Street Corner Serenade

Regular reading of The Beat Below the Street has raised my consciousness as far as buskers are concerned. That made it extra interesting last night when I caught the act of a street performer I first saw playing in Washington, D.C., more than 20 years ago.

Washington is not an especially friendly city for buskers and they are non-existent in the suburbs where I live. But last night there was a familiar guitarist playing near the exit escalator of a downtown subway stop at the Verizon Center, where I was taking my daughter and a friend to see Green Day (the daughter's first rock concert).* He used a hand cart to haul his sticker-covered electric guitar (I didn't get the make or model), amp and rhythm machine and he had shells and a bell around one ankle to add a little jangly percussion. It had been a few years since I'd seen him but he had the same long bandana-covered braids. I think the reading glasses perched on the end of his nose were new, though.

Waiting for the Green Day show to end, I leaned against a bank of newspaper machines that was well guarded by eight D.C. police officers and took in the street show. He had a great voice and I thought he was an impressive player. He did semi-jazzy ethereal versions of "Fire and Rain" and "Summertime" before declaring intermission and taking a phone call. As the concert crowd began to leak out, he started the Green Day hit "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" but broke it off and admitted he didn't know all the words.

The sidewalk patrons were moderately generous to him. Certainly more generous than I'd in the past 15 or so times I'd seen this guy play over the years. I'm embarrassed to say that I'd never put a cent in his jar before so I dropped in a modest $5. I promise to do more to support the street arts, too.

Finally daughter and friend emerged from the arena, bubbling over with post-concert enthusiasm, and met me at the designated rendezvous spot. They carried on about what a great show they'd seen and I was very happy for them. I'd seen a good show, too, and for about a tenth of what their tickets cost.

I Googled around today and learned that the guitarist's name is Mark Francis Nickens and he's played in bands around town and recorded a bit, in addition to becoming a busking institution in Washington.

This video from The Washington Post, which also loaned out the photo above, has an interview with Nickens and, as always, youtube.com has something.

* It's been many years since I saw a mass-popular act in big arena setting like this Green Day show. I was surprised how clean-cut and family-friendly the crowd seemed. Also, I was never frisked going into a concert.

Uke Talking to Me?

Let's not confuse the ukulele with a little guitar -- that would ruin the whole premise of this blog -- but the wee four-string wonder from Hawaii is experiencing a spike in popularity.

The ukulele has had a few booms in the past -- the Roaring '20s, Arthur Godfrey in the '40s and '50s, the inexplicable Tiny Tim in the '70s -- and now we're in the midst of another. The Los Angeles Times says that the Internet has stoked this revival with youtube videos, message boards and special applications. The Times traces its roots to 2002 when Paul McCartney played a ukulele at the tribute for uke fan George Harrison, who used to give them as gifts.

Martin makes them, Fender makes them. The Kala Brand Music Co. in California sells them and reported a 75 percent jump last year. There's a Ukulele Hall of Fame in the Duxbury, Mass., which is a long way from Waimei Bay. The sit-com "Scrubs" has a uke-playing character. A Google search will give you more information about websites, ukulele ensembles, festivals, lessons, etc, than you can handle.

Sometimes the ukulele suffers from a hokey, cartoon-ish stereotype. There's a movie, "The Mighty Uke," to dispel that. As someone suggested, search youtube for ukelele and the title of your favorite song and you'll likely find it performed on a uke. Yes, even "Stairway to Heaven" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Highway to Hell." "Mannish Boy," too, and the theme from "Shaft."

I'm not the least bit tempted to set aside the guitars and take up the ukulele (a little bit of ukulele music goes a long way with me) but it does have its charm. I especially enjoy the odd juxtapositions, like this video of "Satisfaction."

Looking for Les

We escaped to the Delaware shore for a few days this week, during which my guitar-related experiences were few and minimal. I drove past the exit to Stevensville, Md., which is the home of the Paul Reed Smith factory, but that wasn't very musical. The only time I applied fingers to strings was after spotting this guitar swap shop (above) a few miles west of Bethany Beach.

It's a tiny place that's only been in business about a year and has a bunch of amps and about 20 acoustics and electrics, none of any fancy pedigree. I plunked and plinked on a few and had my first experience with a 12-string, which rang nicely.

My fantasy is to walk into a place like this or, more likely, somebody's yard sale and spy a '59 Les Paul with a price tag of $75. I'll offer $60 and settle on $70. Then I take it home and start cleaning it up. While I'm lovingly polishing up the sunburst, a genie will appear and give me the playing skills of Duane Allman, although he will require me to find my own bottleneck slide.

On the drive to the beach I put the iPod on random play and something odd happened about a dozen songs in. It played "Born to Run" -- the Springsteen song from "Live at the Odeon" -- and followed immediately with "Born to Run," an entirely different song that has the same title as the Springsteen tune. The non-Springsteen "Born to Run" was a semi-hit for Emmylou Harris and this particular version was by her former bandmate, the British Telecaster master Albert Lee.

Emmylou's "Born to Run" was written by another Brit, Paul Kennerley, who once had the pleasure of being Mr. Emmylou Harris. Kennerly's story is pretty interesting. He was an advertising copy writer in London when he heard Willie Nelson on the radio and got hooked on country music. He eventually gave up advertising and started writing country songs, including one of the best concept albums I've heard, "The Legend of Jesse James," which features Harris, Lee, Johnny Cash, Levon Helm and Charlie Daniels.

In the meantime, I'm still looking for that overlooked Les Paul.

Finding My Inner Headbanger

The Telecaster has a new playmate.

That's a Line 6 Spider III amp with 15 watts of juice pushed through an 8-inch speaker with four playing modes and six effects. As always, don't ask me what that means; I'm just faking it here. All I can tell you is that that amp gets way loud and makes some freaky cool noise.

When I started this guitar playing, I figured I'd be happy learning to plink out a couple of Robert Earl Keen songs and some simple folky-country type things. But this amp is pulling me over to the Dark Side. It apparently is marketed toward young heavy metal aspirants on a budget and has settings meant to evoke the likes of Metallica and Anthrax. I generally prefer silence to Metallica and Anthrax but I have to say that playing on those settings can give you a feeling of power.

Check out this control panel.

The effects on the knobs (the second and third ones from the right) are chorus flange, phaser, tremelo, sweep echo, tape echo and reverb. I won't know how to use them properly until I get a master's degree in electrical engineering but the trial-and-error method is working for me so far.

As for mode settings, you've got clean, crunch, metal and the one indicated by the arrow. Can you read that? If not, click on the photo and take a look. That's right, it says INSANE. The purpose of this setting, the manual says, is "to provide you with as much input gain distortion as possible short of complete meltdown."

The manual has lots of phrases like that: "... monster truck of tone ..." and "... that infamous brown sound that will feel like flames are shooting out of the input jack ..." Who can resist sweet talk like that?

These Line 6 amps, as best as I can determine, are a fairly new development in Guitardom. Purists may scoff but with all the effects built into the amp, they eliminate the need for a rack of special effects footpedals and you can get it on the cheap, too (the Spider III goes for $99 but Best Buy had it on sale for $75 and I knocked off another 10 percent with a coupon). I would have preferred the more expensive model that had blues and twang settings, in addition to all the metal mania, but it was a little pricey.

Excuse me, I have to plug in on the insane mode, max out the phaser and sweep echo and in get in touch with my inner headbanger.

Six-String Me

The Six-String Nation guitar got me thinking about what I would put into a little guitar to symbolize my life and heritage.

Let's start at the start in the dusty little West Texas town where my parents grew up. About the only things that grows out there are mesquite and cedar trees, which some luthiers use for bottoms, tops, sides and fingerboards, although I'm not sure the species you'll find in West Texas are the proper ones for guitar-making.

Baseball was the sport I enjoyed the most and was the least bad at so my custom luthier will have to work some Louisville Slugger into this guitar, maybe in the bridge.

For fret wires, how about melting down the key to that old MGB that I used to love, except for when I hated it for breaking down at rush hour. Also, I spent a few summers working at a refinery and a fabrication yard along the Houston Ship Channel so could you make tuning pegs out of burned welding rods? And I spent enough money at the orthodontist to buy a couple of high-end Martins so maybe now I can get some use out of my kids' old braces.

To represent the college years, I think a pick guard fashioned from a polished armadillo shell would be a real eye-catcher. I'd like the fret markers to be shaped like longhorn silhouettes and you could make them out of beer bottle caps.

So far I've only covered about half my life and I think I've come to a dead end. This guitar has nothing about my profession, the places I've lived in the past 25 years, my wife, children (other than their braces). I'll have to give this some more thought because I'm having trouble coming up with tangible things that represent them -- at least tangible things that you could work into a guitar. Maybe I'm just more complex than Canada.

A Thing or Two or Three

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.

You're probably thinking the kitty in the picture is a lefty who just flipped the guitar and strung it in reverse. No, he's actually a right-hander. Cats don't even know how to hold a guitar.

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 the guitar!

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.