Inspirations (and Intimidations)

I've had a couple of very inspiring (and kind of intimidating) musical moments this past week. The first one was seeing Junior Brown in concert! A good friend and client took Cyn and I to see him at the Ark this weekend. Amazing guitarist! The guy plays everything from Hendrix to Honkytonk to Segovia, all brilliantly...and then switches to his steel guitar and plays that brilliantly. Plus, he has a great singing voice and writes excellent songs. For a while after seeing him I was considering just throwing the guitar out the window and hanging it up. I think that would upset Junior if I did, though, so I won't. But Man! Get you over to YouTube and check him out. Beyond belief.

The other very inspirational event was watching a movie documentary of percussionist Evelyn Glennie called "Touch The Sound". Glennie is a Classical percussionist who does unbelievable improvisatory work, from walls of sound with the Kodo drummers to amazing delicate bits playing with chopsticks on plates, and much more. A very strange and almost mystical thing about her is that she is effectively deaf...her ears register very little sound at all. Somehow she has taught herself to "hear" sound using her whole body, and it seems that the experience is very rich and beautiful to her. The movie is a fabulous experience in itself, a dialog about sound and perception, and a treat to watch. Her duets with guitarist Fred Frith are worth the price of admission, seriously! Easily found at video rental shops and worth the time for anyone who ever enjoys music and sound.

So I have a gig tomorrow with my band The Mobsters...will I bring any of this inspiration to the table there? Well, I still don't have Brown's chops or Glennie's sensitivity, but having experienced a little of that kind of artistry sure won't hurt me. Knowing that there are far frontiers to explore, vast horizons to travel toward...music is an endless quest, a toy that keeps changing shape, an infinite journey into yourself and out into everyone else in the universe. And a lot of fun besides!

Bigsby Tremolo

Just got a Bigsby Tremolo put on my new guitar! Mickey managed to set it up in record time...truly he is the Ninja Master of Guitar Techs. For those of you who don't know, the Bigsby is a mechanism that allows you to bend all of your guitar strings up (or down) simultaneously...a whammy bar if you will. If you've heard the Ventures, or any Surf Music, you've heard the sound. I've messed with other tremolos before, but listening to the amazing Johnny A. finally won me over to the world of the Bigsby. If you haven't heard that guy, don't waste any time, go get one of his albums, or go to YouTube and watch him play a little...you'll see what I mean. Of course, a Bigsby sure won't make me into Johnny A., but it's a nice thing to have in the arsenal. Now I just have to mess with it for about 30 years or so...

Yet another Magic Guitar

I would be totally remiss if I didn't mention another amazing guitar I have...this one is a restoration of a kind of historically notable model, the Ovation Deacon Limited. I got this one for $60 from a co-worker when I worked at a record store, but it was in pieces. I figured I could put it together and at least use it for photo ops, since it looked like an interesting instrument. But getting it playable took a long time, and several very competent luthiers worked on it to no avail. Finally my friend Mickey Richard got ahold of it and wrestled it into submission...by pretty much rebuilding the thing! When I got it there was a hole chiseled into it (to badly accommodate a bad tremolo bar) that you could see daylight through. He filled that with matching mahogany and put a veneer over that, which is so finely done that you have to look very closely indeed to see the difference in woods. Plus he re-fretted it, put in a new bridge, and new pickups, cut a new pickguard and refinished the thing with violin varnish. It looks (and plays) amazingly well...you can see what a nice job he did on it!















...and how does it sound, you may ask? It's a kickass little guitar! Tonally it sounds somewhere between a Gibson SG and a Fender Telecaster, very open and live. Its very thin mahogany neck is somewhat sensitive to changes in humidity so I don't take it out to outdoor gigs, but I'm gonna start taking it out to club dates now and then, since it's a lot of fun to play, sounds so good and also looks crazy cool!

The Magic Guitar

I have had the chance to play and own a bunch of good guitars and basses...for several decades I just had one acoustic guitar (a little Gibson) and a Fender Jazz Bass, and that was it. But in the last few years I've gotten the bug, and have created a little collection of nice instruments that I use in the studio and out at gigs. Some come and then go, and others are keepers, but I learn something from each one, even if what I learn is that I don't play that particular instrument.

I had that experience recently with a little jazz guitar I bought on ebay. It was a Jay Turser copy of a Gibson 175, and I was excited to get it. I've been getting into the primal stages of chord melody guitar (in another 20 years I might start getting good) and I thought this was the ticket. But for some reason, this just wasn't the guitar that was working for me. Didn't sound right, didn't feel right, although it was a very beautiful and well-made guitar. Dang, I thought, back to Ebay for you I guess.

But as luck would have it, my friend Danny Pratt had been looking around for a nice hollowbody, and when he called me up to play a gig I mentioned the Turser. He offered me a trade for a Tex-Mex Stratocaster, and since it had a whammy bar, and I needed a guitar with one for a studio track I was doing, I said OK. I had never thought I'd want a Strat, I'd always thought of them as kind of sterile in my hands, although I've seen people pull amazing music from them (Hendrix, Clapton and Michael Katon, amongst many others). But he played the Turser at the gig, and he sounded so good on it and seemed so happy, I figured it was cool, if I had to I'd just sell the Strat later.

But then I sat down with it, and time evaporated completely, and when I came to myself I was still playing and it was 3 hours later! Always the sign of a very special axe. Just forget whatever I said before about Strats, this one has made me re-examine my paradigm! It plays like a dream and just sounds beautiful, I'm playing it through an old Epiphone amp and I'm just amazed with the tone. I just used it on a new tune last night in the studio, thinking I was just goofing around, but somehow having that guitar in my hands created something magic. That's a keeper track! I found myself playing melodic phrases I hadn't known I could and might never even have thought of before, there's just something about it. A Magic Guitar!! Amazing.