My 1976 Stratocaster has a fairly storied past. It was purchased from a heroin addict outside a music store in Detroit in 1979 for the princely sum of $75 dollars. This thing’s been with me on five continents for close to thirty years. People ask me about it not because it’s a particularly great guitar (it surely is not!) but because it doesn’t sound much like a strat. Well, you can partly blame it on the fact that I never intended to play a Strat. Never liked ’em. So I always wanted it to not sound like a Strat. Hence, there were many home-made modifications.

The pickups have been replaced with a variety of humbuckers… most recently a complete set of Seymour Duncan JB ’59s which are supposed to sound like, what? Jeff Beck; Jazz Box? Who knows?
The 5-position switch was replaced with a 3-position switch. The three positions now function as follows:

i. Front pickup

ii. Front and Rear […]

AKA, New Year, same ol’ whiney posts.

But this will likely be the last post before I switch web hosts. As doctors so like to say, ‘Some side-effects may include…’ But hopefully there will be no ‘dead air’. As always, if you notice anything untoward, please give me a jingle… e-mail… tweet… flaming arrow… semaphore…

I needed more space and some features to make the upcoming ‘Detroit’ site possible. There’s also the older concert videos which I haven’t had the time or the web space to present. So there are a lot of plans… if I survive. 😉

NB: I’m writing this from bed. Again. Don’t ask. Instead of opera-tin’ (get it? Even with the grim reaper at my door, I still got it.) But it’s making me even more ADHD than usual laying on my back. To avoid going nuts, I’m trying to remain ‘useful’ by doing stuff I always mean to get round to—like ITEM #318: Re-learn French by watching Canadian TV and old OSS 117 movies. (Did I say ‘going’? […]

Some people are just head and shoulders above the rest in terms of execution; the Michael Jordans. John Williams and Steven Spielberg are like that in movies. I’m not saying everything they do is ‘the best’ every year but, like His Airness what they do is of such a consistent quality that over time, they just dominate. They are the U of M ground game of movies.

Warhorse

And ‘War Horse’ is another example. It’s not the best work for either, but again, the execution is so damned good that you watch the implausibilities go by and feel your emotions being manipulated like a Swedish masseur and you give into it because, hey… it’s a fuckin’ Swedish Massage.

What makes Warhorse at the top this year is not that John can write in any style he wants and it’s gonna sound great. He may be the last guy who can really write a truly post-romantic score. (People forget that the guys who laid down the law in Hollywood’s Golden Age were largely […]

Just when I think there are no new ways left for me to injure myself, I’m currently recovering from my first ‘guitar shock’. I’ve had plenty o’ mic shocks before, but this is the first time I’ve gotten 110vac on the control plate of a Telecaster. I moved my pinky over to the knob to do a ‘pinky swell’ and POW! There goes a fingernail. Ruined the paint job on the guitar.

Worst of all, it didn’t even look cool. Just looked like a middle-aged man having some vague sort of mental breakdown—screaming for no apparent reason.

In case you were wondering… I lived. 😀

I was going to carry on about the end of ‘tradition’ in music when this story fell out of the sky like the sixteen tone weight in a Monty Python episode: http://www.npr.org/2011/12/24/144193341/taking-classical-off-the-pedestal-into-black-communities

Upon hearing this wonderfully inspiring and uplifting story about a guy worthy of much praise, a guy who is making a real commitment to bring culture to the disadvantaged black youth of my inner […]

I recently read an article in Rolling Stone (amazing they’re still in business) about the currently popular group ‘Foster The People’. And the leader, Marc Foster, said something like this:

I don’t want to be one of those one-hit wonders like James Taylor… you know… doing ‘Fire And Rain’ for the next 30 years. I want to do thirty more great songs like [insert number one song title I should know here]

In this Great Age of Narcissism (The Big G), I guess I shouldn’t be, but when I read this, I was quite gobsmacked. I think my amazement and umbrage is because for all the RS pretensions of ‘journalism’, the interviewer just let the guy get away with it; not challenging any of his deep pronouncements. But in the GAN, hyperbole like this goes as unnoticed as smog in the city. You don’t really see it until you get outta town.

I mean, this guy should be so lucky as to have a fraction of the career James Taylor has had. He’s […]