Lightness has a call: Hidden Youtube Gems

I was searching on the web for a vid of a Q+A sort of lesson I had seen before of John McLaughlin at PRS (more on JM in a future post), and found this wonderful sequence of Jeff Beck walking through a handful of his classic guitars.  Not often (ever?) that I would apply the term "thrilling" to something I run across on Youtube, but what a joy to see that amazing command and authority, on these unamplified out-of-tune relics.... something so egoless and unaffected about JB here that impresses me more than any amount of flash and bombast.  Of course there's a linear track from Jeff's Esquire that found its way to Seymour Duncan, through the limited edition "Telegib" collaboration between Duncan and Jean Larrivee, to my beautiful Larrivee Bakersfield in the pic above. 

Lies my body told me

Had a talk with J the other week, subject matter included separation, divorce, health issues, anxieties over children; career struggles. Not a conversation we would have had at 25, even a pair trending to melancholy and depression like theappalled. Ignoring the aging rockers that remain in the marketplace for a moment, you would think there would be a lot of heavy music out there being made by folks hitting a similar point in their lives, right? I am confronted with the opposite on a daily basis, and occasionally in complete immersion a la 14 hours in the car on the way to our east coast family vacation. "The opposite", that is to say, the top 40 radio fare in current rotation. I would like to think I am fairly objective in concluding a lot of this stuff is pretty awful, without becoming an "I'm turning into my parents" cliche. Note: my parents had no connection to popular music of any era, so the cliche doesn't apply anyway. My disdain stems partly from a tired cynicism and impatience similar to that hilariously represented by Steve Albini's foreword to the Tape OP volume 2 compilation - the first few paragraphs are here. If you don't know who Steve Albini is then this post is going to be even more obscure than usual for you:

http://tonevendor.com/item/28924

Yeah, yeah: dance, party, drunk, driving around, boy meets girl and all that ensues, yadda yadda. With all that cynicism poisoning me I honestly did not realize how disconnected I was from all the "good" music that of course is being created all around, all the time, and got a rather abrupt awakening of sorts recently when I subscribed to the Decatur, Georgia based pop culture eMag "Paste" (paste.com). Paste offers a downloadable "playlist" of around 7 songs per issue, and with over 100 issues online that's nearly 1000 songs - from bands that I had mostly NEVER HEARD OF. Ok, maybe 5 or 6 of them. I downloaded all of it, and filled a 20Gb Nano including nothing from my archives. It's been interesting to shuffle that long list of material with no emotional connection or reference points.  It's like being teleported to another planet. Planet "Hip", I suppose. To the original point of this entry however, a lot of this stuff is still very young music made by young people, albeit ones that actually care who might be on the bill at this years' SXSW. I was gifted the album "Silent Movies" by good friend HP last year, and after being all torn up over it I realized that I had been a fan of Marc Ribot for most of my adult life, since he played guitar on Tom Waits "Downtown Train"; which I consider to be one of the greatest tracks of all time, almost singlehandedly redeeming the '80s. Making the connection was coincident with release of Marc's second effort with the band he calls 'Ceramic Dog" ("Your Turn"), which for me became one of those increasingly rare (see "cynicism", above) resonant "OK, like THAT'S what I'm talkin' about!!!" moments. A blaze of NYC avant garde art-punk-jazz delivered in a torrent of virtuostic Anger - and not that faux "anger" exhibited by 18 yr old punk posers, but a real middle-age professional Anger. As Marc himself puts it, speaking to the gap between 2008's debut "Party Intellectuals" and the current album:

“If you listen closely, you can hear the rage, hope, disappointment, ritual excess, love and anarchy that were in our personal and collective airspace during those years,”

Not without humor, but what's there is of the blackest variety. I was on the floor over the twisted pseudo-parody of a 1940s swing number "The Kid is Back!" -

I'm fat again
I'm drinkin'....again
And I'm puttin' out over town without thinking....again
I'm back again....etc

Anyway, truly inspiring and my kind of thing  - if it's yours let me know as we should probably be getting a band together and making some very angry old people music. Clock is ticking...

You know it was a good jam...

.....by the amount of blood on the pickguard?? 

 

Considered just leaving it on as an ongoing creative art project but maybe best to clean up.  Great time last night playing many, many covers in a basement jam with a 5-pc - lots of fun.

I need some juice...

For anyone out there feeling in a downturn of blues (besides myself), let us share in a perfect moment of Zen as contributed by John and John of TMBG,

wild spiders crying together

News flash, friends:  US-built vintage guitars from Fender and Gibson are ridiculously out of reach for the ordinary player.  Startling revelation, I know.  There are still "sleeper" models disdained or ignored by collectors from these companies - my favourite acoustic guitar is my 1949 Gibson L48 that I picked up on eBay for around $1200, which has a carved spruce top made by the same hands that carved the L5's of the time (quick glance on 'Bay shows one non-cutaway '49 L5 up at around $7500 US at time of writing).  That being said, several years ago I applied some research towards affordable alternatives and began to develop a great fondness for the undervalued American builders of the 50's and 60's, specifically Chicago companies Kay and Harmony, and Guild to the end of the Westerley, RI era.  The Guilds I own are serious professional-grade instruments that make no apologies to any Gibson ever made; the "others" are in a category unto themselves.
Clearly there were always pockets of admirers of these instruments out there and the 'net is dotted with sites that attempt to catalog information and models.  The growing success of the Eastwood company producing relatively inexpensive reissues, and players like Jack White commanding increasing influence in the present, however, has very quickly increased the amount of attention placed on the formerly downtrodden.  The aforementioned escalating vintage market has also left others besides myself scouring different pastures for what is affordable and available from the dawn of the rock 'n' roll era.    Which brings us to the inspiration for today's post, a comment I read in this month's "Premier Guitar", in a review of a guitar from Montreal-based builder Nic Delisle.  This guitar, Mr. Delisle's "The Forty-Four" model, is in essence a copy of the Harmony H44... with a base price of $1900!! 

"It wasn’t long ago that Harmony guitars of the ’50s and ’60s were considered ill-suited to serious music making. But such guitarists as the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach and Marc Ribot have made amazing, signature sounds on these (once) affordable axes. And in their wake, players, collectors, and even guitar makers have reexamined the merits of these guitars while driving prices on the vintage market ever higher."

Nice to have been ahead of the "value" curve, and I suppose I should send Dan and Marc a quick note of thanks for driving those prices up.  Meanwhile, take a look at the "real thing", a Harmony-built Silvertone S1429, stamped "F-61" inside, meaning build date fall of 1961, five years before I was born.  Backstory: if I recall correctly I was looking for a Meteor, and through intense net searching landed on this piece in Lemoyne, PA store BCR Music.  The 1429 was essentially a blinged-out Meteor, built by Harmony for Sears, with fabulous 6-ply body binding (!!!!), 3-ply on the neck, 3 DeArmond pickups with individual switches and 6 tiny fragile nonstandard good-freakin-luck-ever-replacing vol/tone knobs.  I paid too much at the time, but it was one of those crazy "under the bed for 40 years" stories, and I rationalized that I may as well have one of the nicest ones in existence.  One of the quirky things about it is the neck, which on 99.99% of guitars tapers to be wider at the body end than at the nut.  On this guitar the taper is minimal, giving you the feeling like you're playing a giant bi-sected pencil strung with wire.  The non-height adjustable pickups sit housed in fabulous solid rosewood surrounds and I tend to clunk my pick against the middle one, which I hate, and was one of the things that turned me against my hog-backed Gibson ES-175.  The Silvertone tends to be the least played guitar in my "aggregate", and since I'm not a "collector" and have an internal barometer that compels me to get rid of guitars I don't play, I haul it out regularly determined to sell, plug it in... and hesitate.  I mean, it sounds unreasonably good - amazing, really.  The DeArmonds have the reputation of being some of the best guitar pickups ever made, and I have to say while my experience is limited (see above, re. "out of reach" vintage guitars) they are like nothing else. Big, airy, and crazy high output for the time - like one of the best single coils ever but with the added dimension of the fully hollow body.  Feedback prone like all hollow bodies, but not overly so.  Sigh.  I may still succumb to the lure of some other high-value item I would play more (just saw a Guild X-170 in my local area!!), but for the moment the coolness factor prevails.  Speaking of coolness, I did a quick search on "Fall of 1961" and landed on a terrific poem by Robert Lowell, called "Fall 1961" - this is an excerpt, but Google it for the rest and its resonance of the tone of the time,

All autumn, the chafe and jar
of nuclear war;
we have talked our extinction to death.
I swim like a minnow
behind my studio window.

Our end drifts nearer,
the moon lifts,
radiant with terror.
The state
is a diver under a glass bell.

A father’s no shield
for his child.
We are like a lot of wild
spiders crying together,
but without tears.

Done, done, on to the next one...

Honestly, in the '90s the Grunge thing was remote for me.  I was aware of Nirvana and I thought "Smells like..." was a great song and video, but I think I was just out of their demographic when it was current.  Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters were different though.  I have vivid memories when my kids were toddlers of driving to the store solo with "Blackout" or "Monkey..." at pain threshold volumes; and when One by One came out in 2002 "All My Life" clung on to me like a personal anthem, and still feels that way.  We caught the "Them Crooked Vultures" tour a couple of years ago, and it was mind-blowing to see Dave drum, like he was about to fly apart at the atomic level.
So, given all that, many thanks to JA for forwarding the link to Marc Maron's recent WTF podcast of his interview with Dave, who is out promoting his new documentary "Sound City".  So rare to see/hear/read an interview out there in the music press that reminds us of what it's all about, the joy and love of making music.  Dave comes off as funny, open, engaging and the luckiest guy alive to be doing what he's doing, check it (and the movie) out, hopefully it will wash some of the accumulated jaded cynicism off you like it did for me:


http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_353_-_dave_grohl