07.27.11
All The Lazy Bums
I can’t put my busking guitar case out on the sidewalk as a tip jar in cyberspace.
Micropayments accepted.
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07.26.11
The hottest things in T-shirt design
Do this from your iKit. I dint. But you can. K?
Need slightly larger font when employing script.
Just right.
This won’t make any sense if you’re just dropping by and haven’t listened to Retraining Camp. So do it now.
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07.25.11
Inspirational
Jerry McCain is the singer/harmonica man. But the guy on the distorted guitar track is gone, gone, gone, too.
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07.21.11
The new “We Are the World”
You’ll laugh because if you don’t you’ll have to … well, laugh, anyway.
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07.20.11
Buy American
Cigar box guitars and foot stompers were invented by folks in the poor south. Like the harmonica, they were musical instruments for anyone to play — even without formal musical education of any kind. Keep in mind that, strictly speaking, modern cigar box guitars aren’t the standard old instrument. Addition of electronics, piezo or humbucking pick-ups, makes them acoustic/electric.
Cigar box guitars are tuned to open chords and the folk blues made by them works off of drones and slides. It’s an easy genre of music to fall into and very addicting. The instruments go from quiet to swampy to intense racket very simply.
It’s not a big leap at all to go from a six string electric to one of these old three or four-string old time devices (particularly if you’re at all familiar with taking a string off a standard guitar to do the Keith Richards 5-string open G chord thing).
As is fairly obvious in the video, they reward simplicity and music-making for the sake of emotional expression and sincerity.
On the web a number of people have enthusiastically turned to cigar box guitar making. They’re fanatical about it and you can spend a couple hours wading through photos of great-looking wood box instruments for show or sale on these websites. Here’s one fabulous example.
They’re definitely not for the plutocracy. Yet. Mostly. That’s a pretty good thing and it would be a shame for shoeshine boys in the lower reaches of the upper class to stink it up. Symbolically they fit with most of the rest of the nation being sent to the poor house for the sake of the ruling class.
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Jonnie Marbles got beat by a girl — Brit manhood thrown into question
Relax, it’s just a still so I could stream the music for a minute.
Another day thrown into the toilet.
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07.19.11
What’s worse than iKit music app rubbish?
This.
While various tech nerds think it’s cool, it’s virtually unlistenable. You have to endure a little more than you’ll want to get to the robot guitar part.
You’ll hear it’s patently awful but a good pick for a robotic contraption being as it does away with 98 percent of the expression present in typical electric guitar performance. It’s the guitar line for Marilyn Manson’s “The Beautiful People,” a machine-like and very stiff riff that doesn’t require the device to do anything real guitarists more frequently do — like bend notes, use finger vibrato, work the volume or tone knobs, etc.
As something meant to sound mechanized one supposes it could be called good. But that ain’t saying much.
07.15.11
Happy hour blues rock
Don’t drink too much now. Or this will happen to you.
How many times have you seen the Viagra commercial and the manly man come on about “getting things done?”
A couple hundred? More? Can’t get that old Howlin’ Wolf tune, “Smokestack Lightning,” backing for the white he-man in the muscle car with the boiling over radiator, out of your head? The dude is so getting it done, rolling the Z-28 in the Mojave!
“Woo-hooo!” goes the Wolf.
Well, I’m sick of it, too.
So I redid the music with something I’d like to hear propping it up.
And it’s entitled “Mister Can’t Get It Up.” Lyrics — what there are of them, heh — are on YouTube proper in the description.
Wooo-hoooo. Gotta get the doctor!
As usual, YouTube does everything in its power to corrupt the video and put artifacts into it during processing. I do not control your tv set.
Mitigated somewhat by forcing a larger upload.
07.14.11
Another long day among the foreign-made guitars
Yesterday I foolishly decided to take an old Gibson SG to Pasadena’s Guitar Center.
The idea, since I don’t use it very much anymore and it’s an old American-made piece when Gibson was still in Michigan, was to trade it in for something new.
Big mistake. GC Pasadena spent an hour and half photographing it digitally, then sending them off to the Hollywood store for consultation. All for the sake of an offer that wasn’t worth making.
It’s a Gibson SG, stamped as a Les Paul Custom on its truss rod cover plate, with all original hardware. And it plays wonderfully.
It is obviously from 1979 — that is, it looks great but it also appears well played. And as fairly common for thin neck SGs of this age it has a minor, almost imperceptible, neck repair near the tuning peg head.
Whatever that damage was it had happened to the guitar before I bought it in 1986. And the instrument performed perfectly at all dive bars it was asked to in the Lehigh Valley in subsequent years.
What I hadn’t taken into account, and what I’d forgotten I’d written about on this blog, was that instrument valuation, like everything else in the US, has turned into a racket. One in which only certain pieces, never or almost never played — hidden away in closets, are coveted appreciating assets for various among the plutocracy and those serving it.
You know, the annoying guys — lawyers, semi-high end people in Internet businesses, early retirees, assorted shoeshine boys to the heads of investment firms, the types you sometimes meet at a show in a high-rent place where they serve expensive drinks.
“I used to play guitar a lot and I have …” they always say, wanting to get into a penis-measuring contest before you turn to the amp and make like you’re checking connections until they go away.
Tied with this was the always-on observation that the American made guitars are now all for the plutocracy. You go into the store and the US pieces worth having are all hung up on the wall out of reach without help, or behind the counter, or in the special glass-walled room where you can be kept under observation.
The off-shored stuff, however, is for you.
So, too, you see the big Fender amps — like some Frontman model kind of dressed up to look sort of like a Fender Twin — out for the peons.
In the back among the used gear is a ’74 Fender Twin, really beat-up looking from the time when CBS owned the company, priced among the pearls, almost three times the amount of the new foreign-made stuff.
There are, unfortunately, no pictures of the old Fender manufacturing facility after it was expanded by CBS in California during the early Seventies. And that’s a shame because it actually employed a lot of people. As opposed to employing a lot of people in China and Mexico.
An aerial view of it in “The Soul of Tone,” a coffee table book on Fender, shows old pre-CBS Fender filling nine medium-sized warehouse-type buildings. CBS then immediately doubled the company’s manufacturing floor space.
Imagine that!
With a little stroll across the floor we come to the rack of Fender Telecasters. Hidden among them is one US-made model distinguished immediately by its price above 1k.
Everything else is distributed between Chinese and Mexican origin, the latter being the new middle-market price point.
My friend asks me where they’re all made. I tell him to look at the headstock or the serial number.
I point out a Telecaster with a “Nashville Deluxe” sticker on it. It’s worked as a premium model for those who can’t afford premiums, a non-standard Tele with three pickups instead of the usual two.
My friend, taking my tutorial, looks at the headstock for the tip-off.
“Nashville Deluxe — Made in Mexico,” he laughs.
Not good enough for the plutocrats. Want it?
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