Interlude: Reflections on Music
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011, by Steve Perry
Introduction: Interlude: Reflections on Music ...
First, if you are looking for the Steve Perry who sang with Journey, I’m not him. If you downloaded this as a preview, and that’s who you were after, you should chuck it and move along, I’m not the droid you’re looking for. I’m a different fellow–name is common, but I had it before he did, so I’m keeping it.
I have always been interested in, and moved by, music. My earliest memories of my life’s sound track goes to big band and swing; be-bop; and early rock and roll. My father played trumpet as a young man, later electronic organ, and there was always a radio on or a record player in the background. I remember when we bought a 45 rpm of Elvis singing “Hound Dog,” and The Coasters doing “Yakety-Yak.”
My father had Glenn Miller and Hoagy Carmichael LPs. We had 78 rpm records of Gene Autry singing Christmas and Easter songs, and we watched 1950’s B&W television that offered up Your Hit Parade, Tennessee Ernie Ford, The Dinah Shore Show, and Name That Tune.
Later, we saw the Beatles, but that wasn’t until the 1960s, and music was already deep in my brain–I remember singing “Lavender Blue,” Sammy Kaye’s version, and that charted in 1949. My mother tells me I used to sing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” the Nat King Cole cover, which actually came out the year before I was born. I recall listening to my grandmother’s 78 of “Blue Tango,” and watching Liberace at her house.
So, music:
What follows, more or less from earlier to more recent, are essays on, and connected sometimes less-directly to, music. Most of them are from my blog. Some are, despite my my lack of expertise on the subject, how-to articles, mostly going to basic techniques and even theory in regards to the guitar. Some of the pieces are about particular songs or instruments. Some are links to online versions of things I found interesting or moving. There are a few book reviews, movie reviews, obituaries, and some TV stuff.
Much of what is herein is personal and completely subjective, but then, that’s the point of this kind of book–a peek into somebody’s mind that might spark something in one’s own thoughts of feelings.
In theory, there are links embedded in this book–usually the titles to each essay. If for some reason they don’t work, you can drop drop by my electronic house and find them by searching for the title. Or you can just pull up a chair and listen (or talk) as you wish: themanwhonevermissed.blogspot.com/
Steve Perry
26 December 2010
The Essays
Don't Try This At Home
Guitar Gadgets
New Toy
Guitarzan
Case in Point
Couple More Guitar Pictures
For the Guitar Players
This Magic Moment
Classical Guitar Making - Bogdanovich
Guitar Strings
Repertoire
And One More …
And Now Some Soothing Classical Music
Ukulele Weeps
Accidental Research
Dropped D
Filk
Connections
Guitar Man, Or
Mechanical License
Classical Blues
Aaahhhoooooh!
Send Lawyers, Guns, and Money …
Apocryphal Stories
Speaking of Guitar Music
Don't Play it Again Sam
And, Of course, There's This …
Blasphemy
Songs About Methamphetamine
Sounds of Silence
Acting!
Clapton
Redneck Ice–Yo, yo, yo …
White Trash Christmas
Guitar Gadgets II
Busted Fingernail Blues
House of Grace
Guitarzan, Give Him a Hand
No Nookie Song
Play That Funky Neurology White Boy
Once
Dissonance
Music R Us
Virtuosity
Handmade Musical Instrument Exhibit
Spring String Change
Me 'n' Sir Paul - The Road Not Taken
Hallelujah
Sergeant Pepper … It's Really Deep, Man …
Guitar Music
Old and Wise Ain't Everything
YouTube is Amazing
Wooden Instruments
Pachelbel Rant
Stuttering Canon
Living Here in the Future, Part 3
This Might be Heaven, This Might be Hell
La Musica, La Musica (The Rolling Stone's Top 500)
Love and Death
Woodshedding
Political Science
Musical Joke
One More Reason I'm Surely Going to Hell
October Set
On Being a Fossil
Stand By Me
Classical Guitar Blog
February Set
Born in Arizona/ Got a Condo Made 'a Stone-a
There Are No Republican Folks Singers!
Useless Fact of the Day
Voice
Rock 'n' Roll
Live from Daryl's House
Una Limosnita por el Amor de Dios
You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling
Cyborgs R Us
Musician Joke
Current Set
Musical Interlude
Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)
Musical Mastery
Speaking of Music
Les Paul
Ex-King of Pop
A Little Musical Interlude, Sort Of …
Tell Them Boris Sent You
Stage Fright
Dial Up Blues
Joan
Hitting a Clam
Heigh Ho, Everybody! (Autumn Memories)
Live Fast Die Young
Make the Best of the Situation
Happy New Year
Into the Void
Gator Got Yore Grammy
La Musica, La Musica!
High Strung
I Feel Good
Golden Oldies
More on Music
Changing the Tune
Stage Patter
Androgyny
Repertoire
Sunday and the Sun Did Shine
Moving to the Dark Side
Major Questions in Life
Work Ethic
Telstar
Old Movies
Least Surprising Announcement of the Day
Practicing
Sing It Funny
Juke Joints
Hey, Sir Paul
Rock Bios
Sing It, Sing It
Not Exactly Don't Stop Believin'
The Axis of Awesome
Up The Charts With a Bullet - Sort Of
Otis
Tell 'Em Wordman
Humanist Hymn
Let It Go
Levels
Jam
Blind Whitebread Perry
Tracking Down Old Songs
Musician Smokes Dope! Details at Eleven
Peace Symbol
New Song
My second blog post:
Like a lot of guys my age, I got a guitar in the sixties, learned the requisite three chords, and thought I was gonna be the next Bob Dylan. A buddy with about the same ability and I and his wife formed a folk trio and wrote some dreadful and pedantic protest music, which we croaked at anybody who would slow down enough to listen. Did a couple of coffee house gigs, hootnannies in the park, like that. Where have all the flowers gone? Eve of Destruction. Blowin' in the Wind ...
Cut a demo tape long ago and far away, but I suspect it went straight into the agent's garbage can the second we walked out the door ...
We were awful. Couldn't play, couldn't sing, but since that didn't stop Dylan, we figured what-the-hell.
Thing is, we couldn't write, either, and he could.
About 1968 or thereabouts, my buddy went to Leavenworth for eighteen months, as a result of taking a long vacation from the Army without their permission, and I stashed the guitar next to the file cabinet for the next thirty-odd years.
A couple years ago, after watching my silat teacher play–he's a world-class guitarist–I decided I need some other way to be creative besides writing, so I dusted off the old guitar and started trying to teach myself how to play. On a scale of 1-10, I'm probably about a 2.5. I know a few simple instrumental tunes, and I can sing along with a few others. I spend an hour or thereabouts a day practicing, and the dogs haven't run off yet ...
I do like listening to guitar players who know how to do it, from classical to pop to rock to blues to country to, well, pretty much anybody who can nail it down. Like silat, I won't live long enough to get good, but we do what we can with what we got.
Those of you who are guitarists know what a capo is. Those of you who don't, it's a device that attaches to your guitar's fretboard and presses down on the strings, for the purpose of changing the key. This is sometimes useful for accompanying, say, a singer who sings in a key that is difficult to play on the guitar. Sometimes this is used for effect. When George Harrison plays "Here Comes the Sun," his guitar is in standard tuning, but he has a capo on the seventh fret, which is what gives it that tinkly sound ...
Um. Anyway, there are many brands of these. One of the most interesting ones I've found is made by a British firm, G7th, Ltd.
The original model was designed for steel-string acoustic guitars and works very well for them. But since classical guitars generally have wider necks, and flat fretboards, the application of the G7th was somewhat limited. It could not be used past the fifth fret because it wouldn't reach across all six strings. (In the capo picture, the original is on the left, above.)
To attend to this, G7th has come out with a classical model (also a new one for twelve string guitars, which have wider fretboards.) The compression arm is longer, and the pad that presses upon the strings is flat. (The capo on the right.)
It works very well on a classical guitar, as far up as you can put it before you run into the thickening where the heel joins the neck to the body.
Plus, it looks so cool. You can see what it looks like on the guitar.
How it works is simple: You apply it by sliding it over the fret you want, and squeezing it shut. There is this wonderful little cam that locks it into place however hard you want it, and when you want to take it off, you just thumb the little lever down to open the jaws.
First-rate materials and construction, too.
New Toy
I have been lucky enough to get a well-known and highly-respected luthier, Alan Carruth, to make a guitar for me. (And to get what is a kinfolk-deal price on it.)
Al, called "the dean of American luthiers" by Tim Brookes, in his book Guitar: An American Life, is building me a classical guitar. While the sounding board is of cedar, one of the two most common tonewoods, the sides and back are of a somewhat-unusual wood, Osage Orange. (In the U.S., this is a "trash" hardwood; it grows wild, and has been used mostly for fence posts.) Also called hedge-apple, after the fruit it produces, this is, according to Al, a drop-in replacement for rosewood. Traditionally, classical guitars often have rosewood backs and sides. For years, the wood of choice was Brazilian rosewood (it supposedly smells like roses when fresh-cut). This particular species is endangered, and dwindling supplies, cut before the ban, have driven the costs sky-high–a good set of Brazilian rosewood might drive the price of a custom-guitar up a couple thousand dollars.
Luthiers have found replacements for Brazilian using Indian rosewood, as well as Australian and African hardwoods, and Al says that the tone of Osage Orange is somewhere between that of Brazilian and Indian rosewood. The only drawback is that the wood is orange when fresh cut, slowly turning darker brown as it ages.
Since I am more concerned with how it sounds than how it looks, the color is not as important to me as it might be to some.
Al's waiting list is long and getting longer, but he is currently addressing my instrument. Here, if I can manage it, are a couple of pictures. One is of the rosette, surrounding the sound hole; the other is of the back and center trim. Al's choice of woods for these are fascinating: The central braid has lines of bloodwood/maple (red/white), blue mahu with satinwood (green/off-white), and 'burning bush' with cherry (orange/red-brown). The background of the braid is walnut. The curlyques around the outside are also mahu/maple/cherry. The 'angled ladder' on either side of the curlyques is Indian rosewood/maple.
Probably be a couple months longer before the instrument is done, but I am tickled pink with Al's work.
Thursday before last, I went for my first guitar lesson. (And, it turns out, only lesson, at least for now.) Local guitar store has four or five teachers on tap, and I picked one who plays stuff I like. Got there just as the skies opened up, wind, rain, and met the teacher, a guy maybe my son's age. He saw that I had a classical guitar, went out into the shop and collected one, tuned it, and asked, "Okay, what do you want to learn?"
The teacher is in a local band, has CDs, and plays a wide range of material.
I was, I said, interested in fingerstyle playing, (fingers instead of a flat pick) classic rock and blues, with some odds and ends pop stuff. Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Buddy Guy, like that. I also wanted to learn a specific technique, called tremolo, more about which later.
I didn't have a book I was working from, which is how a lot of students approach things. I did have a fresh piece of music with TAB (a system of notation created by lutists and often applied to the guitar in lieu of standard cleft-and-notes). He looked at it, played it, and demonstrated that he had the musical chops to be be teaching.
The piece–the theme from the movie The Godfather–had in it some tremolo, which involves rapidly picking a single string with several fingers to produce a quavery sustained note. (A violin string under a bow can make a long, echo-y note, but plucked guitar string notes decay rapidly, thus tremolo. If you've ever heard a good mandolin player do Russian music, you know the effect. And if you have ever heard the classical piece Recuerdos de la Alhambra, you also know what it sounds like.)
I'd been trying in on my own, but hadn't managed to get it right.
The teacher demonstrated that could do the effect. He brought out a piece of classical music by Carcassi that wasn't too hard and suggested I try that. Then he showed me a nice Chicago blues groove, that sounded a lot like the background music of a TV commercial for Cialis, the, um, anti-ED drug. He wrote out some different key progressions for 12-bar blues, ( I-IV-V chords, since all you need for blues is three chords and a turnaround, though you can add in 7ths and 9ths to make it sound better. Showed me a nice turnaround in the key of A.)
This being an introductory half hour lesson, that was it.
It was a good experience. I enjoyed it. The teacher obviously had skill, knew his stuff, and he was pleasant, but there was something ... missing ...
The first thing was, he didn't ask me to play anything. Not being a teacher, I don't know if this is normal, but had I been in his seat, I would have wanted to know what the student knew, and I'd have asked questions and asked to hear something so I could tell. No big deal, but that makes sense to me. If I laid something out, then maybe he could have pointed to places where I could have fingered the piece differently or better. Made comments on the tone or resonance or somesuch. Was what I already had any good? How could I make it better?
That would have been my first order of business: What kind of music do you like? Play something for me.
Second thing was, he didn't really show me anything I couldn't have gotten out of book or offline on my own. I've been doing that for a couple years and while I'm not a good player, I am still making progress.
I'm not sure what I expected, but whatever it was, I came away less than satisfied.
It isn't the teaching per se; I've been studying one thing or another all my life, I have no problems having somebody offer knowledge I have to work at learning. I've been in a silat class coming up on a dozen years, started a yoga class this summer.
The question now is, do I try again? Give the guy another shot? Or maybe try another teacher?
When I got a new guitar, I resolved to give it serious attention, and taking lessons seemed to way to go. Now, I'm unsure.
Maybe the autodidact in me wants to make a point. And I wonder, does he have a valid one?
So, the long awaited guitar case finally arrived. Goes well with the osage orange guitar Alan Carruth built, heavy and well-made, should protect the instrument just fine, and it looks waaay cool, with the faux-swamp gator and gold plush lining ...
Okay, I'm done buying stuff for a while. Back to work ...
Yeah, I was born down there and certainly that part of the country has its share of problems, but it was home for a long time, and it also has some good points. The song "Dixie" isn't really PC these days, although I find it amusing that it was supposedly Abraham Lincoln's favorite tune. I like it. Especially that slow version Bobby Horton did for Ken Burns's PBS documentary on The Recent Unpleasantness (though he mistakenly called it "The Civil War ...")
Anyhow, I came up with a slow instrumental version I like and since I wanted to give folks who might find it interesting a chance to hear what the new guitar sounds like, if you want to risk it, go here:
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=431344
Starting Thursday morning next, I begin guitar lessons. Maybe a year or two from now, I'm still around, I can post a link to something better than this poor effort.
For you gearheads, this was recorded straight into my Mac via a Samson CO1U USB mike, using the program GarageBand, exported to iTunes, and then uploaded as a small MP3 file to SoundClick. It's not sweetened, save whatever GarageBand does automatically for its mixdown, and all the finger taps and squeaks are audible.
Me, I'm not so good, but–don't the guitar sound fine?
So, my much-awaited Alan Carruth-built classical guitar arrived today, and, boy, howdy, it is a humdinger!
Those of you who recall seeing me post on this before, please bear with me while I gush a bit:
The guitar has a cedar top, with back and sides of Osage Orange. This is a "trash" wood that Alan says works as a drop-in for rosewood–sounding, somewhere, he says, between Brazilian and Indian. Freshly cut, it has a pumpkin color to it, darkening eventually toward brown.
One of the biggest advantages of such a wood as Osage Orange is that it doesn't start the meter running anywhere near the cost of Brazilian rosewood.
Um. Anyway, the guitar got here, I tuned it up, and it–not to put to fine a point on it–is outstanding. It's pretty basic, the only decoration being a small inlaid owl Alan uses for his logo, on the headstock. Sloane tuners.
I have been fortunate enough, even though I'm not a good player, to lay hands on some very good classical guitars, and Alan's is the equal of any of them, and at considerably less cost.
From time to time, Alan posts in the music newsgroups, regarding various instruments. He really seems to have a handle on the theory–he can talk the talk.
And I'm here to tell you, he can also walk the walk.
Once the strings settle in and I have a chance to fool around with it, I'll record something and put it up on my SoundClick page.
This one will be traveling with me. If I have to leave it behind, it will be stored somewhere as secure as Fort Knox ...
Sure makes up for the case not getting here, yee-haw it does ...
(Clicking or double-clicking on the pictures will make them larger–least it does on Firefox's browser.)
A cautionary tale ...
At the end of March, I decided I needed a new guitar case, in honor of my new guitar which is supposed to be here any day now. Maybe even today ...
I got online and built a virtual case, on Cedar Creek's website. This is a cool feature, by the way–you tell the software what color and finish and hardware you want, and it produces an image. I wound up with brown faux "swamp alligator" on the outside, and gold plush on the interior.
I have one of my classical guitars encased in a Cedar Creek tweed, and it's a fine box–five-ply laminated wood, arch-top, six latches, very sturdy and heavy, and if not quite a top-of-the-line Calton case, a really good deal for about half as much.
So I emailed the sales department, got the price and delivery information, which was four weeks, and then sent a credit card number. Being cautious, I split the card number into two emails, half with one, half with the next.
June rolled around, no case, so I sent another email query.
Seems they hadn't gotten the second email, so they hadn't put the order through, and the salesman had been on the road, so he missed it.
Okay. That could have been my fault. I re-sent the number. First week of June.
Third week in July, having not heard back, I sent another email? What's up?
Salesman got back to me–Sorry about that, my order was still in progress, but things got busy, the shop's volume went up, and the 6-8 week lead time had gone to 8-10 weeks.
Well, okay, since my order went in June 6th, I figured middle of August, right? Maybe another week past that.
So, last week of August, no case, I sent another query, and even though it has been only a few days, so far, no response.
Thus far, this process has run five months. If you discount the first chunk due entirely to my error and restart the clock, that makes it three months, which is still somewhat longer than the slipped delivery of two-to-two-and-a-half months ...
I think Cedar Creek produces well-made and good-looking cases, I like the one I have, but if my experience is any indication, best you be prepared to wait a while if you order one.
Or, "Ho, that's a good one on me ...”
Today's word is "epiphany."
There are several meanings for this one–primary and specific is the religious revelation of Christ to the Gentiles, in the book of Matthew.
A bit more generally, epiphany is a manifestation of a spiritual or supernatural being.
The third meaning is more general still–it is a sudden and usually unexpected realization or insight, the "Aha!" moment when you get something. It's the forehead-slapping, oh-wow! how could I have missed seeing this? second. You come to Jesus, or you come to realize something in a visceral way that, in the moment, is very tangible. Like the sound of a seatbelt latch snicking into place, something clicks! and you are locked in.
Sometimes these moments can be huge. Cosmic consciousness, connection to the divine, a pattern recognition that stretches across your personal universe and alters your life, maybe the lives of everybody around you. Of that moment, you know who you are, what you need to do, and how to do it, and your place in the scheme of things. Nearly every religion I've spent any time studying has this concept, and there are a lot of names for it, nirvana, samadhi, zen, beholding the Divine, attaining bliss, the cosmic thunderbolt, the finger of God, the kundalini risen ...
Most people don't get a lot of those moments. If you get one in a lifetime, you might consider yourself blessed. Or maybe like Cassandra, cursed. But whichever, you won't be the same afterward. The fire anneals and re-tempers you, and you come out different.
The smaller epiphanies, the ones that come as you struggle to understand something, be it emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, physically, are more frequent, less overwhelming, but, as I am discovering, something you can cultivate.
On the one hand, these moments aren't dependable–you don't know when they'll happen.
On the other hand, they are dependable–if you work at it, they are going to happen sooner or later. At least in my experience.
On a typical day, most of my time is spent doing the things most working people do–I get up, get dressed, go to work. In my case, I don't have to get very dressed, and commuting to work involves walking down the hall to my office, but still.
There are several things I do on a typical day that I try to do well: I write, I do pentjak silat, I practice the guitar. (I also interact with my dogs, sometimes hike to the local Safeway, or the post office, and do other errands. And put it all away when my wife comes home from work to be with her. And there are kids and grandkids and other activities, too.)
Of late, I have had several small–or maybe not so small–epiphanies. They are not the end of the journey, but they are mileposts along the path.
One day in silat class, it came home to me that I knew enough of the art to use it. Not mastered, far from it, but during one of those fumbling attempts to add a new piece, I realized that the reason I couldn't do what I wanted in that moment was that I was thinking and not doing. Of course, that's the nature of learning in a class–a new thing can't be internalized the same way a repeated move can. It blossomed in me that, if I wasn't following directions to do-it-this-way, that if I were turned loose and told just do whatever I felt like as the attacker came at me, that I could clean the guy's clock, no problem at all. I had the moves to do it, and they'd be there when I needed them. Simple.
It's not as if I hadn't thought I could before, and it's not as though I won't someday have another Aha! moment that will be different, but that little flash changed the way I felt and moved. Of a second, I was better at it, and I knew it. Right down to my toes.
Same thing happened whilst practicing the guitar. I picked up a new piece of music recently. It wasn't a complex composition, but as I started to play it, it came to me that I could do this, and I could make it sound good. That didn't mean I wouldn't have to work just as hard getting my fingers to go where they were supposed to go as before, but that, in the end, I knew that if I kept it up, I'd learn it, and after a certain amount of time, I'd have it.
These kinds of moments used to happen fairly often in my writing, not as much any more. I think maybe I'm as good as I am apt to get, though now and then, some small bit will flower on the page and I'll grin at it. Of course, I've been writing a lot longer than I have been doing silat or playing the guitar, and there are roads I've been down often enough so I know the scenery. Maybe if I take a different path, I'll see new things.
And my point about all this?
These magic moments are the product of work. They come because you are doing what is necessary to learn something. The timing isn't predictable, but the realization that you can and most like will internalize concepts or movements or feelings as long as you keep plugging away is, for me, a major one. And that one path to the magic is the old Nike TV commercial:
Just do it.
And if you just do it long enough, you will eventually get it.
And there you go. Today's epiphany.
Guitar-makers come in all shapes and sizes: on one end, you have folks like C.F. Martin, the company that produces thousands and thousands of instruments every year. On the other hand, you have the one-person-shop luthiers, who might make but a dozen instruments in that time, plus or minus a few.
Martin makes fine guitars, but if you want a classsical guitar much better than entry level, you want to find a luthier who makes them by hand. The good ones–and there are far too many for me to list here–you'll have to wait a while until they can get to you. (There are some luthiers in their fifties who have stopped taking new orders because they worry they won't live long enough to finish the ones they have on order–they might be ten or twelve years out.)
Among those who are outstanding makers, I will mention two: Alan Carruth and J.S. Bogdanovich. These men can make for you a concert-quality instrument at a reasonable price and in a relatively short time. There are links to them in my list on this page, and if you are looking for a fine classical guitar at a cost that won't require robbing a bank to pay it, please, go check them out. Neither man could make a bad instrument if they tried.
Both men are acknowledged experts in their field, though both would be quick to wave that off. Some people in the guitar realm–me included–have been trying to get Alan Carruth to write a book for years, and it is my hope that he does someday, because he is a wealth of information on the care and feeding of stringed instruments, and not just guitars. Talks the talks, walks the walk.
Jack Bogdanovich, who also can walk his talk, has written a book, just out: Classical Guitar Making: A Modern Approach to Traditional Design, and if you have any interest in the subject, this is a gotta-have-it book.
I'm a terrible craftsman, it's hard for me to figure out which end of a screwdriver to use, but with this book, I think maybe even I could figure out how to build a classical guitar.
The volume is chock full of pictures, detailed how-tos, drawings, and the hard-learned knowledge of years of practice. If you like guitars, you'll enjoying having this on your shelf. If you think you might want to build one, you can't pass it up. At $29.95, it is a steal, oversize format, more than 300 pp.
You can find Jack's book here
Guitar players are very picky–excuse the pun–about their strings. Those of you who play nylon stringed classical or flaminco guitars might be interested in checking out Aquila's offerings, which feature for the trebles something called "nylgut." This is a kind of nylon composite that is supposed to have the tonal qualities of gut, but the longevity of nylon.
Recently, I bought a couple sets of these, on for my guitars, cedar-topped classicals, and they certainly do make a difference. The longevity remains to be seen, but the tone is far superior and the volume noticeably increased over the standard D'Addario strings I have been using. They make a good guitar sound better, and they make a lesser guitar sound much better.
They come in several varieties. The basic model, Alabastro, includes the nylgut trebles and silver-plated basses. There are more expensive ones that have completely silver wound basses. (You can also get real gut and silk strings from the same maker, but those cost a fortune.)
None of them are cheap. I use the basic Alabastros in normal tension. (Classical players don't buy strings by gauge like steel string players, but by tension–normal, hard, tension extra-hard, etc.)
David Kilpatrick, in the U.K., also sells them, and he's a good guy who will make you a deal if you buy multiple sets.
And in the U.S., you can find them here: Aquila USA.
These places also sell lute and uke strings.
And what music am I endeavoring to learn to play upon my guitar to some theoretical good effect?
Well. Hereunder the instrumentals: (in the interests of full disclosure, on a few of these, I do try and sing along:)
Guitar Clerk’s Bane, 1969
(This is a quick montage of: Smoke on the Water, Stairway to Heaven,
House of the Risin’ Sun, Classical Gas, and Blackbird)
Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring
Greensleeves
Yesterday
Bridge Over Troubled Water
Romanza
The Minuet Baroque Down
Here, There and Everywhere
In My Life
Cast Your Fate to the Wind
Bouree in Em
Here Comes the Sun
Fleur de Leis
Canon in D
Maleguana
Hey, Jude
Cady Jo
Theme from The Godfather (Speak Softly, Love)
Dixie
The Water is Wide
(Dropped-C)
Ashokan Farewell
(Dropped-C)
None of these can I claim to have mastered, but pretty much I can get from the start to the end on most of them, some of the time, from memory. (Not quite on Ashokan Farewell, yet.) Those in the public domain, or ones I've written, I sometimes share on Soundclick! The copyrighted work I'll need to get licenses for, if I ever feel like posting 'em or sticking them on a CD.
I do have a whole bunch of songs that I strum or fingerpick whilst singing–well, more like croaking–along, ranging from The Kinks Lola, to Randy Newman's Sail Away, to some I've written, but since I'm focusing more on how to play the guitar, I don't spend as much time learning those as I do the instrumentals.
Somebody asked me recently why I play guitar. Like a lot of stuff in my life, it falls into some familiar categories: It's creative, it's fun, it's learning something new, it's a discipline, I love music–the usual.
When I got my first guitar at sixteen, it was because the folk movement in the U.S. had blossomed, and I had visions of myself on stage as part of Peter, Paul, and Perry ...
Never wanted to be a rock star, per se. Like a lot of baby boomers, I was drawn to rock during the time I came of age, and grew up along with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, but I played acoustic–nylon strings–and was trying to change the world, so I was big on Message: "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" "Blowin' in the Wind, and even "Eve of Destruction ..."
"Hey, Jude" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water" came later.
All in all, I would rather have been Randy Newman than Mick Jagger.
Um. Anyway, at sixteen, I learned three major chords and one minor one, and started strumming and singing and writing dreadfully-dreary-and-sincere folk-and-protest music, which I'd sing to anybody who'd listen at the drop of a hat.
Me and twenty thousand other guys around town.
Buddy of mine got a guitar, so he and I started collaborating on dreadfully-dreary-and-sincere folk-and-protest music. We couldn't sing, couldn't play, and couldn't write, but other than that and a complete lack of performing talent, we were just like Bob Dylan. We had guitars, didn't we?
My buddy and I, and then his second wife, formed a trio. We sang in a couple of coffee shops, at hootnannies–go look that one up, kids–and even cut a demo tape of our material once. Gave the tape to an agent in L.A. and I expect it was in his trash basket before the door closed behind us. They say all you need is three chords and the truth, but I think you need more. We didn't have it; we were, not to put too fine a point on it, awful.
Worse, we didn't know how awful we were. We thought we were Simon and Garfunkel, or Lennon and McCartney, at least as good as they were. We just needed a break.
Being bad is one thing; not knowing how bad you are? Priceless ...
But–being young and stupid offers one hope: You might grow out of it. And I pretty much did.
After my buddy got sent to Leavenworth for a long vacation–another story–I parked my guitar next to the file cabinet and let moss grow on it for most of the next thirty-five years. Now and then I'd get it out, usually when I was depressed. Sing a few sad songs, then put it away. I think I changed the strings on it three times in three decades. I didn't learn anything new.
Then one day, in the middle of a book I was slogging my way through, knee-deep in the Really-sorry-I-took-the-job swamp, I scraped the mold off the guitar and decided it was time to actually learn how to play it. I was writing for a living, which some folks think is creative, but I wanted to do something just for fun, and not profit.
Unfortunately, I won't live long enough to master the guitar. I got a copy of "Guitar for Dummies," and started learning some classical stuff, some fingerpicking material I liked, couple blues riffs, and am even writing new songs. The difference is, this time, I know how bad I am, and I'm not looking to stand on the stage at the Garden–or even the Onion–and wow the crowd. Not my path, and I don't mind at all.
I am getting a little better, SoundClick! provides an outlet and that's enough. (Sure, there's always the fantasy that Springsteen will hear something I've written and cover it, but that's like the winning-the-lottery fantasy: not a reason to go looking for a Ferrari.)
It is true that I once sang "Hey, Jude," live with Paul McCartney.
Yeah–me and twenty thousand other people, at the Rose Garden ...
This is a classical piece by Barrios that demonstrates tremolo, a technique of giving a guitar string sustain by rapidly plucking it repeatedly. In this version, Canadian-Romanian guitarist Ioana Gandrabur plays "Una limosna por el amor de dios," usually just called "Limosna."
It is perhaps a bit more remarkable that the woman was born blind ...
And Now Some Soothing Classical Music
To go along with Jake's uke, here's a kid who spends a lot of time in his room ...
If you haven't seen this before, I thought I'd offer a little musical interlude. Enjoy.
You see a little thread sticking out, you pull it, and you never know where it will lead ...
I was looking the McMeen music book, mentioned a posting previously, and one of the arrangements is of "Ashokan Farewell." You might remember the Ken Burn's documentary The Civil War, and if you do, you will recall this song, because it was pretty much the main theme, played over and over in many variations throughout the series.
It's a beautiful and haunting tune, and the first one I'll try to learn from the book. Perfect compliment to the slow version of "Dixie" I sometimes play.
I hadn't really thought about the song before, assuming it was a period piece, but I wanted to know more about it, so I went online to check it out.
It's not a period piece at all. It was written in 1982 by Jay Unger, as a kind of Scottish lament, in honor of a fiddle and dance camp held at Ashokan, not far from Woodstock, New York. Apparently the main part of the town now lies under a reservoir that supplies drinking water for New York City.
Ken Burns heard the album, liked it, and thus how it got to become a kind of Civil War anthem. It was the only non-period music used.
I find this kind of thing fascinating. For more information, check out Jay Unger's FAQ on "Ashokan Farewell."
No, Dropped-D is not a rap singer, it's a way of tuning a guitar–five of the strings are kept standard, and the sixth string, the bass E, is lowered a step, to D, thus the open strings are DADGBE, going from six to one.
There are all kinds of such tunings, and mostly I stay away from them because they require that you learn new chord shapes and I barely know any in the plain-vanilla standard Elvis-Ate-Dynamite-Good-By-Elvis versions. (To give dropped-D even more of a resonant rumble, you can first lower every string a full step, to DGCFAD, then drop the D to a C–CGCFAD ...)
However, there are some songs or tunes that a simple Dropped-D tuning will muchly improve. I am working on an arrangement by El McMeen, an acoustic guitarist of extraordinary skill and musicality, of the old standard "The Water is Wide." Lovely the way he plays it.
El has now come out with a book, from Mel Bay, full of arrangements in this tuning. If you are thinking about moving into alternate tunings, this is the easiest one to try, and you should get this book: The Art of Dropped D Guitar
You might also poke around his website and pick up some of his CD's. Guy is, no two ways about it, a terrific guitarist.
There doesn't seem to be a precise definition of "filk," but as I understand it, it is folk music with science fiction or fantasy roots.
Generally. Filkers sometimes write songs about dogs, cats, or their cars, but more or less, that's what it is. And while it is not a folk song per se, I consider the opening number from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (just after "Lips, Lips, Lips!") Science Fiction to be among the most well-known examples of filk.
Some of these songs are funny, some serious, and many of them are well-written and sung. Some very talented musicians in the filk community, though I am not among them. By and large, even though "normal" is not the first word that springs to mind, an audience at a typical science fiction convention is apt to be the brightest group of folks you'll be around. Any joke, no matter how esoteric the reference, somebody in the group will get. Fans are a diverse lot, but most of them are literate, polite, and sharp, at least in my experience, and the smartest of them can run with anybody, anywhere.
I have dabbled in the filk form. And given that I'm going to a convention wherein there will be folks bringing their guitars and whatnot, I thought I'd dust off my contribution to the genre.
I composed this for a buddy who was a television animation writer of some note–he has written hundreds and hundreds of episodes for scores of kidvid shows, even won an Emmy for his work.
The God of Saturday Morning
Well, there goes Flash Gordon, bein' followed by the Hulk/
A passel of Smurfs are right behind/
Shazam and Hi, Ho Silver! and Isis flies again/
And Tarzan still swings upon his vine.
Chorus:
He's the god of Saturday morning/
He's fuckin' up your little kiddie's mind/
He says he does it for the money/
But his karma is runnin' out of time.
The Network says no violence but lots of jeopardy/
The animator screams there ain't no way/
The producer justs says "Rewrite!" the only word he knows/
The censors frown and won't let him use "gay."
(Chorus)
He wants to write a novel, but the rent is overdue/
His television set is on the blink/
He says just one more season, that's all he's gonna do/ '
Til then, he's gonna see a shrink.
(Chorus, and out: Yeah, yeah, his karma is runnin' out of time/ Whoa, whoa, his karma is running out of tiiiimmme ...)
Some years ago, there was a PBS television show starring James Burke, called Connections. Burke would come out, and through a series of fascinating links, show how something like the flying buttress on a medieval castle wall had a direct-through line to the invention of the picture tube in a TV set.
Something like the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon ...
Our younger dog is named "Layla," after the Eric Clapton song. (Actually it was the Derek and the Dominos song, but that's another story.) We've always loved the tune and the name.
If you don't know the story behind it, Clapton wrote Layla for Patti Boyd, who was, at the time, married to his best friend, George Harrison. He had fallen in love with her, but since she was married to Harrison, that was a problem. Supposedly he also wrote Bell Bottom Blues, from the same album, because Patti gave him a pair of flare-leg jeans ...)
Harrison, meanwhile, had written his wife a song: Something (in the Way She Moves) which wound up on the last Beatle album, Abbey Road.
Later, Harrison and his wife divorced, and Clapton and Boyd got together and were married. Whereupon Clapton wrote another song for her, Wonderful Tonight.
I had known about the genesis of Layla for years, but only discovered the other songs connected to Boyd whilst doing some research into the name. My wife and I found some old pictures of Boyd in a Beatle book we have, and were puzzled: She was attractive enough, but wasn't a stunning beauty or anything as a young woman; what was it she had that drew two of the biggest rock 'n' roll artists ever to the point they married her? (She was married to Harrison for eleven years, to Clapton for a decade.)
Actually, both John Lennon and Mick Jagger confessed to having serious crushes on Patti, as well ...
Meanwhile, Patti's sister, Jennifer, was the singer/songerwriter Donovan's muse, most notably in the song Jennifer Juniper. And she went on to marry Mick Fleetwood ...
Something about the Boyd girls ...
Saturday was my daughter-in-law's birthday, and we went to her house for a barbecue. Her parents, Tim and Angela, were here, visiting from England, and we sat on the new deck my son had built, drinking wine in the cool-but-sunny spring evening and chatting.
The subject of music education for children came up. I allowed as how I had been exposed to the ukulele in junior high, which led the conversation to a British entertainer well-known for playing one of these, George Formby, who died in 1961.
Yes, I'd heard of him. Which led me to speak of George Harrison, who, I had heard from Paul McCartney's onstage patter during one of his concerts, had been a fan of Formby's, and who had amassed a great collection of ukuleles. Harrison had given one of these ukes to Paul and taught him how to play Something on the instrument. Which he then did for the audience.
Which led to Angela–I'm not sure what that our legal relationship would be–an in-law once removed?–telling us that she had gone to school with George Harrison's first wife, Patti. They were classmates and friends.
Which led to me wondering aloud what it was that Patti had that caused so many rock stars to orbit around her. Well, she said, Patti wasn't gorgeous, neither was she the most intellectual of young women. And while Angela, being very circumspect, actually never said aloud what it was, I think I got the gist of it, and it was most likely what I had guessed–being a man and all ...
Connections. Gotta love 'em.
You Love That Guitar More Than You Love Me ...
I happened across this in the local bookstore yesterday, and it's hard to imagine a guitar player who won't find something to like in it.
Guitar Man: Or, You Love That Guitar More Than You Love Me, by Will Hodgkinson, is one the best books on why to play the guitar I've ever seen. Touching, amusing–might-have-to-change-your-pants funny in spots, it chronicles the adventures of a thirty-something British writer who decides he need to learn how to play, and who sets himself a goal of playing in front of an audience in six months. And some of the players he interviews and tries to learn from along the way.
My edition is from Da Capo Press, just out in the states, apparently, though it saw publication in the U.K. in 2006
It is worth buying just for the scene where Will decides to get out of his basement and go into he woods to practice, to commune with nature using his acoustic guitar. Time I got to the end of the scene, I could hardly breathe I was laughing so hard.
If you play guitar, get it. You'll like it. If you are a good player, it will bring back memories of when you weren't.
If you are a beginner, it will give you hope ...
Blind Whitebread Perry
In musical circles, if one does covers of another artist's work, one must pay for the privilege. If you cut an album and decide to offer Sir Paul's song "Yesterday" on your CD, and depending on how many copies you press, it will cost you a certain amount in royalties for each copy.
Typically, this is about nice cents each. You get this mechanical license by going through the agency that reps the artist for such things, places like BMI, ASCAP, Harry Fox.
The music industry, finally having come into the 21st Century, has now included MP3s and other internet media in this licensing process, although this is somewhat tricky, and the cost is about the same. I'll get to the tricky part in a minute.
I bring this up because I am learning how to play El McMeen's arrangement of Jay Ungar's fiddle tune, "Ashokan Farewell" on my guitar. Assuming I ever get it down, I want to post it on my SoundClick page. If I allow people to download MP3s of the song, then I need to send Harry Fox nine cents every time somebody does so. (Practically speaking, what one does is get a license before posting the tune, based upon one's best estimate of how many people might download it. If you figure five hundred, that runs you $45. There is a minimum of 150, and so if you figure that maybe nine people will download it, too bad.)
License is good for a year, and I suppose that if fewer people download it than you figure, you might get change back, but I dunno.
If you are selling the MP3, you might make a profit. If you are giving them away for free, not so much ...
Since this would be the only piece on my site that isn't public domain, or stuff I wrote, I figured I should pony up, so I have gotten the license. Now all I have to do is learn the piece ...
Oh, and that tricky thing I mentioned? If you don't allow downloads, if the material is streaming-audio only? Apparently it doesn't count, though some quirk in the way the rules are worded. So somebody can log on and listen without getting the MP3 and it's no harm, no foul.
It's 1986: Imagine you are a talented young classical guitarist who has gotten a chance to be in a master class with the living legend, Segovia Himself. You get to sit in front of the Maestro and play a piece. (In front of a couple hundred other crack classical guitarists watching.)
But the Maestro is having a bad day, he's cranky, and he interrupts you constantly and eventually, he ... orders you off the stage.
For more than twenty years, the story goes around about how some hotshot punk got up in front of Segovia, gave him attitude and lip, and got booted for his surly and snide remarks.
But: somebody taped it, and lo, after all these years, the tape shows up on YouTube, and hey, the young guy–who isn't you, but in point of fact, is Michael Chapdelaine, now a master guitarist in his own right–is shown to be not the least bit disrespectful, and in fact, the epitome of grace under pressure.
After the lesson, Chapdelaine could not have been any more gracious, and was a damn sight more than I'd have been in his shoes.
Check it out on YouTube.
And his hair was maybe not so perfect ...
I've been a long-time fan of Warren Zevon's music. For years, my buddy Reaves and I would sign letters, and then emails with snippets from Zevon's songs–mostly "Werewolves of London," or "Lawyers, Guns, and Money."
Lately, I've been on a jag whereupon I've been reading rock biographies of folks from back in the day. Read several about the Beatles; Dylan, Baez, and the 4th Street folk-rock crowd from the Village; the SoCal Hotel California groups–Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell. Donovan's autobiography. Randy Newman's. And the most recent one, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, about Zevon. He passed away a few years back, and his last album is hard listening–he wrote the songs after he knew he was dying, and toward the end, he didn't have much left, he could barely sing. Lotta well-known folks in the biz turned out to play on that one.
I'm about halfway through the book. If the biography is anywhere close to accurate–and it seems to come mostly from friends and family and people he worked with–he was, for most of his early days, a mean drunk, heavy doper, prone to violent, jealous rages, and somebody who thumped his various wives and/or girlfriends around when he was soused or stoned.
If you had known the man up until he was in his early thirties, you might have thought he was a genius of a songwriter–but a total asshole. Talent only excuses so much, and then it doesn't matter how brilliant you are ...
I'm hoping it is going to turn around soon, but it's really sad so far
Send Lawyers, Guns, and Money ...
So, I finished the bio of Warren Zevon, written by his ex-wife Crystal.
Just before he turned forty, Zevon got clean and straight, and he stopped being a dope-fiend drunken asshole --
And became just a plain asshole ...
I love the guy's music. Right up there with Randy Newman. And he had a lot of people who loved him, but near as I can tell tell, he fucked nearly every one of them over on this trip. Especially his women, all of whom he cheated on with almost determined regularity, and most of whom stayed with him a lot longer than they should have. Sex became his drug of choice, until the end, when he went back to booze and legally-supplied drugs, for his cancer.
What he had was his brilliance as a writer and his musical craftsmanship, which was, by all accounts, outstanding. Everybody admired his way with words and his ability to pick up a guitar or sit down at a piano and make magic.
But: What an unhappy man he seemed. Insecure in the extreme, jealous, lacking any semblance of self-discipline, well on his way down the road to hell most of his life.
So sad.
People cut him a lot of slack because he was a musical genius; too much so. Maybe if somebody had been able to reach him, he might have turned out differently. But, according to the book, anybody who was not completely for him, he cut off, he would not hear any criticism of his work or his life, and that's just tragic, in the classic sense of that word.
At least he left the music behind.
I heard this one a while back and for some reason it came to mind today. Best appreciated by folks who play stringed musical instruments.
So the guy telling the story goes to a flea market, and there on a table is a fairly good acoustic guitar for a really good price. Guy picks it up, it's way out of tune, and the tuning gears are all frozen.
He looks at the seller. "Yeah, my brother's guitar. He bought it, got tired of having to tune it every time he played. So he got it just perfect, then he super-glued the tuners so it would stay that way ..."
According to a survey done by Acoustic Guitar Magazine, hereunder the top twenty-five pieces guitarists play (or want to learn how to play) in the USA. At one time or another, I could manage about ten of them.
Acoustic Guitar’s Top 25 Songs
1. “Blackbird” The Beatles
2. “Tears in Heaven” Eric Clapton
3. “Aerial Boundaries” Michael Hedges
4. “Layla” Eric Clapton
5. “Classical Gas” Mason Williams
6. “Fire and Rain” James Taylor
7. “Here Comes the Sun” The Beatles
8. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” Bob Dylan
9. “Embryonic Journey” Jorma Kaukonen
10. “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” Richard Thompson
11. “Daughters” John Mayer
12. “County Down” Phil Keaggy
13. “Little Martha” The Allman Brothers
14. “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” Crosby, Stills, and Nash
15. “The Boxer” Simon and Garfunkel
16. “Windy and Warm” Chet Atkins
17. “Crash” Dave Matthews
18. “When Will I” Monte Montgomery
19. “Candy Man” Reverend Gary Davis
20. “Stairway to Heaven” Led Zeppelin
21. “Tangled Up in Blue” Bob Dylan
22. “Wish You Were Here” Pink Floyd
23. “Black Mountain Rag” Doc Watson
24. “Harvest Moon” Neil Young
25. “Hotel California” The Eagles
When guitar players go into music stores, they tend to want to pick up the axes and play a few riffs. The more popular a song is, the more likely it is that–if you are a clerk in a guitar store–you will quickly get real sick of hearing it, because every Clapton wanna-be who comes in will sure as hell play it.
Recall the sign on the guitar store wall in Wayne's World–No Stairway to Heaven ... ?
Now it's all Green Day and Prince, but back in my day, it was Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin and Beatles, and for the acoustic guys, Mason Williams.
I thought it would be fun to put together a little parody of this, so I came up with something called "Guitar Clerk's Bane, 1969. These are some of the Oh-crap-not-again! pieces the guys behind the counter at Music City were hearing in the late sixties.
Maybe the title-link will work. If not, you can go to my blog and look for it there.
And, of Course, There's This ...
Stairway to Gilligan ...
This is burn-'em-at-the-stake wrong, but for a fan of either the Beatles or Led Zep, entirely too funny.
So there's a big push to get out information on methamphetamine–aka crank–this week. A TV show about it is on, lotta coverage.
It's a nasty, nasty drug. As John Sebastian used to say, if you are going to indulge in recreational chem, you should stick with the stuff that grows from the ground.
Meth is bad shit. Even doing it once can screw up your brain chemistry. Don't go there.
I thought I'd take this opportunity to offer my song, "Methamphetamine Mama" up for any filmmaker looking for a catchy, hymn-like warning against the evils of the devil's crystal.
You can hear it by going to SoundClick–copy and paste in your browser: <http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandid=431344> or there is a player on my blog. Upon which you can listen to a score of songs I have posted there, too:
If I Can't Have You
The NFU's jam of Walter Donaldson's 1920's classic. Rough, but we're working on it.