A Thing or Two

The Yamaha people put one of their guitars to the ultimate endurance test earlier this year. You probably don't want to try this at home but they stuck a Pacifica 112V on the roof of their building in Britain and left it there for a month, just to see how it would hold up.

Yamaha didn't say what the weather was like during that month but reported the guitar came out in great shape: no neck warping, no problems with the electronics. Just a slight crack in the lacquer on the neck and some rust on the strings ...

An important part of the Fender legacy died earlier this month. His name wasn't on the headstock but George Fullerton was the yin to Leo Fender's yang. He could play guitar, unlike Fender, and they shared a love of electronics and radio repair. Fender eventually persuaded Fullerton to come to work for him in the mid-1950s and one of the first results was the Telecaster. They went on to collaborate on the design and manufacture of the Stratocaster.

Fullerton, who was 86 when he died of congestive heart failure on July 4, had been working as a consultant recently to the Fender custom shop and that's him above with the limited edition George Fullerton 50th Anniversary Stratocaster and amp that Fender put out a couple of years ago ...

I think I've made my stand on cats and guitars pretty clear. This exchange from Acoustic Guitar Forum shows why cats and guitars don't mix:

Michau: Hi everyone! I recently bought a used Larrivee D03 (spruce top, mahog sides/back) and I love it to death, but the big problem that I didn't notice until after purchasing it was that it had this awful pet odor (I'm thinking cat) clinging to the wood. I've researched a little bit on how to remove pet odors from wood surfaces, but none of them seem safe for a guitar finish (commercial products). Anyone have any tips or ideas that they could share? Thanks!

Chitz Creek: Sorry about the smell. I guess I should have mentioned it was actually my cats guitar. He's got a lil Yamaha now.

Six Strings, One Nation

Here's a guitar that symbolizes a whole nation.

At the behest of Canadian radio host Jowi Taylor, luthier George Rizsanyi built it from 63 pieces of wood, metal, bone and stone -- all artifacts that represent a great deal of Canada's history. It's called the Six-String Nation (double-click the pic for a better look at the detail) and Taylor has been trotting it around the country since it was finished in 2006, getting noted Canadians, like Gordon Lightfoot, as well as ordinary ones, to play it.

In a vast and diverse country sometimes polarized by its French and British ancestry, this guitar ties everything together. Incorporated into into it are items like wood from Jack London's cabin, ivory from a mastadon, a piece of Pierre Trudeau's canoe paddle, a slice from the door of a bush pilot's plane. There also are bits from a walarus tusk, a dance hall floor in Alberta, a moose shin, a ski used by an Olympic champion and a piece of a French frigate scuttled in 1760.

One of the pieces that generates the most interest is the bit of gold taken from the championship ring of hockey icon Maurice "Rocket" Richard. It's used on the marker for fret No. 9, which was Richard's jersey number. There's more hockey history incorporated -- a part of a Wayne Gretzky stick.

The top piece probably has the most emotional draw. It's from a 300-year-old rare albino sitka spruce in British Columbia that was considered sacred to the Indians. In 1997 the tree was cut down by a misguided anti-logging protester and laid untouched until the Haida Indians donated a piece for the guitar.

Scenes From My Life

I'm not sure it would work as a movie. It sounds more like a Eugene O'Neill play.

Scene I

A leafy suburban street. After driving only half a block from their home, Wife, Daughter and Son must stop the car due to a gaggle of geese wandering aimlessly in the street.

Daughter: Ugh, there they are -- the honking menaces.

Wife: The Honking Menaces! That'd be a good name for a band.

Daughter: Yeah, Dad's band!

Wife, Daughter, Son (heartily): Ahaaa, haaaa, haaaa! Ahaaa, haaaa, haaaa!

Daughter and Son high-five.

Scene II

A driveway on a leafy suburban street. In preparation for a weekend at the getaway house in western Maryland, a middle-aged wanna-be guitarist carefully loads his acoustic into the minivan's cargo area. Son, who is settling into a back seat, sees the guitar.

Son (pleading): No, Dad, please! Not that!

Father (softly, trying not to show pain): I'll keep it quiet.

Fender Stratocaster vs. Gibson Les Paul

Every great rock song made in the past 50 years was played on either a Gibson Les Paul or a Fender Stratocaster.

How's that for ridiculously overly broad statement sure to start a bitter argument?

I'm just kidding, of course. Sorta. (Obviously, I wouldn't leave out the Telecaster.)

Still, I'd like to know the percentage of great songs over the years that have been played on a Strat or Les Paul. They have shaped rock 'n' roll in immeasurable ways (with help from the Telecaster).

The DVD "Solidbodies: The 50-Year Guitar War" traces the rivalry between the Stratocaster and the Les Paul from the beginning, through their marketing missteps and revivals with commentary from young guitarists like Derek Trucks, Joe Bonamassa and Henry Garza of Los Lonely Boys, as well guitar historians and collectors.

Especially interesting were the parts on how both companies nearly blew it. When all those British lads were shaping blues-based rock in the early and mid-'60s, they desperately wanted the tone of the Les Paul -- the '59 Les Paul to be specific. But by then Gibson had ended it's deal with Paul and stopped making them. When the Gibson people finally caught on and resurrected the model, they compounded their mistake by not using the double-coil Humbucker pickups that were on the original and had to try again.

The Stratocaster had its own troubles when CBS bought Fender and quality standards dipped, along with Fender's reputation. Both companies lost much ground to emerging guitar makers like Kramer before the Strat-based grunge movement came along and knocked Kramer out of the game.

So which is better the Les Paul or the Strat? The video doesn't pass judgment and I certainly don't have the expertise to say. It's all subjective, anyway. "I guess it's more of a personal thing," Garza says. "You say, 'Wow, that girl's really pretty,' and the other guy goes, 'What's wrong with you, man? That girl's ugly.'"

You can see the movie's trailer here.

Ends & Odds

The classical master Andres Segovia once said, "The guitar is as difficult as a hysterical woman. But I am faithful to her. I am not polygamous." I wonder if he was thinking of this guitar on the right. It's called the Nakyd Laydie and is the work of Howard Klepper ...

And speaking of things spoken about guitars, there are a couple of new quotes in the GuitarTalk sidebar on the right -- one from James Taylor, one from Dick Dale and one from Freddie Mercury. I strongly identify with the Mercury statement ...

The Martin people are sensitive to the economic times. They're putting out a solid-wood 1 Series model that is expected to sell for less than $1,000, which is pretty inexpensive for a U.S.-made Martin. The company has had a 20 percent drop in sales since the fall, according to The Wall Street Journal, so to keep the price down, Martin eliminated the inlays on the 1 Series, the same strategy the company used during the Great Depression. "We needed something so we wouldn't have to start laying people off," said CEO Chris Martin.

The Journal quoted a music store owner in Michigan as saying the 1 Series guitars sound very good, although maybe not as good as the $2,000-$3,000 models ...

Things aren't so good at the Paul Reed Smith factory in Stevensville, Md., where 30 people are being laid off and production is being cut back to four days a week. This comes as the company is getting set to introduce a new line to celebrate its 25th anniversary and going into the acoustic and amp business ...

John Lennon's old 1958 Hofner Senator, on the left, wasn't such a bargain. It was auctioned last week for $337,226, which was almost double what the Christie's people had expected to get for it. It came with a 1982 fax of a letter written by George Harrison to verify that the Hofner was one of Lennon's first guitars ...

As a follow-up to the recent post on power chords, I have discovered that there are power chords for ukuleles. Somehow that seems like an oxymoron.

iPod on Its iOwn

As we do every month, it's time to put the iPod on shuffle and let it play what it wants to play. Apparently the iPod was in an R&B mood.

• "All That You Dream," Little Feat
• "I Found a Love," Wilson Pickett
• "The Real Me," Johnny Adams
• "Good Times, Bad Times," Led Zeppelin
• "Teenage Boogie," Webb Pierce
• "Model Citizen," Warren Zevon
• "Change Gonna Come," Otis Redding
• "My Home Is in the Delta," Otis Spann
• "Down in the Hole," Rolling Stones
• "Ranches and Rivers," Joe Ely & Joel Guzman
• "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell
• "What Do You Do When Love Dies," Dusty Springfield
• "Crazy Mama, Rolling Stones

Empower Chords

Let's have a frank discussion of power chords. Power chords usually are composed of the root note, a perfect fifth interval and the root note doubled at a higher pitch. They don't have a major or minor third interval, which is what a chord needs to make it a major or minor. Sometimes they get pitched in the middle register.

I have absolutely no idea what anything in the paragraph above means but I came across it on the Internet and it sounded important. All I know is that power chords are very easy and fun to play around with. Anyone can do power chords and, yes, that includes me. About all you need are two strings and two fingers capable of reaching across three frets on adjacent strings, much like in the ever-popular A5 power chord pictured on the right.

But when I'm playing power chords I sometimes feel guilty, like I'm cheating, which is somewhat the case. They're shortcuts, using only a couple of notes, instead of four or more with standard chords. You don't get the full sound so in some styles of playing power chords are no substitute for full chords but with electric distortion, you don't always need a full chord.

Still, power chords are enough to allow a beginner to create a little music and get a feeling of accomplishment. I especially like power chording my way through the Stones' "She's So Cold."

Link Wray is generally considered to have given birth to the power chord with his 1958 instrumental "Rumble" but Wikipedia says blues sidemen Willie Johnson and Pat Hare were using them in the early '50s. Either way, several billion rock guitarists have been banging them out since then with good results.

Link Wray is one of those guys who never got enough credit. He was partial to black leather, sunglasses indoors and greased-back hair and he was a little rough around the edges. "Rumble" was considered so subversive that many radio stations wouldn't play it. Even though it was an instrumental, its menacing, primal tone and the nation's fear of gang-fighting hoodlums at the time made it too edgy. It became a hit anyway and was a big influence on guys like Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page and Neil Young. Also, Wray was an early proponent of distortion and supposedly poked a pencil through the cone of his amp to get the fuzz that became his trademark.

Despite all that, Wray, who was living in Denmark when he died in 2005, isn't in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I think I'll boycott it until he and Stevie Ray Vaughan are inducted.

Sssh, I'm Palm Muting

This is one of those posts that experienced guitarists may want to skip. Or they may want to read it and smirk at my naivete. But either way, l'm not ashamed to say that until I took lessons, I was oblivious to palm muting.

Palm muting involves resting the heel of your picking hand on the strings -- not too heavily, not too lightly -- back near the bridge as you pick. The result is a chunkier sound, like that chug-a-chug-a-chug thing you get with a good Chuck Berry song.

I've been having fun with palm muting lately with both the Telecaster and the Alvarez, although the technique is most often used with electrics and power chords. Whichever, it gives a song a whole different texture, makes it something new.

Palm muting is a basic element of rock 'n' roll and blues and, like I said, despite decades of listening, I had no idea it was going on. The great thing about starting from zero is that everything is a revelation, even the things in the palm of your hand.

For Reflective Moments

Mirror, mirror in my hand, who has the coolest guitar in the land?

If you like the reflective look, the answer would be Keith Urban, who recently took delivery on this custom Telecaster from Yuriy Shishkov, the Fender designer mentioned a while back. The guitar, which Urban is playing on his current tour, is covered with pieces of hand-cut mirror. Urban said he was inspired by a similar guitar that Paul Stanley played for Kiss.

I'd like to see Kyle Busch smash this guitar. He'd never win another race.

Check out more of Shishkov's artistry at his website.

The Great Rock 'n' Roll Robbery

It wasn't the crime of the century but it was one of the better capers in rock 'n' roll history.

In 1973 someone ripped off Led Zeppelin for $203,000 -- the proceeds from a three-night stand in New York -- and the case was never solved, nor the money ever recovered. Now a new novel, "Black Dogs -- The Possibly True Story of Classic Rock's Greatest Robbery" by Jason Buhrmester, fictionalizes the crime with a gang of shadies from Baltimore. It's a pretty good rock 'n' roll novel and has lots of movie potential.

A guitar plays a small but key role in Buhrmester's tale. It's a 1958 Gibson Les Paul sunburst that the gang steals from a pawn shop as its entree to Led Zeppelin. This guitar is highly desired by collectors because a relatively small number of them were made and guys like Jimmy Page, Duane Allman, Mick Taylor and Eric Clapton play them.

In the book, the thieves sell their '58 to Page for $2,000 but they should have held on to it. The originals now go for about 100 times that much.

Finding a Reason to Play Guitar

Why am I playing this guitar? Why, after all those decades of not having the slightest desire to make any sort of music, is the guitar now so important?

Guitar World magazine offers 10 reasons why people take up the guitar and I tried to see where I fit in.

10. Mating: Attracting girls is certainly a motivator for a teenager and I certainly could have used the guitar's help in my youth but, after 20 years of marriage, this is no longer a factor.

9. Irritate Your Parents: Too late for that one, too.

8. An Alternative to the Sporting Life: I was always comfortable with my lack of athletic skill.

7. Improve Your Vocabulary: Guitar World says it's cool to sling around the guitar lingo and, while I might like to randomly throw out phrases like "replace the nut" and "lower the action," I don't think it elevates my social standing.

6. Be the Life of the Party: No, it would take more than a guitar to make me interesting.

5. Form a Band and Join the Circus: But that would mean I would have to give up my day job!

4. Head Start on a Psychology or Management Degree: You learn a lot about people by playing guitar in a band but I already know too much about people.

3. Versatility: Guitar World points out the guitar's versatility by saying you can’t play chords on a violin or slur notes on a piano or play counterpoint harmonies on a sax. Unfortunately, I can't do those things on a guitar, either.

2. Slay Your Idols: That's what Nietzsche said, meaning to surpass your mentors. Most of my
guitar idols are already dead, though.

1. Enlightenment: Ah, at last, here's a reason that pertains to me. I started in order to give myself a challenge, to do something different and something creative. To do something totally new and alien to me. Plus, the girls love it.

Shoes & Obits

What's black and white and red all over and is going to court?

Eddie Van Halen is suing Nike, claiming the shoe company ripped off his iconic paint job, as seen on his Frankenstein guitar (above) for its new line of Dunk shoes (upper left in the picture above). Van Halen says he came up with that pattern for the guitar in 1978 and patented it in 2001.

Earlier this year he came out with his own line of funky shoes (upper right) and he says Nike has done him irreparable harm and damage by copying it. The Nike lawyers say the don't see the similarity.

Too bad the trial can't be held in the restroom at Stancill's Guitar studio. As you can see, the decor, which is a tribute rather than a profit-fueled trademark infringement, is perfect ...

Several well-regarded -- although not necessarily well-known -- guitarists have died lately. Most recently, Bob Bogle of the Ventures died this week at the age of 75. The Ventures' instrumental work influenced scores of guitarists and that was Bogle playing lead on their biggest hit, "Walk Don't Run."

Huey Long (no relation to the Louisiana political family) died last week in Houston. He made it to 105 after a career that included playing with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and the Ink Spots.

Fort Worth boy Stephen Bruton (right), who died of cancer in May, was an especially witty songwriter, as well as a solid player. He was Kris Kristofferson's guitarist during Kristofferson's prime and had been a force in the Austin scene for a long time as a solo act, with the Resentments and as a producer. Bonnie Raitt, with whom Bruton also played, played an Austin show shortly after his death and cried her way through one of his songs, “Too Many Memories.”

You've got to like a guy who can come up with lines like: "She wasn't really smiling, only showing me her teeth" and "You can kiss my ass 'til my hat pops off."

With Apologies to Jeff Foxworthy ...

(click the picture for a better view)

You might be a guitarist if ...

• ... you take more than one guitar on vacation.
• ... you have a guitar on your knee as you read this.
• ... you check strangers' fingernails to see if they have the short-on-the-left-hand, long-on-the-right-hand guitarist manicure.
• ... you wrote in Keith Richards' name in the last presidential election.

You might be a bad guitarist if ...

• ... you cry whenever you see tablature that includes a B chord.
• ... you have more than $500 worth of instructional books and CDs sitting in a pile.
• ... your family encourages you take up Guitar Hero.
  
• ... your instructor says "open D string" and you have to silently recite your memory crutch ("Every Average Dog Goes Back Early" works for me) to find it.
  
• ... the guys in your band have nicknamed you "Buzzy."

Some borrowed, some original. Feel free to add your own in comments.

Cat Scratch Fever

I should just stay off youtube. It does nothing but aggravate me. I check out the instructional guitar videos that are billed as being for beginners who have never touched a guitar and maybe only heard one played a couple of times. But 45 seconds into the video, it's over my head with talk of intervals in a traditional pentatonic scale that are normally limited to whole steps and minor thirds. My self-esteem gets shattered.

Plus, youtube is brimming with videos of cats that can outplay me. Like this guy, who apparently thinks he's Kiti Hendrix or somebody. Maybe Kittie Ray Vaughan.

Welcome to Play a Little Guitar

Welcome to the Play a Little Guitar blog, where I am now well into my second year of musical incompetence.

This blog, which is pleased to be cited as today's Blog of Note, is the chronicle of a middle-aged beginner with no musical background trying to amuse himself by learning the guitar. Sometimes the efforts go beyond amusing to downright comical and sometimes even tragic but as it stands now, I am well on target to reach my goal of appearing on "Austin City Limits" in 2019.

Here you can read about Telecasters through history, my daughter and her stray guitar, a bathroom that looks like Eddie Van Halen's Frankenstein guitar, my prejudices against all B chords, goofy things said at Guitar Center stores, guitar toilet seats, the ethical dilemma of pinky-planting and the distressing trend of distressed guitars. Someday, once my band-to-be, Stinktown Willie & the Hard Liquors, makes it big, I'd like to have my own guitarist action figure.

And while I have your attention, can anyone tell me why they call the song 'Dueling Banjos' if one of the guys in the movie is playing a guitar? And what about a guitarist's fingers? Are they overrated? How long should they be? How many is too many and how many is too few?

Thanks for looking around.

Subway Singing & Saving Frets

I know you're currently reading your favorite guitar blog of all time but I'd like to recommend another, The Beat Below the Street. It's written by a journalist who decided to mark the first anniversary of his unemployment by busking his way through New York City's subway system for 48 days (to mark his age). The quest just began on Monday and so far the blog has been an engaging tribute to the city as well as music ...


It turns out that Sam Bass, the artist who painted the Gibson Les Paul that Kyle Busch smashed (see the video here) after winning a NASCAR race in Nashville, was a bit miffed to see his hard work destroyed. (Click the pictures for a better view.)

"I don't care who you are -- that's got to hurt a little bit because you have something invested in it," he said.

To make it up to Bass, Busch commissioned two identical guitars. The original was valued at $25,000 and Busch's purse for winning the race was $52,000 ...

The guitar world's environmental concerns usually are focused on using alternatives to endangered tropical woods like mahogany and rosewood. But folk-blues singer Otis Taylor wants to save a little metal. His custom-made Santa Cruz acoustic doesn't have frets above the 14th fret. "I never play past there ... so why waste the metal?" he said in a Q&A with the American Songwriter website. "I think people need to sit back and get a little green on their guitars."

Who Needs Fingers?

I think I could play better if I had a few extra fingers but lots of renown guitarists get by with less than 10. I'm not sure how they do it.

Les Paul, who turned 93 this week, has the use of only two fingers on his left hand due to arthritis and he's still playing a weekly gig at a nightclub in New York. Django Reinhardt got caught in a fire and ended up with two partially paralyzed fingers on his left hand but still became one of the great jazz guitarists. A childhood wood-chopping accident left Jerry Garcia with only 9 1/3 fingers and his oddly configured right hand became something of a trademark. That and really long solos.

Now Leslie West, who provided the soundtrack for much of my teenage years with "Mississippi Queen," has told the Gibson people he only needs two fingers on the fretboard. "I play the guitar with only my first and fourth fingers, on my left hand," he said. "I never learned to use all my fingers, like you would playing a scale." But does this picture indicate otherwise?

Canada Can't Pull It Off

The competition for world's largest guitar pull is more intense than I suspected. I hope the people in Luckenbach realize that.

Canadian guitarists swarmed a festival in Toronto last weekend in hopes of breaking the Guinness World Record for world's largest guitar ensemble. The official count was 1,623 guitars, which left them 179 short of the record set in Germany a couple of years ago. It sounds like a good time was had anyway.

The rules for the Toronto pick-a-long specified that only acoustic and unplugged electric guitars were allowed. No Guitar Hero fake guitars. Not even bass guitars, banjos, ukuleles, mandolins or lutes.

The song of choice was "Helpless" by Canadian homeboy Neil Young. I think I'll add it to my repertoire since it's pretty simple. Just a series of D, A and G chords while singing through your nose, which I do naturally.

"Helpless" was chosen in an online poll -- beating out other greatest Canadian hits like Bachman-Turner Overdrive's "Takin' Care of Business," the Band's "The Weight," Bryan Adam's "Cut Like a Knife" and Feist's "1, 2, 3, 4" -- but not everyone liked the selection. "Gawd what a boring song!!" one person wrote in a comment on the Globe & Mail website. "And to hear that many people play it would really be grating."

"Helpless" certainly isn't everyone's cup of Molson's but I thought Young's performance of it was one of the highlights of "The Last Waltz."

Kyle Busch Is No Pete Townshend

Since I favor harsh punishment for those who commit hate crimes against guitars, I hope someone is wetting down the waterboard for NASCAR driver Kyle Busch.

I don't really know a thing about Kyle Busch but apparently he has quite the reputation in NASCAR circles for being a bit of an arrogant, boorish, bratty crybaby. After an extended series of left turns on Saturday, Busch won a race at the Nashville Superspeedway and this video shows how he celebrated.

That was a hand-painted Gibson Les Paul he smashed -- smashed in three tries, it should be noted, so I guess there is no need for steroid testing on Kyle Busch. The artist, Sam Bass, who is an officially licensed NASCAR artist, took it well, though, as you can see in the picture on the right.

"I was stunned when it happened," Bass said. "When I took the picture with Kyle ... the first thing he said was that there was no disrespect to me or the trophy or the speedway or any of the sponsors. He just said he was going to give each of his guys a piece of the trophy. As a person that loves rock 'n' roll the way I do and appreciates a good show, Kyle Busch put on a great show in Victory Lane and shocked the world."

Busch said since the guitar didn't break up like he had hoped, he was going to have it neatly cut up so his crew members could each have a piece.

This would be a good time to quote John Hiatt's "Perfectly Good Guitar."

There ought to be a law with no bail
Smash a guitar and you go to jail
With no chance for early parole
You don't get out 'til you get some soul

Oh, it breaks my heart to see those stars
Smashing a perfectly good guitar
I don't know who they think they are
Smashing a perfectly good guitar.

Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix have immunity on this matter because they were the first. In 2006 Townshend said he would no longer destroy guitars on stage because the act had become such a rock cliche.

"Dad, It Just Followed Me Home"

My daughter brought home a stray the other day. Not a puppy or kitten but a stray guitar.

She had called breathlessly from school to let me know that while helping clean up a backstage storage area, she had come across an abandoned guitar. It was filthy, battered and missing a string and bridge pin but had potential, she said. Her music teacher said she could keep it over the summer if she fixed it up.

Plus, my daughter said, this guitar had a beautiful etched pickguard.

Beautiful etched pickguard? That made my ears perk up. An etched pickguard, I thought, it's got to be a Gibson Hummingbird -- the acoustic preferred by the likes of June Carter Cash, Sheryl Crow and Keith Richards. A guitar that runs into four figures. Yes, yes, we can give this guitar a home, I told the daughter, even if only for the summer.

But, alas, my excitement was not justified. It's not Hummingbird and not even close. This stray is a three-quarters-size mutt of indeterminate pedigree. The logo on the headstock has been rubbed off and the label in the sound hole doesn't mention a manufacturer, which makes me think the maker wanted to remain anonymous. I'm not sure what kind of wood it's made of but it's barely a step above cardboard. I think it must have been used as a prop in a play rather than as a guitar in the school's music program. New, it probably cost no more than $50.

Still, we took it by Stancill's Guitar Studio (check out the new website) where Scott graciously took a look and said a new set of strings might make it playable.

The daughter's enthusiasm was unabated and she gave the non-Hummingbird a thorough cleaning that got it sparkling quite nicely. With a little guidance, she put new strings on, which means it is now worth at least $12.99. The low E string buzzes but we may be able to adjust the bridge or file down the first fret a bit to take care of that.

So it's not a Hummingbird and by September it probably will be back in that dark storage room until it's pulled out to dress up a set in a high school production of "The Glass Menagerie." But it's another case of a guitar providing me with a nice father-daughter moment -- the kind that can be pretty rare when you're dealing with teenagers.

And, besides, all guitars deserve a good home, even if only for the summer.

Redefining the Term "Big Band"

Want to be in a band? A really big band? Head to Luckenbach, Texas, (as in "... Luckenbach, Texas, with Willie and Waylon and the boys") on Aug. 23 and join the "Pickin' for the Record" effort to get into the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest guitar ensemble.

Organizers, including the Kerrville Folk Festival, are hoping to draw 2,000 guitarists, which would break the record set by the 1,802 people who played "Smoke on the Water" in Germany in June 2007.

No word on what's on the playlist for Luckenbach but you have to assume that not everyone gets a solo.

Participants do get a T-shirt and dogtags, though, and proceeds go to Support the Welcome Home Project's Veterans Endowment for Traumatic Brain Injuries.

Angels and Playboys

They say nothing is an accident but I can't come up with an explanation of why these songs came up on the iPod when I hit shuffle for June:

• "Walkin' Blues," Lucille Bogan
• "The Factory," Warren Zevon
• "I Want Let You Go," Ray Charles
• "Crazy Lemon," Joe Ely
• "Bluin' the Blues," Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys
• "Say, Man," Bo Diddley
• "Everybody's Talking," The Resentments
• "One of These Days," Emmylou Harris
• "Stray Cat Blues," Rolling Stones
• "Knowing," Lucinda Williams
• "Wind Me Up," Alvin Crow & the Neon Angels
• "It Wasn't Me," Chuck Berry
• "Orange Blossom Special," Johnny Cash

I'm currently working to add "Stray Cat Blues" to the list of Stones' non-hits that I can play in mediocre fashion. It's basically C's, D's and G's.

The Ubiquitous Telecaster

The Telecaster -- it's everywhere!


(This is the result of too much spare time and too few Photoshop skills.)

Miscellaneous

Call me a wimp but those medium-gauge strings are gone. They were just too much for my fingers so I switched them out for extra-lights. The fingers were very grateful ...

Stephen Colbert isn't the only late-night TV dude who likes to bang on the guitar. The New York Times stopped by Conan O'Brien's office, which he was packing up for his move to Los Angeles, for an interview and came up with this photo. I spy two guitars and at least 11 cases.


“Music and comedy are so linked,” O’Brien says in the interview, which runs this Sunday. “The rhythm of comedy is con­nected to the rhythm of music. They’re both about creating tension and knowing when to let it go. I’m always surprised when somebody funny is not musical.”

Apparently there once were lots of videos of Conan playing on his show on youtube but the honchos at NBC had them yanked. Still, you can see him busting into "Sunshine of Your Love" at the 3:58 mark on this video ...

John Belushi perpetrated one of the greatest acts of cinematic guitar abuse in "Animal House," as seen in the video below. The singer was played by Stephen Bishop, who had a couple of soft rock hits with "On and On" and "Save It for a Rainy Day" back in the '70s. Bishop had the cast of the movie sign the remains of the guitar and hung it in his garage.

25 Things

A while back on Facebook there was popular pass-it-along-to-your-friends item titled "25 Things About Me." In the same spirit, here are 25 things about me and the guitar:

1. For the first 54 years of my life I never had the slightest urge to learn guitar.
2. I wish I'd started at age 14.
3. I can play four or five songs.
4. If I could magically play the electric like anyone, it would be Stevie Ray Vaughan.
5. If I could magically play the acoustic like anyone, I'm going with Lightnin' Hopkins.
6. Pinch harmonics are a mystery to me.
7. When I say I can "play" a song, I'm using the word "play" very loosely.
8. The acoustic Alvarez or the Telecaster? I honestly don't have a favorite.
9. Well, maybe the Alvarez since it was my first.
10. I find instructional books very frustrating. They assume you know more than you do.
    
11. I'm a little surprised and disappointed -- but not discouraged -- that I'm not more proficient than I am.
12. Now that I have an idea of what's involved, I get mesmerized watching a good guitarist work.
    
13. I'm not very talkative but I love to talk about guitars.
14. If I were to get another guitar, I think I'd make it a Les Paul.
15. I'm only kidding when I say my goal is to play on "Austin City Limits" in the next 25 years.
16. I'm not kidding when I say the name of my first band will be Stinktown Willie and the Hard Liquors.
17. I can't -- and never will be able to -- do B chords.
18. Whoever came up with barre chords was a sadist.
19. The second fret should be much wider in order to accommodate all the fingers necessary for an A chord.
20. I still don't get heavy metal.
21. Power chords are a dilemma for me. I feel like I'm cheating when I play them.
22. I'm amazed that a Martin guitar can sell for more than $100,000.
23. Quite often I'm satisfied just learning the intro to certain songs. The intro's usually the coolest part anyway.
24. I love guitar picks.
25. Sometimes I stare at my guitars because they're so darn pretty.

Odds and Ends

I misspoke yesterday in saying that the new medium gauge strings I put on the Alvarez weren't that much tougher on my fingers. After an extended playing session today, I say without shame that I am definitely a lightweight when it comes to strings. These mediums are like playing steel cables. My fretting fingers are traumatized ...

The traditional face-melting rock guitar solo may not be dead but it is in critical condition, says the Financial Times of London. This article cites Eric Clapton, along with Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page, as being among the pioneers of the searing, self-indulgent solo back in the 1960s and '70s but says that has given way to more subtle lead play. Nonetheless, the FT says the solo could make a comeback thanks to Guitar Hero, since the video game relies so much on classic rock and heavy metal and kids who like to make funny faces ...

There's a man in Scotland who's looking for a deal on guitar strings. His girlfriend cut the strings on all his guitars because he was cheating on her after he told her that his guitars were more important to him than any relationship. The woman was originally charged destroying property and assault but in the end got off with just an admonishment from the judge ...

Stephen Colbert likes to whip out his guitar on "The Colbert Report" every now and then and his staff gave him a 1973 Martin D41 for his birthday this week. It came from an online dealer in Boulder, Colo., who said Colbert had recently played on the air and then said he needed a new guitar. You can see the previous guitar in this video. Note the excess stringage; everybody wants to be Chuck Berry.

String Thing, Part 2

All this talk of strings inspired me to change out the Alvarez. I've gotten ritualistic about string changing. I line up everything I need -- the strings, the string winder, the tuner, the wire cutters -- like a doctor preparing for surgery and then start operating.

Once again, the patient survived. I went with medium gauge strings this time, instead of the lights, just to see if there's much of a difference. My ears are too unsophisticated to notice much change in sound and the mediums aren't that much tougher on my fingers. But new strings sure me play better.

It's a simple thing that would impress only a beginner like me but when I get the strings all in place and stretched out and in tune, I get a real sense of accomplishment. Probably like a medical intern whose patient survived, even if it was just a tonsillectomy.

Not to take issue with the master, but maybe Chuck Berry could use a little advice on string management. He's notoriously cavalier about the way he treats his guitars (he considers them tools and just checks them as baggage when flying) but look at all that excess stringage in this poor quality screen grab from youtube. The man's lucky he didn't lose an eye.

If only he had let me take my wire cutters to those strings. It would have been my greatest contribution to music.

The complete video is here and the overly long strings come into view around the 37-second mark.

String Thing

The old folkie Dave Van Ronk once said, "God has a way of telling you when to change your strings." Apparently He tells different players different things about string changing and lets some, like me, decide on their own.

That's one of the burning issues in the guitar world -- without divine guidance, how often should you change strings? The correct answer seems to be: whenever you want to. It's been written that a set of strings has a playing life of 12 hours, which doesn't sound like much of a lifetime to me, before they go dead. But it's also been written that Eric Clapton's road manager says Clapton never changes a string unless it breaks and supposedly there is a woman performer who's gone years without changing because she likes the sound of rusty guitar strings. So as is often the case with guitar-related things, whatever works for you is fine.

Strings go dead and lose their tone and brightness because of the build-up of sweat, oil, dirt and various other forms of finger gunk between the coils. There are various cleaners on the market to combat this problem. As noted earlier, I'm not real hard on my strings so I try to get my money's worth out of them. I go with the Elixir coated strings, which are more durable -- and consequently about twice as expensive -- and I try to keep my hands clean.

When it's time to change again, I'm tempted to try these Knucklehead Strings out of Spanish Fork, Utah, just because it's hard to resist such distinctive packaging and branding. And they come with an extra high-E string.

Face the Random Music

Let there be random music from the iPod and let it have a slight old-fashioned R&B flavor.

• "Murmur Low," Pinetop Perkins
• "The Nothing Man," Bruce Springsteen
• "Down in the Valley," Otis Redding
• "I'm Not That Kat Anymore," the Bottle Rockets
• "Do You Miss Her," Stacie Collins
• "Tin Pan Alley," Stevie Ray Vaughan
• "Almost Grown," the Animals
• "The Frog," Sir Guy
• "Modern Art," Tom Russell
• "Susie Q," the Rolling Stones
• "Just Like Me," Paul Revere & the Raiders
• "Honky Tonk Women," the Rolling Stones

Loose Change

What has four strings instead of six and really big "tighteners" on the headstock but isn't a guitar? That's right -- a bass. The excellent Guitarz blog came across this listing on eBay, which proves that I am not the most uninformed person in all of Guitardom. The seller apparently thought she had quite a rare guitar since it only had four strings. I like the prospective buyer who asked if he could get a one-third discount since this guitar didn't have six strings ...

I'm still amazed by what you can find on youtube. My dad referred me to these videos of Texas bluesmasters Lightnin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb performing live and there are many more. These two both have nice close-ups of the finger-picking, including Lipscomb using a pocketknife for a slide and working with two fingers bandaged together on his right hand ...

Suggested reading: Jim Normandy, one-time hippie commune kid turned big-time banking executive, now is in the guitar-making business.This Portland Oregonian story (thanks for the picture) says his beautiful aluminum guitars are starting to catch on with bands like My Morning Jacket and Eagles of Death Metal. They come in different colors and finishes and have a reputation for good sustain ... In a bad economy, what's the market for vintage guitars like? The Los Angeles Times says it's still expensive -- even six-figure expensive -- even though there are bargains to be had.

Father & Daughter Jam

I once jokingly referred to my daughter as my guitar protege but that no longer applies. On some levels she's surpassed me.

She signed up for a guitar class at her high school this semester and told her teacher she wanted to do it so she could exceed her father's playing. You can imagine how extremely gratified I was to be such a source of inspiration, even if she just wanted to embarrass me.

But I'm not embarrassed, of course. Just proud of her. So far she's mostly doing single-note picking, which comes fairly easy to her because she knows how to read music after several years of chorus. (Reading music is another thing she can do that I can't, along with speaking Spanish fluently and earning a second-degree black belt in tae kwan do.)

She's finding chords a little trickier, partly due to having small hands, and has yet to get past the my-fingers-hurt-too-much barrier.

The class sounds pretty good; perhaps I should audit it. She's learned some scales (and taught me one), a little Spanish number, a blues progression and done a little coffee house-style jam based on a blues scale. On the side, she taught herself that Celine Dion song from "Titanic" just for fun.

Sometimes we get our guitars out and she shows me what she's learned lately. Mild jamming ensues, followed by a paternal smile.

She's not sure how far she wants to go with the guitar but with this quick start, I have to invoke Satchel Paige's maxim about not looking over my shoulder because someone is surely gaining on me. I'm also afraid to look ahead because she may already be out in front.

Bob Dylan on Catfish Hunter

So far this season my beloved Houston Astros are playing baseball about as well as I play guitar. And with that artless introduction and tenuous connection, I'll go straight to the list of baseball-inspired songs compiled by the Gibson people.

• "Glory Days," Bruce Springsteen: The star high school pitcher turns into a working stiff.
  

• "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," The Hold Steady: The band's lead singer revamped the song at the behest of the Twins, his favorite team.
  

• "Catfish," Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan wrote a song about Catfish Hunter. I'm not sure why.
  

• "(Love Is Like a) Baseball Game," The Intruders: A Gamble & Huff piece with lyrics like "I ain't never won when I played a baseball game/Now it seems that love and baseball are just the same."
  

• "Beat on the Brat," The Ramones: No real baseball connection other than the line "Beat on the brat with a baseball bat."
  

• "Tessie," The Dropkick Murphys: The band says this song helped the Red Sox break the Curse of the Bambino in 2004.
  

• "A Dying Cubs Fan's Last Request," Steve Goodman: Just like the guy in the song had requested, some of Goodman's ashes were scattered at the Cubs' "ivy-covered burial ground."
  

• "Piazza, New York Catcher," Belle & Sebastian: A love song that also includes an allusion to Sandy Koufax.
  

• "Night Game," Paul Simon: No mention of Joe DiMaggio in this one but it's about a pitcher who dies on the field.
  

• "Centerfield," John Fogerty: By law, now must be played at every baseball game.

Quick Takes

At last, I can hang my guitars in the closet next to my Ray Wylie Hubbard and Keep Austin Weird T-shirts. It's called the Guitar Hanger, of course, and the trademarked motto is: "You may not like hanging around the house but your guitar does!" If you're not understanding the concept, here's a video.

The Guitar Hanger made the list of oddities to come out of January's big NAMM trade show, along with circular (or pointless, if you will) picks ...

The Opryland resort in Nashville should put Guitar Hangers in its closets as part of the hotel's new "Check In, Rock Out" service. For $50, visitors can lease a variety of guitars -- Gibsons, of course, since Gibson is based in Nashville -- such as an Angus Young SG or a Les Paul Goldtop. The guitars come with hand-held amps and headphones so as not to disturb other guests ...

Schecter has introduced this camouflage guitar but I wonder how effective it really is. Seems like even if your prey couldn't see you, they would still hear you. It would be nothing but a liability in a deer blind.

Cowboys and the Heaviest Band in the World

I play "cowboy chords." I just learned that.

The A, E and D chords in their major and minor encarnations, as well as G and C, are called "cowboy chords" -- played within the first three frets -- because they're prevalent in country music and because they're the sort of chords that cowboys might play when hanging out around the campfire beating on the guitar. None of those fancy finger-contorting F's or B's. I guess cowboys are supposed to be minimalists.

You could also call those chords the meat-and-potatoes chords. Every guitar student starts out with them.

Here are some guys who play Dallas Cowboy chords.

We've covered a couple of musical baseball teams, the Mariners and the Diamondbacks, and now comes a band the features three offensive linemen from the Dallas Cowboys. Free Reign, which may be the heaviest heavy metal band in the world, includes (L-R) guard-bassist Leonard Davis (6-6, 353 pounds), center-drummer Cory Procter (6-4, 308), offensive tackle-singer-guitarist-Marc Colombo (6-8, 318) and lead guitarist-nonfootball-player Justin Chapman.

They've played a show or two in Dallas and if you like heavy metal, you might like what you can hear on the band's myspace page.

Rocking the Starship Enterprise

The next time Capt. Kirk heads off for the Final Frontier, he can boldly take a gaudy, hand-painted Gibson J-200 where no gaudy, hand-painted Gibson J-200 has gone before. The Gibson people presented the guitar to William Shatner last week in Nashville at the premier of "William Shatner's Gonzo Ballet," a documentary about a ballet set to Shatner's 2004 album "Has Been."

The J-200 is about $4,500 worth of guitar. No offense to the artist (Mandy Lawson on the right, shown with Ben Folds on the left, who helped produce the album, and Gibson Chairman Henry Juszkiewicz), if I was going to get one, I think I'd go for the natural finish.

From 'Atrocious' to 'Very Bad'

Random musings on my playing: I must be living in some sort of crazy alternative universe where everything is backward. Why else would the kids be getting all huffy, telling me to turn down the amp and shutting the door on me when I'm playing.

But despite the lack of artistic encouragement, I'd say I've made some great progress in recent weeks. I've advanced from atrocious to very bad -- and I'm proud of it.

I'm starting to think I don't attack the strings hard enough. I've never broken a string while playing and my strings hardly ever fall out of tune. No more Mr. Nice Guy, to quote Alice Cooper.

I've been having a lot of fun experimenting with the capo lately. Changing the pitch can be like playing a whole new song.

Also, I find that I'm often playing the acoustic without a pick. I don't see myself becoming a true finger-picker but going pick-less eliminates the clicky pick noise and sounds more natural. I think this started with trying to play quietly while the rest of the house slept and I'm not sure it's necessarily a good thing. Now when I use a pick, it sometimes sounds like a bit of unnatural clatter.

My Mojo Has Risen

My guitar playing acquired a little special mojo today.

After reading a PaLG blog entry about about the special relationship between rattlesnakes and guitars, a fellow Robert Earl Keen fan graciously shipped me three rattles of varying sizes to spice up my playing. These came off West Texas diamondbacks so you know they're quality rattles, too.

I ceremoniously dropped one of the rattles into the Alvarez's sound hole and it won't be long until I'm playing like the second coming of Lightin' Hopkins. I started with the medium-sized rattle for fear of releasing more hoodoo than I can handle at this point.

Now all I need is a mojo hand and a black cat bone and this guitar picking is really going to take off for me.

A note about the rattle donor: he's the same guy who up and gave a guitar to another member of the REK message board who casually asked what would be a good beginning guitar. So if you see him at a Robert Keen show, buy him a beer.

A Movie About Playing for Life

If I found out I only had a few weeks to live, I'm not sure where the guitar would fit into my plans.

But in the movie "The Guitar," it becomes a major focus for a young woman who learns within a few hours that she has terminal cancer, has been fired from her job and that her boyfriend needs some "alone time."

Might be a blues song in there somewhere.

In the movie, Melody, played by Saffron Burrows, moves into a vast loft, maxes out the credit cards furnishing it and finally gets that red Stratocaster that she longed for -- and even tried to steal -- in her girlhood. And of course, she needs wall-to-wall Marshall stacks to play it through.

The best scene came when the guitar and amps are delivered and Melody tenderly hooks them up. It's a melancholy moment for her and instead of strumming, she makes it rumble and twang by hugging it and waving it in the air. All this makes Melody cry a bit. Since I'm a little slow in picking up on any sort of symbolism (I didn't even get the connection with the character's name until halfway through the movie), I wondered what the guitar represented to her. Later Melody cleared that up for me with a quoted reference to "a souvenir of another time."*

I enjoyed the befuddled look on Melody's face as she tried to make sense of an instructional DVD that went on about pentatonic patterns. I also got excited by the closeups of her fret hand and shouted things like "D chord!" and "That's a C!" at the television.

I don't want to give away the plot but suffice it to say that by pursuing her hidden guitar passion (as well as some sex passions, but that's for another blog), she managed to fulfill to her life.

And by the end of the movie, Melody was playing better than me, of course.


* It turns out that quote is from a Patti Smith poem. The next line is kind of nice: "In art and dream you may proceed with abandon / In life, you may proceed with balance and stealth."

Here and There

First lady Michelle Obama struck the right chord with her French counterpart, former model-singer Carla Bruni Sarkozy, by giving her a Gibson Hummingbird last week when the Obamas were in France. Bruni has recorded three CDs and probably learned something about music from ex-boyfriends Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton ...

Roy Rogers' Martin Om-45 ended up selling for $460,000 at a Christie's auction last week. It had been expected to go for a maximum of $250,000 ...

Yesterday I bought a binder and a bunch of those 8x10 plastic sleeves so I could organize all my tabs/chords/lyrics pages. I invested a great deal of time in looking up the tabs and printing fresh copies. Then I discovered that when I put them in Word and changed the font and font size, I had inadvertently shifted the chord notations from their proper places, making them worthless. Starting over now ...

Finally, it's all about branding, right?

Big Bass Man at Little Guitar Works

Due to the similarity in names, maybe this blog should form some sort of alliance with Little Guitar Works, a luthier shop in Austin, Texas (motto: Own a Little, play a lot).

In the luthier's case, however, the "little" doesn't refer to size or amount but to the proprietor, Jerome Little. In addition to creating stunningly beautiful Torzal basses (mostly) and guitars, he's gives his creations something novel -- an ergonomically twisted neck. He started with basses on the grounds that bass players are the most susceptible to carpal tunnel syndrome and other overuse injuries since their instrument has a longer neck and heavier strings.

Little's solution was to rotate the upper part of the neck downward, making the strings more accessible to the fretting hand, and then angle the bridge upward to make the strings an easier reach for the finger-picking hand. It all adds up to a total rotation of about 35 degrees and saves the player from having to flex his wrists so much.

Xavier Padilla of the Gipsy Kings is one of the best-known proponents of Little's twisted-neck bass. Padilla was suffering badly from repetitive stress problems and told an interviewer he had dreams -- real while-you're-asleep dreams -- about a bass with such a neck. More than a year later he come across a picture of a Little creation and the two put together his dream bass.

Little has been making his twisted basses for a few years and now is working on six-string guitars, too. So just maybe that kid at the Guitar Center knew what he was talking about after all.

Save the Guitars!

The christening of a restaurant at the new Yankee Stadium resulted in the deaths of 27 guitars last week.

The Yankees' new home includes a Hard Rock Cafe and apparently the traditional way to open a new Hard Rock Cafe is with what's called a guitar smash. Twenty-seven guitars -- one for each of the Yankees' 26 World Series championships and another for the one they intend to win this year -- were sacrificed last week in the name of overpriced cheeseburgers. The aftermath, as seen on the Hard Rock website, is seen on the right.

Leading the way was former Yankees centerfielder Bernie Williams, an accomplished guitarist who has recorded a couple of CDs, along with Ace Frehley of Kiss, a couple of guys from Anthrax, Anton Fig, the drummer in David Letterman's band, and various Yankees executives. The guitars that were smashed appeared to be all Stratocasters -- some with black baseball bats instead of necks. All participants wore safety glasses.

Williams also donated his custom pin-striped telecaster, bearing his jersey No. 51, to the restaurant.

Not to be overly politically correct about this but rather than smashing those guitars, I bet the Hard Rock people could easily have found some underprivileged kids within a few blocks of the stadium who would have loved to have had a guitar.

But the Yankee Stadium carnage was nothing compared to what occurred when the Hard Rock opened a restaurant in Times Square when 100 Gibsons were beaten to death.

_________________________

Update: Further research (meaning more Googling) shows that also present at the guitar smash were children from Renaissance EMS, a Bronx-based organization that sponsors music and sports programs for at-risk kids. The group also was present for the Hard Rock's groundbreaking ceremony last spring, when they were given guitars. After the Times Square slaughter, the Hard Rock donated 100 guitars to another charity.

But still ...

You Must Remember This

When you start learning the guitar, they tell you'll have to practice a lot and they tell you that your fingertips are going to hurt. They don't tell you how much there is to remember.

I once scoffed at any musician who brought out lyric sheets with him. My perspective on that has changed.

Consider "Take It Easy." It's a pretty simple song, musically (basic chords) and lyrically (only two words of more than two syllables), but it calls for more than 300 strums and chord changes. That's not counting the intro and outro.

Any performer who's been around a while probably has a few hundred songs in the ol' repertoire, which is several tons of chord changes and lyrics to recall. Frank Sinatra, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Ozzy Osbourne and Elton John -- and, yes, even Jessica Simpson -- have all used teleprompters on stage and I no longer fault them for it.

As an alternative to the teleprompter, a performer could try the Jimmy Reed method. He sometimes had his wife onstage whispering the words to him.

The Jaws of Music

I'm developing a case of guitar jaw. I noticed today that when I'm playing, I clench my jaw something fierce. I suppose if I sang it would keep my jaw loose but the only thing worse than my playing is my singing so that's not a good option.

A little research shows excessive jaw-clenching is fairly common among guitar players. The consensus advice is to relax, which seems a bit obvious to me. Maybe I should get a mouthpiece. Someone suggested putting a cookie between your teeth with just enough pressure to hold it in place. I'd eat the cookie, though.

I wonder what all that jaw-clenching does to my face while I'm trying to play. I hope I'm not making some grotesque guitar face.

The iPod Deals

The following baker's dozen of songs were chosen solely by the iPod in this order:

• "Raised by the Graves," Scott Miller
• "Conversation With the Devil," Ray Wylie Hubbard
• "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man," Chuck Berry
• "Oozlin' Daddy Blues," Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys
• "Mariano," Jason Boland
• "Mercy," Duffy
• "Something Else," Georgia Satellites
• "Drinking Blues," Lucille Bogan
• "New York, New York," Ryan Adams
• "Sixty Acres," James McMurtry
• "Memphis," Rod Stewart
• "Claudine," Rolling Stones
• "You Don't Have to Go," Jimmy Reed

Short Takes

In 1990 Yuriy Shishkov was in a damp basement room in the Soviet Union, illegally making guitars with makeshift tools and scavenged parts, selling the finished product for about a $100. He eventually made his way to the United States, where he found himself making guitars for Jimmy Page, as well as Paul Stanley of Kiss. Now he's an ace luthier in Fender's custom shop, where he puts together guitars like a mirror-topped Telecaster for Keith Urban. Sure beats working the night shift at the Tonika plant in Vladivostok. The Los Angeles Times tells his story here and furnished the picture on the the left.

I'm probably the last to learn this but Page put aside his Les Paul and played a 1958 Telecaster on the notable solo on "Stairway to Heaven" ...

This struggling economy is hurting the guitar business. Nashville-based Gibson, which has been around since 1902, is laying off 50 people amid what it says is a 20 percent drop-off in instrument sales in this fiscal quarter. The layoffs will be on the corporate side, rather than the guitar-making side ...

Jimi Hendrix's boyhood home -- the tiny house he lived in when he developed his interest in music --- was demolished this week but it's legacy may live on. "Can you imagine a guitar made out of wood from Jimi's house? Who wouldn't want that?" Pete Sikov, who bought the 900-square-foot house a few years ago for more than $30,000, told the Seattle Times. Sikov is saving and cataloging the pieces from the place, where Hendrix lived from age 10 to 13. Sikov moved the house from Seattle to nearby Renton, Wash., a few years ago with the intention of making it a museum of sorts. But after several development deals fell through, Renton city officials ordered the house, which was something of an eyesore, demolished.

Smoothing Out the C Chord

I might have to give myself a gold star -- a little discreet one -- after making some progress recently. No major breakthroughs but progress, nonetheless.

A couple of weeks ago a friend asked how I was coming along on the guitar and I replied that I was sometimes amazed at how truly awful I still am. I went through the list of musical crimes I have been committing from the beginning -- of shortcomings that have plagued me from the beginning -- fumbling fingers, slow and erratic chord changes.

Shortly afterward, though, a few things started falling in place and, for the most part, I have no idea why. I've got a small handful of songs I can handle if I keep the tempo slow enough and if expectations aren't too high. My repertoire -- if I my be so bold as to call it that -- centers around lots of old countrified Stones stuff like "Dead Flowers," "Torn and Frayed," Rip This Joint" and "Country Honk," as well as what sounds like the playlist at a classic rock station -- "Brown-Eyed Girl," "White Houses" and "Love Me Do." Jackson Browne's "Take It Easy" is probably the highlight of the show.

One improvement I can pinpoint is the way I handle the C chord. It used to give me fits because I was subconsciously trying to lay in my three fingers one at a time. If I tried to do it quickly, I'd miss and if I tried to do it carefully, the song would come to a near-halt. But then I read that you need to apply all fingers at the same time, which certainly make sense. This is one of those basics I should have learned a long time ago but we all learn at our own pace, don't we?

Tales of Ignorance and Generosity

There isn't much I can contribute to a discussion of the merits of switching out a bone saddle in favor of a turq saddle or whether somebody should buy a Larrivee D-05 or go with the Taylor 710 L9. That's why I mostly lurk at at the Acoustic Guitar Forum message board, which is home to some pretty serious players.

But every now and then I find some nugget of guitar information that isn't several miles over my head. And some of the threads are downright amusing, like "Dumbest thing overheard in a guitar store" with many of the tales featuring the sometimes ill-informed sales staff of various Guitar Center stores. My favorites include the salesman who thought bass -- as in the opposite of treble -- was pronounced like the fish of the same spelling and the guy who tried to convince a customer that a guitar with a warped neck was intentionally tilted so the player could have a better view of the fretboard.

And then there was the salesman who urged a man to spend $2,000-plus on new Martin and then take it home and enlarge the sound hole himself because it was the "new thing" to do.

As someone pointed out, that's what Willie Nelson's done to the sound hole of his Martin and he seems to be doing OK.

Sometimes you get a feel-good story at the Acoustic Guitar Forum like the New Jersey man who solicited for a guitar for his stepson, hoping that it would help him through his stay in a rehab facility. The man was out of work but offered to pay off the guitar over time.

Eleven minutes after he posted, a fellow board member was making arrangements to meet up and hand over a nearly new Epiphone. Shortly after that came another offer of a guitar and someone else had a case to donate. Still another person wanted to contribute strings.

The man got the guitar to his stepson that same day and then posted the following:

"I picked up the guitar tonight from a very gracious forum member. She even found a gig bag for the guitar and it looked brand new. I was able to take it to my son right away. I have never seen him so surprised or happy. We went outside to a picnic table and opened it up, he just grinned and grinned. What kid wouldn't with a new Black Epiphone. He then proceeded to play me something he had been working on, 'The House of the Rising Sun.' What a beautiful day. Thanks."

Snake, Rattle and Roll

My next guitar accessory will come from the animal kingdom. Turns out that part of my problem is that I don't have a rattlesnake rattle in my guitar.

Nowadays the music industry mostly uses rattlesnakes to provide trousers for legions of heavy-metal heroes but they once had a more interesting role. Old bluesmen would drop rattles down the sound hole to give their guitars a little more mojo. Borrowing from a fiddle tradition, other folks used the rattles to keep mice and spiders from nesting inside while still others claimed the rattles gave their guitars a buzz that fleshed out their sound.

I'm not sure if my local guitar shop carries rattlesnake parts. Currently all I have in my Alvarez are a couple of small dust balls, although every now and then I accidentally drop a pick in. Neither provides much mojo, though.

Dueling Guitar and Banjo

It's one of the best known pieces of music in movie history -- right up there with "As Time Goes By" from "Casablanca" -- so why is it misnamed? It's called "Dueling Banjos" -- from "Deliverance," the 1972 movie about the city slickers experiencing all sorts of cultural disparities with the hillbillies in northern Georgia -- but what we see is one guy playing a banjo and another playing a guitar.

The banjo boy was played by Billy Redden, an 11-year-old local found at a casting call on location in Georgia because the director thought his "look" suited the role. The story goes that Redden didn't know anything about the banjo so the banjo work was done by a player reaching around Redden.

The actor with the guitar, Ronny Cox, who was making his movie debut, actually is an accomplished player. He was in bands as a kid growing up in New Mexico and for a while sang backup at Norman Petty's studio, where Buddy Holly did some of his best work. Cox, who would go on to play a Woody Guthrie colleague in "Bound for Glory," has cut several albums and still his act on the road when not working in movies.

"Dueling Banjos" was written by Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith in 1955. The makers of "Deliverance" used the song -- as performed by Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell -- without Smith's permission and he had to sue to get songwriting credit and royalties. The soundtrack version was a big hit and spent four weeks at No. 2 on the U.S. pop charts in 1973.

As for Redden (on the left, all growed up) he's got to be one of the most memorable actors in movie history, considering the brevity of his list of credits. After "Deliverance," his next acting job was in 2003 when Tim Burton cast him as a banjo player in "Big Fish," just because he was so taken by the "Deliverance" scene. He also made an appearance on "Blue Collar TV" but spends most of his time working at the Cookie Jar Cafe, which he co-owns in Clayton, Ga.

The Telecaster Rethought

I've been working on some modifications that I plan to submit to the Fender people. Hope they like them.

Musical Mariners

The Seattle Mariners should challenge the Arizona Diamondbacks to a battle of the baseball bands.

As we learned last season, several of the D'backs are so into music that the team set aside a corner of the clubhouse to serve as a Fender-furnished music room. It turns out the Mariners also have a couple of decent guitarists.

Seattle first baseman Ben Broussard's second album will be coming out this year, full of the acoustic rock songs he writes on the road. He's been playing since he was a teenager in Beaumont, Texas, and says at this stage in his life the music is a complement to baseball.

"Music definitely helps me play (baseball) better," he told an interviewer a while back. "I think I play (baseball) better when I'm able to let loose and play my guitar when I have a bad night. I can write a song about it and just let it go."

His music has been used on TV shows like "Real World" and "Dog the Bounty Hunter." You can hear a sample of his first album on his Web site or iTunes and he also does U2's "With or Without You" on "Oh, Say Can You Sing," a compilation of singing baseball players.

Left-handed reliever Tyler Johnson could be Broussard's collaborator. Johnson, who also takes his guitar on the road, is trying to make the Mariners roster after rotator cuff surgery and says he might try a music career if he doesn't make the cut.

The Royal Guitar

If someone said to me "Roy Rogers guitar," I would picture something like the item on the right -- a vintage-looking toy made of pressed cardboard with some gaudy King of the Cowboys artwork. The Autry National Center of the American West sell this very item for $35.

But if someone from the Christie's says "Roy Rogers guitar," the price is going to be more than $35. In fact, it'll be six figures. The auction house is selling a Martin OM-45 Deluxe guitar that once belonged to Rogers, who was, in addition to being the coolest of all cowboys, the founder of the Sons of the Pioneers.

The guitar was made in 1930 and Roy was the last person to play it. Christie's is selling it in its unrestored state -- just under the bridge is a gold star sticker from a flour promotion campaign Rogers did in the mid-1930s -- and is expecting it to go for $150,000 to $250,000 in an April 3 auction. Three other guitars once owned by the former Leonard Slye of Cincinnati, Ohio, also are being put on the block by the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum in Branson, Missouri.

I was a big fan of Roy's but I suppose the pressed-cardboard model fits my budget better than the Martin.

Unsupervised in the Guitar Room

Until today I had only really played three guitars -- all of which I paid for, at one point or another -- in my life. I know that sounds ridiculous to a veteran guitar player and it's also a bit self-defeating because of the way it limits my guitar education. But today I manged to get my hands on several different ones and fiddle around to my heart's content. It was a case of the middle-aged guy in the guitar store making like the kid in the candy store.

Actually, it wasn't a guitar store but the guitar section of Best Buy. I'm not sure when Best Buy started selling guitars but my little heart skipped a beat when I saw all those electrics hanging on the wall. I lusted for them for awhile and then went in a room about the size of a standard bedroom that was wall-to-wall acoustics. I sat in there among about 100 guitars and played around for almost an hour, getting my hands on Takamines, Taylors, Gibsons, Fenders and even a couple of Martins (these were the relatively inexpensive, foreign-made models with hardly anything over $500). Again, anyone with any experience will find this naive but I was fascinated by the way each had it's own feel and voice. I think I liked the ones with the big, deep sound best.

The reason I'd never sampled guitars before was because I'm just way too self-conscious about the way I play. I'm severely audience-phobic and to go into a place like Guitar Center and be scrutinized by serious players would never work for me. I live in fear that someone is going to ask me to demonstrate my prowess. It was hard enough playing for an instructor when I was taking lessons. Fortunately, I apparently was invisible to the Best Buy personnel and they hardly noticed my presence.

As it is now, about the only people who ever hear me play are family members and they have no choice. Another guitar student with a story similar to mine -- didn't get serious about the guitar until later in life and was at times struggling with it -- told me it had done him a world of good to start playing with others. I'm just not ready for that -- psychologically or skill-wise, I'm afraid. But if I ever do play for any sort of audience, I'm going to do so under a big banner that paraphrases the Marshall Crenshaw album title "I've Suffered for My Art. Now It's Your Turn."

A Blunt Musical Instrument

I recently came across a story that reminded me of the guitar's versatility. Not only is it a musical instrument, it also can be a blunt instrument for administering a sound thrashing.

It seems a man in Wasilla, Alaska*, found someone robbing his house. The homeowner responded by grabbing a guitar and bashing the burglar, who fled, only to be captured a short time later.

The homeowner's choice of weapon follows in the rich tradition of El Kabong, the old TV cartoon character who roamed the Southwest handing out musical beat-downs to deserving miscreants. El Kabong was a Zorro spoof, a masked alter ego of Quick Draw McGraw, the sheriff who was part John Wayne, part Barney Fife. He called his guitar a Kabonger, an otherwise unknown four-string acoustic model from an unknown luthier. This video explains how things worked.

I don't recall ever seeing El Kabong actually make music on his Kabonger but I doubt he was very good at it since he was a horse and fretting would be awfully difficult with hooves.

El Kabong was just a cartoon character but Keith Richards, while he may have some cartoonish qualities about him, is a real-life guitar-swinging vigilante. Watch him take a baseball-style stroke at some fool who rushed the Stones' stage before jumping right back into "Satisfaction." You can almost hear the kabong. (Way to help him out there, Mick.)

* Yes, this is the town that gave us Sarah Palin. Police said Russia could be seen from the crime scene.

Koa and a Cat

I'll concede that I might be a little old for Taylor Swift, the 18-year-old singing/songwriting Nashville phenom, but I think I'm developing a crush on her guitar. Not the rhinestone-covered model she uses for "Teardrops on My Guitar" but the eye-catching koa wood one seen here. She played it at the Grammys last month and also posed with it on the cover of the current Rolling Stone.

Coincidentally or not, that guitar is a Taylor ...

If you're a guitarist on a budget, you might check out www.goingtoday.com. The site offers one random musical item for sale per day and sometimes you can get a decent deal. The offerings might range from a box of harmonicas to a $220 effects pedal but usually are on the inexpensive end of the scale. I got a plug-in mini-amp for the Telecaster that was pretty junky but also a decent clip-on pickup for the Alvarez that plugs into my Fender amp ...

Man, it really irks me that a cat can play better than I can. His technique is better, he's faster and he plays with more passion, although I think the playing-with-the-teeth thing at the end was way over the top. Somebody ought to turn him into guitar strings.

Actually, youtube.com is full of guitar-playing cat videos. Some of the other cats are better than me, too; some not. None of them, though, have this guy's flair. He's a feline Stevie Ray.

The Telecaster

You can tell I'm a neophyte guitarist because I'm just now getting around to posting an adoring photo layout of the newest guitar. A hard-core player would have done this weeks ago.

This isn't exactly the work of Annie Liebowitz (she shoots guitars as well as people, doesn't she?) but the thing is so shiny it's hard to photograph.

Dancing With the iPod

This is a pretty eclectic stumble through the shuffling iPod.

• "Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers," Etta James
• "Out There," Jimmie Vaughan
• "Live Forever," Billy Joe Shaver
• "Take It Easy," Jackson Browne
• "The Valley of Regret," Stone Coyotes
• "So Excited," B.B. King
• "Sad Songs and Waltzes," Willie Nelson
• "Shine On," Humble Pie
• "Hard Times in the Land of Plenty," Omar & the Howlers
• "Everybody Needs Somebody," 13th Floor Elevators
• "Texas Rain," Townes Van Zandt
• "Cowboy in Flames," Waco Brothers

On closer inspection, maybe it's not all that eclectic since six of the 13 acts are from Texas.

Bits & Pieces

The people at the Smithsonian Institution have a knack for explaining things. This site, pointed out by one of my most loyal readers, gives you the history of the electric guitar, as well as primer on how they work. The site includes audio commentary by G.E. Smith, best known for his tenure as the bandleader on "Saturday Night Live" ...

Not many professional guitarists can discuss the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System at length and have day jobs as consultants to the Pentagon. In fact, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, formerly of Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers, probably is the only one. He talks about his dichotomy in this interview ...

I was browsing through some guitar tabs on the Internet and came across this entry for "Lean on Me." The fellow who had tabbed it out topped off his work with this message: "This song is very easy if u can't play it, throw your guitar in the nearest dumpster and lay in the dark rocking back and forth in the feedle position!" That was enough to discourage me from even trying the song because the nearest dumpster is a pretty far walk from me. Also, now I can be all smug and say, "Well, maybe I can't play the song but at least I can spell and punctuate!" ...

If you name your band Lynyrd Skynyrd, you're going to have to expect some misspellings. Still, for a band that helped define Southern rock, provided enough hit songs to fill a couple of ours on a classic rock radio station and endured a tragic plane crash, you'd think the Guitar Hero people would get the spelling right on the cover of their video game (click the picture for a closer look).

At least they didn't include Lead Zeppelin and Deaf Leopard.

The State of the Guitar

There are state guitars and then there are guitars of the state.

The New Mexico Senate has passed legislation that would establish a state guitar -- an acoustic called the New Mexico Sunrise by the Pimental & Sons shop in Albuquerque. It's made of 10 kinds of wood from around the world and has red coral and mother of pearl inlays depicting a sunrise and a black bear, as seen on the left and right.

It runs about $10,000 but if the New Mexico House and governor approve, that state will probably get it gratis.

Back in the days of the Soviet Union, the state controlled the means of production, which meant the state controlled the means of rocking out and, therefore, the electric guitar was a late bloomer under the Communist Party. After all, could there have been a more damning symbol of American decadence?

Without easy access to electric guitars, Russians would get them from touring foreigners or, using the Russian knack for tinkering, just make their own from whatever parts they could scavenge, according to the author of cheesyguitars.com. Skis were used for necks and it was hard to find a working public phone because they had all been harvested for parts to make pickups for Cold War guitars.

Finally, in the late 1960s or early '70s electric guitars went into mass production in the Soviet Union with the Tonika brand. The result (below), according to cheesyguitars.com, was "an unplayable super-heavy guitar with sick body shape, thickest neck you'll ever find and sound suitable for anything but music."

I think I see how we beat the Russians to the moon.

The Art of the Guitar

Don't go to this site unless you have time to spare because Paul Chase's striking guitar paintings can hold your eyes hostage for quite a while. After a lengthy process of elimination, I chose a print of "Classical Glass" (above) to brighten up the home office.

Chase was an art teacher for 35 years and decided to combine his love of art with his love of the guitar (he's been at it for 20-plus years and is a pretty good finger picker). He also paints cityscapes and paintings with cowboy and wine themes and this video shows him at work.

He's not afraid of big jobs, like the creation below that he made for a hotel in Nashville. Chase's full story of making "The Tall Traveling Taylor" can be read here.