse field of gravity to grab us by the collar and say, Look around. Take in the view.

Be here now.

Whether stairways to heaven or highways to hell, the guitar is our most reliable bridge there and back. And Burnside salutes players traversing those passages propelled by their sweat, soul, and fingers.