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.

String 'n' Things

I had a self-induced embarrassment the other day. I was plunking along in rather atrocious fashion, making unpleasant noise, when I threw up my hands and said, "Yeow, this sounds terrible. This thing is way out of tune." So I whipped out the tuner and, lo and behold, the guitar was perfectly tuned. I guess the circumstantial evidence would indicate that the problem was the player, not the strings.

Speaking of strings, why did they have to put two E strings on a guitar? Just to make it complicated? My guitars have only six strings each and there seem to be enough letters in the alphabet to avoid having to repeat one.

And speaking further of strings, there's a fellow known as Professor String who speaks about them quite a bit at his Web site. The professor seems to know his stuff (he says he has a Ph.D. and studied guitar strings under powerful electron microscopes while working his day job with an engineering company). He can get pretty geeky with his equations for calculating diameter of a wound string for a particular frequency but he also has plenty of advice useful to beginners.

One little nugget I picked up -- don't let your spare strings sit around too long. Strings that have been stored in the standard packaging (each string in a paper envelope, often tucked in a plastic sleeve or cardboard box) are vulnerable to oxidization caused by humidity. Fortunately, the coated strings that I like aren't quite as susceptible to this problem.

It makes me wonder how they packaged strings back in the days when they were made of cow and sheep intestines.

This Store Goes to 11

The Guitar Store in Southampton, England, looks very cool with the shutters down. It's made to look like a Fender Super Champ amp (below) and if you click on the store picture, you can see that the dials go to 11, a la Spinal Tap.

Sssh, I'm Trying to Figure Out My Royalties

There's no need to notify the Grammy nominating committee just yet but earlier this week I wrote a song. That is, I wrote a song if you use the broadest, most liberal definitions of the words wrote and song. A music critic would call it cliched, overly simplistic, filled with phony drama and utterly undance-able. I'd have to agree with that critic but, hey, give me a break.

It started when I was just doodling around on the Alvarez, trying to get faster on the changes, and I put together a sequence of chords that was semi-pleasing to my own unsophisticated auditory system. Some E, some E minor, a little A and my old standby, the G chord. Then I pulled some passing words out of the air to keep the chords company and the next thing you know I'm going on about a broken romance and the Iraq war like I'm Bruce Springsteen or something.

What pleased me the most was I figured out when to throw in an A minor to change the mood and give the song a little emotional jolt.

The whole writing thing lasted a total of maybe three hours over two days but in the end there were three short verses, a chorus and even a bridge. Looking at it objectively, it was an interesting process, especially the spontaneity and accidental nature of it all. Since I deal with words for a living, I always figured that it would be easier to write the lyrics first and then shape the music around them. That turned out not to be the case here, though.

While my little tune probably won't become the anthem of a generation like "Satisfaction" and "Born to Run," I really, really believe it's better than "Kung Fu Fighting" or "Who Let the Dogs Out."

High Aspirations

I know I'm just a dilettante guitarist wannabe but I have to admit that I feel a cool breeze pass over me when I throw that guitar strap over my head and put on the Telecaster. Just that simple gesture -- one you've seen countless times -- makes me feel like part of some sort of special clique. The International Brotherhood of Really Cool Guitar Slingers, maybe.

Of course, strapping up is pretty much where my similarity with a real guitarist ends. I can't even wear the thing properly. Once I proudly modeled the Telecaster for my wife and she said, "Uh, is it supposed to be up that high?" Sure enough, I had it cinched way up, closer to nipples than navel -- straight out of Nerdtown. I should have just told her I was emulating the young George Harrison.

But now that I've mastered putting the guitar on and have been made aware of my problem with how I wear it, there are more steps that have to be taken if Stinktown Willie and the Hard Liquors are to become a reality. That's where Mike Hurst -- a Brit who used to play with Dusty Springfield and a 17-year-old Jimmy Page back in the '60s and produced Cat Stevens, Manfred Mann and Marc Bolan -- comes into play.

Rather than just a regular school of rock, Hurst puts on clinics to train tomorrow's rock stars in the dynamics of being in a band. A British newspaper says his workshops focus on the "traditional rock band roles of singer, guitarist and drummer." If you're going to typecast, I guess those three roles would be really cool guy, cool guy and drummer (bass players apparently are on their own). Hurst says he'll cover topics such as intra-band communication and showing up on time for rehearsal.

I think I could handle the be-on-time part.

Posthumous Grammy for Fender

In addition to honoring the Coldplays and Lil Waynes of the world this weekend, the Grammy people had a special award for Leo Fender, the California electronics tinkerer who shaped rock 'n' roll with the electric guitars he designed and manufactured but didn't know how to play. Fender was given a posthumous Technical Grammy for his contribution to the music business.

The Los Angeles Times had a nice little piece on Fender in which fairly well known guitarists like Keith Richards, Buddy Guy and Eric Clapton give praise unto Fender's two best-known products, the Telecaster and the Stratocaster. A couple of the quotes ended up in the new TelecasterTalk sidebar on the right side of this page.

Now that I am a proud Fender owner, I like to leap up and shout "Telecaster!" or "Strat!" every time I see somebody playing one on television. I got to do this quite a few times while watching bits and piece of the Grammys.

Ironic note: Leo Fender's brief biographical page at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame website has a note at the bottom saying, "This website was made possible through support from companies such as Gibson."

The iPod of Texas Is Upon You

This month's random iPod play starts with a distinctive Texas flavor. I swear I didn't rig it that way.

• "Deep in the Heart of Texas," Augie Meyers
• "I'll Be Your San Antone Rose," Emmylou Harris
• "All That Matters," Todd Snider
  
• "Johnny B. Goode," AC/DC
  
• "Watcha Gonna Do?," Lucille Bogan
• "Gwendolyn," The Resentments
  
• "Got a New Truck," Tracy Nelson
• "Worried Life Blues," John Lee Hooker
  
• "Hello My Lover," Willie de Ville
  
• "Ride My Pony," John Hiatt
  
• "Seven Long Years," The Whipsaws
  
• "Hold Back," Rolling Stones
  
• "Comes a Time," Neil Young