Spotlight: Album Reviews 02- Derek Trucks band

Derek Trucks-



has, in my opinion, two claims to fame. He's widely regarded as the only one to closely approximate the tone and style of Duane Almann. And his wife is Susan Tedeschi who, of course, is widely regarded as using Derek as a claim to fame.

But I gotta say, southern rock rarely does it for me. Derek really should be claiming relationship to Susan. Despite her lesser skills with the guitar, in the medium of the blues, it's all about what you do with it. And Susan, with a straightforward Fender Twin and Telecaster tone and a whiskey dark voice to make Bonnie Raitte jealous, does quite a bit.

I tried Derek out based on his claim and buzz in various guitar forums. And I have to say...

Yawn. Not enough there to play it again.

Spotlight: Album Reviews 01- J.Geils Band, Full House Live

Ah, the J. Geils band.



The great band that never quite made it to the top tier of classic rock fame.

But. But. But! Everyone knows Whammer Jammer from the opening Magic Dick harmonica lick. It came from this album, a frenetic over-energized collection of boys from Boston cranking out electric blues in what must have been a beer-soaked, smoke-filled, couple-thousand seat armory somewhere in the heartland.

Full House helps you feel the vibe from a band that was obviously better live than in the studio. If you're familiar with their classic hits- Love Stinks, NightTime, ComeBack, and Centerfold; you won't recognize a thing on this. But if you crank up your local classic rock station every time you hear Peter Wolf's spazzed monologue introduction to "Musta Got Lost," then Full House is an album for you to discover.

Mind you, "Musta Got Lost" is on a different live album. "Full House" is early in their career, but the mix and the energy are beyond compare. Go with it!

Spotlight: Album Reviews

I've always loved music. I have 500 or so record albums (yes, in a box in the basement. What of it?) I have 500+ cds. Hundreds of mixed tapes. If I had spare time and spare change in a spare town on a business trip, I'd find record shops and pick up a few missing pieces now and again.

Then, well, it all stopped. It was the perfect storm of other distractions -golf and kids and, come the mid nineties, the ability to copy cds on a computer. I still remember the 486 Mrs. Toadroller and I purchased after getting married. Whoo-hoo! It had a cd player in it. That day and age, it didn't yet have a burner, but at least I could play music while working on the computer with its dial-up modem and dual boot to OS/2 Warp 3.0. Have I mentioned I'm a geek?

Anyway...

Fast forward to 2003 or so and the world had gone mp3 crazy. I was still setting up and tweaking my mega stereo system in the "listening room" of our finished basement and buying audiophile amplifiers and speakers on eBay. But at the same time, I bought a Rio Karma 20gb mp3 player- the first serious challenger to the iPod (and the first to seriously die a sad death in the marketplace. Remember Rio?) with twice the battery life and ability to play wma, mp3, au, ogg-vorbis, flac, heck- it played formats no-one has heard from since. It came with a docking bay with a pulsing blue light, RCA line outs and-get this- a DHCP client so you could control it through IP. I mean, the little tyke was a music server, for crying out loud. Oh, and 2/3rds the price of the iPod.

How did this fail in the marketplace? I don't know. What a great little unit. I still have it plugged in downstairs and it limps along, playing background music on random. Still has a better search, scroll, insert-into now-playing capability than my Zune.

I spent a week in the office with a spare old laptop, ripping my cd collection into the appropriate wma formats, grabbing the artist and image content from cddb or whatever it was that the ripper (was it Media Monkey?) used, and built up my colection. One of the nifty features of the Karma was its ability to play music by any old tag, including the year of the recording.

So there I was, looking through the collection- 400 some-odd songs from '87, 450 from '88, etc. Clicking along- '91 had 200 or so - a real drop. '92, 93, 94 and on? Something like 100 songs combined.

Anyway...

This is a long way about explaining my pursuit of new music really waned for a long time. Sure, I'd hear something and enjoy it, but I really stopped paying attention. To this day I'm shocked to find out that something current I'm listing too, feeling I'm pretty hip with the kids out there, was recorded in '97. I mean, that's 12 years ago of this writing. Aerosmith's big comeback was in '85, people. Ragdoll was NEW Aerosmith, and now it' s coming up on its twenty-fifth anniversary! Scary.

Anyway...

The point of this post was to do some quick album reviews on music I've been listening to or trying out of late. So here goes- the Toadroller showing his eclectic and insightful musical tastes in brief reviews to the world that has passed him by. I think I'll do them as separate posts. Thanks for tuning in. Please stand by.

Ted Kennedy has Passed

Initial reaction?

Good.

The first public benefit of this blessed event is that the skyway bridge from the parking garage to the terminal at Boston Logan airport has been rendered suddenly serene and respectfully quiet. Those of you who have travelled through Logan will recall Ted’s warm and cheery, if garbled (Teddy did slur his speech- sauced or not) welcome to “His home town,” encouraging you to see the sights including Haaa-vid.

I have admitted before that, while not a cynic, I am certainly an experienced idealist. This has, in a form of efficiency to make the Germans jealous, led to jaded opinions as a form of saving time and effort, and avoiding further letdowns from society. That said, I’ve not been able to refrain from muttering “Shut up, Teddy,” every time I’ve travelled that skyway in recent years. Helps vent the larger picture frustration at any and everything else I've heard from the man in the last couple of decards.

Today, however, the skyway held museum-like, library silence. Pure bliss. Until I sat down at the gate to await my flight. Guess what was on CNN blaring through the concourse? Hmm? Ted's funeral procession. Or was it Irish wake coverage? I certainly couldn't subject myself to the torture of looking at the screen to find out. Headphones on!

Ah well. At least he shut up. A month or two from now he’ll still be dead. Along with Michael Jackson and Joe Piscopoe. Or is he in Canada?

And the Skyway? I'm sure John Kerry's iPhone is ringing; he can't be too busy these days.

Liberty

Not only is Liberty worth defending to the death, it's also worth all the little inconveniences (you know, saving, paying your own way, caring for your family, failing when you fail, picking yourself back up...) that come with being responsible for oneself.

Yes, you can!

Doing my best...

This was on my coporate travel reservations site:
"Go Green • Consider Your Environment • Offset Your Emissions"

My office is painted green. After much consideration , I have to say that I like my environment. I don't know how much I can offset my emissions- I like to eat baked beans.

A disposable coffee cup recently implored that
"only if everyone does their part, every day, can we succeed!" after some mumbo jumbo about their environmental stance; implying that we can save the earth.

Well, it looks like I can doom the planet by simply taking a day off. I took two cups, becuase the coffee was so hot that you couldn't hold the cup without some kind of insulation. Ironic, eh?

Just doing my part.

National Healthcare in the year 2274...

"In the year 2274...the survivors of war, overpopulation and pollution are living in a great domed city, sealed away from the forgotten world outside. Here, in an ecologically balanced world, mankind lives only for pleasure, freed by the servo-mechanisms which provide everything. There's just one catch: Life must end at thirty unless reborn in the fiery ritual of Carrousel."

"CARROUSEL IS A LIE! LIFECLOCKS ARE A LIE!"

A positive thought...

They repealed prohibition, didn't they?



Just a reminder that foolishness can be undone if necessary. Like, say, Sarbanes Oxley, Cap and Trade, Cash for Clunkers, Nationalized Healthcare, Social Security...

I'm just saying that our constitution (at least for the moment) lets us slap our collective foreheads and say "what were we thinking?"

Keep smiling!

State of the Union

I feel like an ant in a country that's gone grasshoppers.

Come on people, snap out of it!

“Capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom.” —Milton Friedman

“Our economy rests on a three-legged stool—political freedom, economic freedom, and moral restraint.” —Michael Novak

Guitar Collection

This post is probably long overdue. Here's the collection today. Starting in the upper left and going down the first collumn, we have:
Hamer Stellar 1 (HH) Korean
Kramer Striker 422 (Quad and 2 dual rails) Korean
Kramer Focus reborn as a Strat parts-o-caster (SSS) Korea and parts unkown
Peavey EVH Wolfgang Special (HH) MIA
Hamer SATP90 (P90s) Chinese (my number one)

Second Column, top to bottom:
Hamer Standard (HH) Korean
Xaviere xv800 Tele (SS) Korean?
Ibanez Roadstar II rs135, (SSS) Japan. It is required that I say it has a nice neck.
Nelsonic Starliner LP Clone (HH) Korean?
Gretsch Rambler (S, neck) MIA 1958

Not pictured: Daughter's pink Squire, Taylor 514ce Acoustic (on loan to me brother so he can soak in the goodness, then buy his own acoustic), and the obligatory Squire Precision Bass. Oh, and Four, under construction in Miramar FL. Come on, Birger!

At some point, I'll blog about each of these as, like children, they're all unique.

Throwing me for a Curve

This was one of those "well, duh!" moments which be came a "way cool!" moment. Here's what led up to that moment.

I don't drive much but around town. When I take a business trip, however, I'll drive to the airport in Portland, Manchester, or Boston, trips of one to three hours depending on traffic and rest stops. In those long drives, I like to catch up on music or audio books. More specifically, I'll batch up a whole bunch of Dave Ramsey podcasts and then listen to them.

My car has a great stereo- 6 disk cd in the trunk, am/fm/cassette, volume/seek controls right on the steering wheel. With my Zune mp3 player, I just plug into a cassette adapter, choose the music or podcast I want to play, and off I go.

But I've also got a Blackberry Curve cell phone. For Christmas, Santa left behind an 8gb memory chip for it, and I've loaded it up with a few thousand songs. Without the best in usability and maintaining content, the phone does an acceptable job of being cell phone, music player, and a poor-man's GPS (way to go, Google Maps!). But my driver's seat becomes a spider-web of cables, headsets, and small media serving devices filling every cup-holder and storage bin.

When an email or phone call comes in, if I catch it it's because of the interference it sets up with the radio- you know, the buzzing deet-da-deet-da-deet static . Then I've got to kill the radio or mp3 player, fish out the phone, answer it, play cat's cradle with the phone's ear phone/mic combo, and pray that the volume is loud enough to cover the road noise.

Last night, on the long swim back home from a customer demo in the Boston area, I went through that whole exercise on a call with Mrs. Toadroller. My headset was unfortunately buried in my computer bag, so I was trying to do the neck craning/hold the phone up thing. I'd turn the volume up to hear her, and then my boy Jack would scream on her end, piercing my ear drums. After a while, I fumbled for the tinny, tiny speakerphone capability and then snuggled the phone into my sun-visor above me. Ahh, hands free. But still, hard to carry on the conversation.

And then it occured to me, "well, duh!"

My Zune had been playing through the cassette adaptor; the headset out on the Blackberry Curve is a standard 1/8" stereo plug, with an extra ring for microphone in. I might not have a mic-in, but it was worth a shot. I yanked the cassette adaptor from the Zune, plugged it into the Blackberry Curve, and carried on the conversation.

Mrs. Toadroller (and my boy Jack) were now being broadcast in crystal-clear stereo through the car radio. And I mean clear- you could hear him playing with the faucet in the background. With the phone sitting on my lap, she could hear me just fine. Boom, like that. My voice into the phone's built in mic; her voice through the headset out jack and into the car stereo, with volume control on the steering wheel.

Way cool! No blue tooth borg-assimilation head units with blinking lights or expensive installs needed.

The best thing is that I can do the iPhone scenario with it. I can be jamming along with my Blackberry Curve playing the tunes through the cassette adaptor, and when a phone call comes in, it will pause the music, play the ringer tone, and I can accept the call and carry on without switching units or fussing with cables. When the call is done, hit the phone's end button and the music starts up again. Ta dah! I'm a PC and I'm rocking like a teenager, but with a nicer car.

Now if I could find an all you can eat music subscription service like Zune's Marketplace and a better media player/synchronization toolset for the Blackberry, I can leave the Zune behind and remove yet another device from the travel kit. It used to be CD player, Noise Cancelling Headphones, spare AA batteries and 10 of your favorite CDs for long trips. Now it can be cell phone, headset, and an adaptor cable.

By the way... In the dark, the Curve's LCD display makes for a handy near-field flashlight, lighting up the front seat quite well for 15, 30, or 60 seconds at a time, depending on how you have your backlight settings configured.

Nice Stockings

Here's a photo I'm proud of. (click for full size)

I noticed (it's hard to miss) the sun on my daughter Bridget's legs, so I took a few different shots. The picture is as framed, without any cropping or post processing. I suppose a little cropping wouldn't hurt, but I give thought to the framing of a picture when I take it and am generally pleased with the results.

Practice pays off with an insight

Over the last month or so, I've been practicing scales. Sitting with a metronome and running up and down different modes of a scale might sound boring (and it can be), but ten to twenty minutes at a shot is bearable and builds a solid base for the future.

Besides, I'm not crazy. I'd change it up: I'd make up little games like one finger on the left hand, jumping all over the fretboard- up the scale at this position, down the scale at another, cross over on the 2nd string. Always on the beat. I'd ramp the tempo up and down. Switch from 8th notes to 16th notes. Hammer hard on a transition that was hard. Work on it until I got it and then switch to a different mode and work in its hard transitions. Do three note step runs, five note step runs. Run a bar at 16th notes and then pause and ping for a few notes before digging back in. With some imagination (and a wee bit of gin) you can make up new games to entertain you for a while.

Playing with a metronome is good, but a drum machine is even better. It helps you count the beat and you can focus on hitting the note with the snare, adding accents and character to the note rather than just hitting it on time. Muffle, pinch harmnonic, clean, soft, hard. And playing clean through your amp reveals the misses that an overdriven sound can hide.

Regardless, when warmed up I'm capable of working the metronome with plucked 16th notes at a tempo of 90 beats per minute which, when you do the math, is six notes a second. Kind of a milestone. I'm no shredder, but that, to me, is pretty darn good for actuallly picking each note, not just hammering on and off through a scale run.

Its the kind of foundation that will let me, in a real playing situation, pull myself up to the tempo of the band and surprise myself with a clean run.

Which brings me to the insight and the payoff. I came across this simple lesson earlier today and it made perfect sense.



I couldn't wait to experiment though I had to (work, errands, dinner). My month of ramping up had left me with nothing if not an ability to take a snippet of a scale and consider it a lick. I've played along with blues songs before, and even felt decent about staying close to the boundaries of the pentatonic in the appropriate key, and the notes I would play would be harmonic- sometimes even emotional- and I could go up the neck and play them here, and I could go down the neck and play them there. But heck, I sounded like a computer program. Play up the scale. Now do it fast. Go down to another mode slowly. Play scale notes. Do it fast then slow.

blah.

But tonight, with the insight, it was different. I was able to take a small piece of the scale and center around it, repeat it and change it, reach out to another note on either side, come back; play the same thing up a string and come back, trill around with different emotions, play part of it. Repeat! Hold a note for a long time and make it talk again.

HOLY COW! THIS PO-BOY HAS THE BLUES!

No, I didn't record it.

Suddenly I knew which pickup I wanted because I was trying to get an emotion through. I knew that I needed to crank down the tone knob on the bridge but keep some saturation. I was a boogie-woogie monster. I'd throw it on the neck and clean. I knew my place in the twelve bars. I'd throw in a minor chord along with the rhythm and hen jump back into a solo. I'd go a few beats without even playing a note just to add to the feeling of what I was doing. I got lost in it and was giving Tab Benoit a little bit to handle- certainly not on the skill side, but man, can't anyone deny we were feedin' off each other. As much as an mp3 can feed of someone, that is.

Bottom line, I was feelin'it. Breakthrough.

Oh, and that Hamer Stellar is Stellar.

Wood moves

Just as rust never sleeps, wood moves. Right in step with the spring equinox, in the last week I've noticed some of the doors around the house emerging from their winter sticknicitude* while others are reverting from winter freedoms to their summer catchy stations. A sort of changing of the guard for the doors.

It also reveals itself in my guitar necks. As fall sets in and leaches humidity, the wood in the necks of the guitars slowly dries out and start to raise the tension on the strings and straighten their necks out as if they could approximate good posture. What to do but tune them down a bit and give the truss rod some relief- loosen it. At ease, gentlemen.

But now it's spring, and the humidity rolls in, reversing the winter's arid effects. Day by day now I've noticed the action turning into a trapeze wire. The tuning slumps low. And so the truss rod is given a tweak in the opposite direction. Straighten Up! Look Sharp! Attention!

Is this significant? Well, yes and no. As with all things minute in nature, the movement can be undetectible to those not paying close attention until finally it crosses a threshhold and -whoomp, there it is.

Yes, that's an analogy for the typically subteranean shifts in our daily political lives. I beg of you to pay attention to the seismic tremors big and small happening in our country these last six months, because we've gone way past that threshhold of visibility and are entering into critical stresses.

Yes, wood moves. Back and forth, back and forth with the seasons. But you can't fold a guitar- you'll break its neck.

"Vote Democrat, get free stuff"

It might just be okay to leave a child behind once in a while...



There are so many things I could say... but I think Julio speaks volumes by himself.

Quote of the day

"More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

-Woody Allen

The many faces of Jack

Mrs. Toadroller (I can call you that, can't I Cheryl? I don't want people knowing your real name) put up a post with pictures of my boy Jack's sundry expressions over at her blog.

I thought I'd better respond with one of my favorite collage of the Pteryjacktal:

Ain't he something?

Yes, quite Stellar indeed

She's a Hamer Stellar 1, probably 99/00 time frame, with a crimson hued burst to black with some great lines and carves. It's unique and will fight its way into rotation with my other Hamers- a China goldtop P90 and a Korean Standard. It's got two nicks on the front edges, a little rash and some bumps on the back, but overall, a great looking guitar. And it's a Hamer. You know it plays just fantastic- beefy neck, not heavy, balanced, and resonant.

I didn't quite realize it when I hit the "buy it now" button at $150 (delivered), but upon arrival today I realized that I must be rescuing this fine piece from what can only be considered guitar abuse. A friend selling for a friend, so the story goes; regardless it made it here, luckily in one piece. Here's what greeted me opening the rather large shipping container:

Umm, why is it only one third filled with packing peanuts? Thank you, UPS, for treating it with care or it could have been a disaster.

Scissoring through the mummy-wrapped bubble plastic, it let out a whiff. "Smoker," I warned Cheryl. This thing was grimy, slimy, with rusty strings and, for some reason, black magic marker on the back. One knob was missing, the other was hanging on at an angle that made me worry about the shaft of the pot, but not a problem- the knob was an oversized mis-fit and the shaft was fine, the pickup switch tip was nowhere to be seen. There was a huge chunk on the edge of the fretboard. Crap! No, wait, it came off. Dirt. Whew!

I was pleasantly surprised that it contained a genuine Seymour Duncan (TB 4, it turns out) bridge pickup and a no name "Patent Applied For" neck pickup.

I stripped it down and spent the next 2-3 hours clearing the grime, cleaning off the magic marker, polishing the body to an incredible luster (this thing glows, you know?), oiling the neck, graphiting the nut, restringing with 10s, adjusting the truss (the neck was like a canoe until I snugged it up- straightened right out), adjusting the action, and setting the intonation which was, no surprise here, waaaay off.

How can one do this to a beautiful guitar? It's neglect, I tell you! Criminal neglect! Come here, little Hamer, I've got a home for you.

Here's a "before" photo. Notice the overall haze on the body and all the gunk around the pickups:

Here's an after:


I waited until after all this cleaning and restringing to plug her in . I couldn't bring myself to even touch the strings it came with. Bloom-floom, beautiful music from the neck pickup. Swapped over to the old SD bridge pickup to see what she could do and phlaaat-spizz. Super thin and a ton of noise/hum...

Opened up the cavity and whoa! Spaghetti!





That ain't right. I followed leads, scratched my head, did a little research on basic wiring patterns for a 3 way switch with only one volume and one tone, scratched my head some more, looked up Seymour's advice, and identified what was likely the problem. The wrong leads from the bridge pickup were soldered to the wrong stub of the pickup selector switch. Five minutes with a soldering iron and fat as shat she's alive!

I'm having a blast here because I rescued a beauty of 24 fretter, dual hummer, oak/lacewood mystic lava lamp topped, fine Korean built Hamer for the princely sum of a buck-fifty and it's a keeper. Can you believe the character in this top? It changes in the light from different angles. Like I said, it's a lava lamp.

Here are some shots of it"


and

and

and

Oops, sorry, TODAY is a very bad day for America

How successful has Obama's first 100 days been?

very

He's made us and our great grandchildren wards of the state with the debt he's enacted. Oh Dennis, you silly, our great grandchildren? Come on! This will be ancient history by then! Oh really? I'm a great grand-child of the depression and I know its effects on my life. This is roughly the same time-cycle as the great depression to now. And a significant portion of our country's history.

He's brought banking into the fold of government responsibility; dare I say nationalized them. Who's next? The core of manufacturing.

He's just defined how much is too much. 250K and then 90% tax rate. Don't forget what the tax burden is for someone making 250k. Oh Dennis, that's just for those companies mismanaged by the evil greedy who deserve such a punishment! Why yes, yes it is. For now. In the industries suckling at the pig. But it's not fair that one group should be allowed to make more than 250k and others not. Why, that makes them Rich with a capital R and that's not fair. As promised in the campaign, the rich are those making over 250k, and this is just the first tug on the noose to put an end to such unnecessary over-abundance.

Congress floated the idea yesterday... I do believe it was our favorite schlepp Barney Frank that did so... that he'd tax those bastards 90% if he could. And sumbich if the house didn't act in less than 24 hours. Astonishing.

Healthcare is going to be a cakewalk. Especially when the retiring boomers start whining about how their retirement funds disappeared (if they had ever actually been responsible enough to create them, which many, many weren't) and they simply can't afford it; someone's got to take care of them, they're the old and infirm.

Sorry. I'm pissed, I'm embarassed, and most of all, I'm dissapointed in the American people for still believing these things are good. I want to run every stinking Subaru and Prius with a liberal bumper sticker (which is, last check, all of them) off the road right about now.

A very successful first 100 days indeed.

Beyond any liberal's wildest dreams. A multi-orgasmic 100 days of liberal achievement whose first wave was at the coro-nomination, second surprising gasp was on election day, and whose third throbbing peaked during the sickening whorefest of the inauguration. The filthy fourth can easily be found over at Barney's playhouse this evening.

Tomorrow's hangover is gonna suck for America.