Breathe

Nearly worked my way through the pile of music-oriented material acquired over the holidays: biography of Lenny Breau, David Byrne's "How Music Works", Ken Caillat's "Making Rumours" and finally a riotous and often hilarious, exuberant "I'm With The Band", via Pamela Des Barres.  After trying to find a source to buy it was delighted to find the Big Star documentary "Nothing Can Hurt Me" appearing on Netflix, which I finally found time to watch.  The whole thing was great but the last scene before credits rolled just killed me, John Fry at the board pulling up faders on what soon became apparent was "September Gurls", and the look on his face said it all.  I was in tears..... paraphrasing something I think that came from a set of Rhino compilation liner notes (from "Poptopia, the 70s" ??), "what's that sound... oh yeah, it's the breaking of my heart....."   

Speaking of tears, was jamming with the boyz the other weekend and hit on what I thought of as the verse to "Breathe" (Pink Floyd) as a vamp thing, but then we realized trying to sing along it also fit the verse to "Down by the River" (Neil Young).  Checked on it later and sure enough they are pretty much the same, but looking closer at "Breathe" was just devastating.  Backing up a bit - I don't focus a lot on lyrics ordinarily, but you would think I would at least have ingrained those to a song I have heard a million times and that I have integrated into my rock n' roll DNA??  Apparently not.  It's just an offshoot of what you could call the "Auld Lang Syne" syndrome though I suppose.  The four lines of the first chorus really shook me up:

For long you live and high you fly
And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be

Uh huh.

No doubt about it, it's 2014

First post of 2014 and this would be the natural time to reflect, publicize the resolutions, etc but not going to go there.  Managed to get an appalled rehearsal in and put most of one brand new song together over the holidays, called "No Doubt About It".  We even managed to pull off a run through of the ancient and venerable appalled chestnut "Free to Bleed", and got a clean take of the notoriously unrecorded "Fake".  Other musical events of the holidays:  DC and yours truly executed the Great 2013 Amp Bake-Off between a tweed Fender HRD and a Mesa Express plus 5:50 within the confines of Crazy Stranger.  Conclusion(s) - both are VERY LOUD.   Played standards with my brother JP for the first time... ever, really....on Christmas Eve, and it went really well! Our history of playing together has been spotty to say the least.  I have been inspired by the fabulous Lenny Breau/Brad Terry recordings ("Complete Living Room Tapes") so I was optimistic that a guitar/clarinet combo would work, and it was surprisingly good.  We even had some impromptu dancing going on for a while. 

Shout out to:
NYC guitarist Sean Driscoll and his most excellent blog somuchsound.blogspot.com!

somuchsound.blogspot.com 

I ran into this while watching, for approximately the millionth time, the video lessons Wayne Krantz did for Guitar World in 2012 on expanding chord vocabulary (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqJp-0PmHPo).  One of Sean's instructional videos on using ideas for using the metronome was included as a "suggested" link, and I really enjoyed his direct instructional style and wonderful sound/playing. His blog is very cleanly done and info-rich without being overly wordy (hint hint, note to self....).  One entry in particular resonated with me when Sean mentions being exposed to John McLaughlin through his older brother's record collection, which is exactly how I was exposed to him.  My early musical life was dominated by JP's polarized opinions and heavy leanings at the time into 70s fusion (George Duke, Mahavishnu, Herbie Hancock, etc).  Like Sean I came later to some kind of context for how great a player McLaughlin really is, but JM for me has been less about the playing (which I love, don't get me wrong) but more about his work ethic and relentless drive to improve and cut an individual and unique path.   In a lifetime of consuming millions of words about music and guitars a handful of things remain with me.  One was a wonderful interview of JM, by Robert Fripp, in the July '82 issue of Musician magazine - I read this in hard copy, so was 16 years old when it came out.  I searched recently online for this and was astonished to find the archive "Pages of Fire" (http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/mclaughlin/art/index.html).  The archive includes the Fripp interview, but also the Guitar Player April 1996 cover interview with Matt Resnicoff that included a quote that was like a knife going through me at the time that I still turn to for inspiration when things get low.   Will leave it there for now:


When did you discover how dedicated you were to music?

I left home when I was 15 or 16 and never went back. I wasn't doing too good at 16. I've been playing guitar since I was 11, and I had to work on that, but at the same time I did a lot of jobs just to survive. You have to live in hope that when you're up at six in the morning driving a truck and you get back at night just shattered, you can still make the extra effort to pick up the guitar and work. [Laughs.] Did somebody tell you it was easy when you came down here to this planet? They didn't tell me! And it's still not. But who wants it easy? If it was, everybody would be doing it. That's what makes it interesting, because you go for it and discover what you're made of. We underestimate our own capacities so dreadfully. I know that spiritually we have infinite capacity. We can do so much more than we think. And that's from the heart, man. Don't ever forget it.

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.