RIP Oliver Pocknell 1966 - 2015

I had good intentions to write a post on reflections from the Maine vacation this year, in the vein of motivation and the conquest of procrastination.  You can see (ironically) just how far I got on that one.  That idea was superseded however by the news that my friend Oliver Pocknell had, in the words of his obituary "passed away quietly at his home" on September 11.
I met Oliver while in residence at the infamous South House of Victoria College, University of Toronto as an undergraduate in the 80's... he came into South as frosh in '85, my third year.  As a somewhat elfin looking, jumpy guy he quickly gained the affectionate nickname "Twitch" (nicknames were mandatory at South House) which stuck like glue to him all the time I knew him.   He soon proved to be a resilient and highly likeable character with a great appreciation for House tradition and "culture".  It was really my graduating year '86-'87 that I got to know him better, and probably spent more time with him then than with my own family.  My memory is lined with recollections of him as a most companionable presence day in and out; kindhearted, sensitive, genuine and funny.  Late night runs for fast food, "a cappella" beat box impressions of "Walk This Way" a la Run DMC/Aerosmith out in the street, hours of recording a fake radio talk show we called "Guppy's Forum" (yes, my own burdensome nickname revealed...)....he would usually just "appear" in the doorway like a shadow at some point in the evenings and be up for anything.  After I left in '87 in those pre-internet days we corresponded for a while by letter but I gradually lost track of him and his whereabouts.  I ran into him once on the street in the 90's after returning to TO following two years in Vancouver, and after that tried to track him a few times without much success - he was a bit "off the grid".   Looking back on my own 49 years he really stands out as one of the "good" ones, and I wish I had tried harder to keep in touch with him while I still could.  Peace, brother - I feel blessed to have called you my friend.

Of white boxes and Knopfler docs

For those paying attention to this drivel I inflict on the world I had to sacrifice my post on Army/Navy's "The Mistakes" from a month or two ago in order to remove a mysterious and unsightly "white box of doom" that had infected my blog, covering up my title header.  Despite the valiant efforts of nephew G to root the thing out only precision bombing got rid of it.  No intention of recreating the post, so please for those sensitive lovelorn souls who consider Matthew Sweet's "Sick of Myself" their personal anthem please Google the band and tune.

Today a wonderful, charming, and low-key doc I trolled over recently, as usual looking for something else...  former Dire Straits bassist John Illsley travels with guitar legend Mark Knopfler to re-visit a series of instruments that helped define his career.

Very cool idea for a documentary and of interest to any guitar nut/Knopfler fan.  Have to say I pretty much burst into tears at 13:10 to hear him launch into the intro to R + J - so great.... 

Retro gear inventory circa '92

Looking around the studio for receipts for an inventory list and found a bunch of pics in an old folder; I suppose the idea was to document my gear for insurance... this must have been around 1992 or so.  Having a couple of nice amps on hand did not appear to make me very happy!!  Brought back memories of that crappy apartment I had in grad school for sure.  Many, many appalled rehearsals there.  My main recording setup was the old Yamaha FX500 sitting on the wood shelf behind me directly into the Tascam Porta 1, both of which I still own BTW!  Big Red of course, which I also still own.  The Peavey Renown 400 I still have but I never should have sold that silverface Deluxe to my left; it was magic and made everything sound amazing (here speakerless for some reason??).  Rose-tinted memory of it induced me to buy another on eBay a few years ago but it was nothing like what I remembered this one to be.  The Mesa Mark II I also regret selling - this was the personal amp of one of the music store managers I often dealt with and I snapped it up when he finally broke down and sold.  I got tired of lugging it from place to place in various moves (man...so heavy) and there was nowhere practical to really wind it out, even at "low" power (60W) it was loud beyond belief.  At its full 100W it required an external cab attached and would think it could have taken down a small building.  Man, I look so young....

Shamed by Bob and Wayne

I subscribe to Premier Guitar, one of the newer gear-porn rags out there, for the old school print addition.  My concession to the new-fangled way of things is to have figured out how to "like" them on Facebook, which resulted in being buried under a barrage of posts from them at all times of day and night.  I generally enjoy these, but I was hit with a double-whammy of shame like a knife in my heart from two in particular over the past couple of weeks. 

Photo: Beowulf Sheehan

I was astonished to see Bob Pollard interviewed in the current edition - that is Guided by Voices Bob whom I blogged about back in the fall.  I cringed a bit anticipating him subjected to questions on gear, string gauges etc but I thought the questions were sensitively done.  The knife-in-heart was the following:

What’s your relationship with the guitar like? Is it a tool or a source of inspiration?I’ve always considered it primarily, if not solely, a vehicle for writing songs. That was the reason I needed to learn how to play to begin with. A friend and I started at the same time—around 1975 after I graduated from high school. After about a year or so I had gotten to the point where I was proficient enough to write. I got together with my friend to check out our progress. I had 50 or so songs and he knew the entire lead from “Aqualung” note for note. My point being that the guitar serves a different purpose for different people.

Funny how such a simple statement can really bring it home sometimes.  I've wasted so much time on "practicing" or playing things that really go nowhere and create nothing.  There was a period during grad school when I obsessively logged every little playing idea that came to me in handwritten tab, and I still have all those packed sheets though have only glanced at them a few times in the intervening 20 years or so. Maybe that was a bit much in the other direction, but I'm way overdue to re-prioritize back into more creative application.

The other was a bit more gear oriented but in a similar vein:  Premier does entertaining "Rig Rundowns" whereby they video interview an artist (or the artist's tech depending on the magnitude of celebrity and/or availability of said artist) usually backstage before a gig and get them to walk through their ... uh... rig, like guitars and amps and pedals and stuff.  More astonishment when the latest of these was the formidable Wayne Krantz, whom I greatly admire.  

http://www.premierguitar.com/articles/22218-rig-rundown-wayne-krantz

Even in guitar circles Wayne is pretty obscure, despite being an innovator and overall astonishing virtuoso and musician.  As I have mentioned in these pages I ran across his book "Improviser's OS" some time ago and have more recently watched and re-watched his series of instructional videos for Guitar World, which are great.   Wayne's Rundown stands in stark contrast to many of those posted by Premier and again instigated some serious soul searching - some of the things we learn from Wayne:

• "I don't know much about guitars".... ( I almost fell over at that one...)
• One loaner guitar (albeit a loaner from John Suhr) is plenty
• A bog-standard, stock (borrowed) Deville sounds good enough and works fine
• His trademark Jubilee Marshall was an eBay acquisition that he uses not because it's such a great amp, he's just "used" to it
• Pedals strewn around the floor like we all did in high school and then carried around in a bag can be preferable to the high tech powered pedalboard monstrosities of today.  I mean, like EVERYONE seems to have those things these days, Premier's current issue is devoted to it.
• Pedals again chosen if they work and sound "good enough"

The message coming through to me is: work with what you have, it doesn't have to be the best or greatest or definitive whatever - if it's functional you can work to get the best out of it.  I felt the burn of shame at this gazing around at my 15 or so instruments and piles of gear. 
Ok, enough - kudos to Premier for putting the focus on two greats way out of the mainstream,

I taught myself to play guitar

I was reminded of a worthy highlight from 2014 the other day, so in minimalist fashion I'm going to throw that out here and avoid a more comprehensive year-end synopsis of events.  David Fair from the indie legend band Half Japanese on How to Play Guitar:

"I taught myself to play guitar. It’s incredibly easy when you understand the science of it. The skinny strings play the high sounds, and the fat strings play the low sounds. If you put your finger on the string farther out by the tuning end, it makes a lower sound. If you want to play fast move your hand fast and if you want to play slower move your hand slower. That’s all there is to it. You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people use, but that’s pretty limiting. Even if you took a few years and learned all the chords you’d still have a limited number of options. If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day. Traditionally, guitars have a fat string on the top and they get skinnier and skinnier as they go down. But the thing to remember is it’s your guitar and you can put whatever you want on it. I like to put six different sized strings on it because that gives the most variety, but my brother used to put all of the same thickness on so he wouldn’t have so much to worry about. What ever string he hit had to be the right one because they were all the same. Tuning the guitar is kind of a ridiculous notion. If you have to wind the tuning pegs to just a certain place, that implies that every other place would be wrong. But thats absurd. How could it be wrong? It’s your guitar and you’re the one playing it. It’s completely up to you to decide how it should sound. In fact I don’t tune by the sound at all. I wind the strings until they’re all about the same tightness. I highly recommend electric guitars for a couple of reasons. First of all they don’t depend on body resonating for the sound so it doesn’t matter if you paint them. And also, if you put all the knobs on your amplifier on 10 you can get a much higher reaction to effort ratio with an electric guitar than you can with an acoustic. Just a tiny tap on the strings can rattle your windows, and when you slam the strings, with your amp on 10, you can strip the paint off the walls. The first guitar I bought was a Silvertone. Later I bought a Fender Telecaster, but it really doesn’t matter what kind you buy as long as the tuning pegs are on the end of the neck where they belong. A few years back someone came out with a guitar that tunes at the other end. I’ve never tried one. I guess they sound alright but they look ridiculous and I imagine you’d feel pretty foolish holding one. That would affect your playing. The idea isn’t to feel foolish."

 I had never heard of these guys but as it happens they have been around forever (well, 1975 anyway...).  However, I had seen and been deeply affected by  Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary `The Devil and Daniel Johnston`  a few years ago., and just found out he also made a documentary on Half Japanese called `The Band That Would Be King`. Have to source that somehow.

In a more morbid vein, I found out poking around on the web that Kurt Cobain was wearing a Half Japanese T shirt when he died - Kurt says, regarding number 38 on the list `Kurt Cobain`s Top 50 Albums`` (http://www.angelfire.com/rock3/nirvana81/kurttop.htm):

Half Japanese - We Are They Who Ache With Amorous Love

Kurt says: "I like to listen to Jad Fair and Half Japanese with headphones on, walking around shopping malls - in the heart of the American culture. I just think that, if people could hear this music right now, they'd melt, they wouldn't know what to do, they'd start bouncing off the walls and hyperventilating. So I turn up the music really loud and pretend it's blasting through the speakers in the mall."

 Check this stuff out and feel all those anxieties and insecurities you cling to around gear, technique, and competitive self-importance start washing away.....

Keep your minds open

Yet another RIP birthday went by this week which reminded me to follow up on my mention of bass-oriented YouTube discoveries back on the Maine vacation in August...  John Francis Anthony (Jaco) Pastorius, y'all, b, Dec 1, 1951.

I really do love the bass as an instrument. I own one, a very nice late 90's Fender Jazz in a classy tuxedo black/white scheme  and yes I can hack away in clumsy "it's the bottom four strings of a guitar, except lower" fashion but I can hardly claim to actually PLAY bass, for real.   I have a deep regard for those who truly can. 

I'm not even sure what I was originally looking for but in a stream-of-consciousness Youtube session one night on vacation I ran across an old Hot Licks instructional/demo video of Jaco, from 1986:

[sorry all, original link to video is dead, will replace if/when it becomes available again]

I started in casually watching but quickly realized what an astonishing, historic document this really was.  Jaco, arguably the most innovative bass player ever to live interviewed by towering bass legend Jerry Jemmot, and a live jam with John Scofield and Ken Dennard!  It is heart rending viewing knowing that within a year of filming Jaco would be living on and off the streets in the throes of mental illness before being beaten into a coma and eventual death in a Miami alley. 
I really started taking notice after the blaze of technical command and precision at 14:03... and another breathtaking display at 18:10 and an amazing off the cuff jam duet at 21:46...  Maybe this wasn't Jaco in his absolute prime but it is such a joy to watch one of the greatest that ever was.  One thing I found striking in the discussion on influences (54:11) it boiled down to Elvis, whatever was on the radio; eventually Jerry himself in the Atlantic era, Bernard Odum, Bootsy Collins, James Jamerson, Paul Chambers, Gary Peacock.  So in other words, nothing out of the ordinary - same people and things that influenced everyone else at the time, but he just took it way out into outer space. 
Jaco seems just a hair "behind the beat" here on the questions, a trifle hesitant but lucid and together.  Tons of great content for any stringed instrument player, and worth the watch just to see Jaco grinning madly in full command going toe to toe with John Scofield.  It blows my mind to think that he came to such a tragic end; just shows you it could happen to anyone. 

You don't really care for music, do ya?

I missed posting this earlier in the week so it's a belated birthday RIP to Jeff Buckley for Tuesday Nov 17th.  Felt odd to learn that we were so close in age - that he would have been 48. It's one of those nearly alone in a dark house in the gloomy early winter pondering mortality kind of nights; I say nearly as daughter no 1 is locked away upstairs in self imposed isolation and no 2 is with Mom in Cincinnati on the first US Cheer competition of her season.  Today/tomorrow would also be brother JP's birthday; first one for which is no longer with us.
I went through a  Jeff Buckley bender a few years ago after an extremely emotional reaction to his iconic "Hallelujah" that just rotated in at random on the iPod one day - I didn't even know I had the track, which came in the "Rolling Stone Top 500 Songs" collection gifted me by younger brother PW.  The song seems to be everywhere these days.   Most recently I was aghast to be attending a school band concert and the junior choir launched into it.... a heavily sanitized and lyrically dumbed-down version as it turns out, though nonetheless made me want to laugh and scream at the same time.  I was holding my breath and squirming to have to hear a bunch of children actually singing "There was a time when you let me know.... What's really going on below....But now you never show it to me, do you?"  but thankfully they never went there.  I love everything about his "Grace" version, from the exhalation into the mic at the very beginning through the great playing with what I consider to be the best guitar sound ever.  Speaking of which, I was astonished to run across this video on YouTube and find I was too late to buy THAT guitar!  I would have wavered at the $60,000 it went for, especially some crazy '83 top-loader of all things, but was cool to think it was out there and available for a short while...

Of course the hilarious thing about it, for those wise to the Jeff Buckley lore, is that it wasn't even his.  It was a semi-permanent loner from Janine Nichols, one of the artistic directors for NYC's St Ann's, who finally got it back at Jeff's memorial service following his death (see definitive article at http://www.mojopin.org/pages/telecaster.php).  I think it is a great example of the artist being far more important than his tools, an extraordinary player shining on a rather ordinary instrument that no collector would give a second glance.  For those who have actually read this far and are still thinking "Jeff who....?" I refer you to the fine BBC 4 doc linked below.

http://vimeo.com/41954163

(photo above top from Premier Guitar FB feed; no available credit)