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