Scenes From My Life (Continued)

Scene V

As a middle-aged wanna-be guitarist father drives his teenage daughter home through the park, they discuss the arts and the nature of innate talent.

Daughter: By the way, you're guitar playing has improved some lately ...

Father (blushing and trying to restrain his pride): Thanks, it's nice of you to say that.

Daughter: ... but it's still annoying.

Father barely manages to keep from swerving off the road.

.

.

(For previous episodes of 'Scenes From My Life,' see this and this.)

Pieces & Bits

A Hong Kong businessman paid $350,000 at a New York auction for that sequined white glove that Michael Jackson used to wear but there was another piece of musical memorabilia on the block that I would have preferred. At that same auction Bo Diddley's trademark rectangular guitar went for a price of what a vague news report said was more than $50,000. That was more than the price paid for guitars that once belonged to Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, Prince and James Taylor ...


In its search for quality blogs, Premier Guitar magazine has once again cast its a keen eye across all Internetdom and that keen eye has landed right here. PaLG gets a nice mention in PG's December digital edition, to go along with a citation a while back. And I considered snarky to be a compliment ...


As noted previously, the guitar is itself a subject of songwriting inspiration. Gibson has has composed its own list of guitar songs -- only a couple of which were mentioned here previously.

There & Here

It's difficult to picture Willie Nelson on a skateboard but if he had one, it would look like the one pictured second from the right, which is based on his legendary Trigger guitar. These are the work of a skateboard designer named Greg Koenig ...

Is it fair to blame a guitar for politics? Maybe so, judging from what Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, 2008 presidential candidate and current TV pundit, says. In a Fox News interview Huckabee said the $99 guitar his parents gave him for Christmas in 1964 changed his life.

"That gift really got me out of my basic shyness, which I'm sure you'll find hard to believe," he said. "But if it weren't for that electric guitar that my parents sacrificed to give me, I assure you I wouldn't be on the Fox News Channel, wouldn't be talking to you, would never have run for anything except run to hide."

I wonder how he would have turned out if his folks had given him an accordion instead ...

The feds swoooped down on the Gibson plant in Nashville this week, apparently looking for endangered wood. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service agents had a search warrant but wouldn't say what they were looking for or if they found it. The speculation is that they were checking for endangered tonewoods.

Gibson says it's in the clear. Also, the Tennessean newspaper says the company has a strong environmental record and links to Greenpeace and that CEO Henry Juszkiewicz has long been an advocate of preserving endangered woods.

Happy Birthday to Woody, From Keith

No, not Ron Wood.

I'm talking about loyal reader Woody Bombay, who celebrates a birthday today. He can do so with his very own 7-inch-tall Keith Richards action figure, thanks to me, his brother. You're most welcome, Woody.

This is a '70s era Keith Richards so it probably comes with a drug habit and miniature syringe.

But look at the big ol' (modified) Telecaster, would you. It's based on the one Keith calls Micawber. The name apparently comes from Wilkins Micawber, a character in Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield" who supposedly was modeled on Dickens' own father.

Lost in the USA!

Bruce Springsteen learned a difficult lesson the other night -- check your tour itinerary before making any geographical shoutouts from the stage.

The Detroit Free Press says Springsteen opened his Nov. 13 show in Auburn Hills, Mich., with a hearty "Hello, Ohio!" and went on to repeat the mistake several times until Steve Van Zandt corrected him. Springsteen called it "every frontman's nightmare."

In his defense, the band had played Cleveland three nights earlier but I was pretty surprised by this mistake, considering how Springsteen's songs are so full of movement and geographical references and have such a powerful sense of place. But a little research shows Springsteen has long been geographically challenged.

• The Rangers had a homecoming in Harlem late last night but he totally missed it because he was lost on the Long Island Expressway.
• "Mary Queen of Arkansas" was originally titled "Mary Queen of Utah."
• Wrote "Galveston Bay" on a visit to Lake Havasu.
• When he and Wayne were driving in to Darlington County, South Carolina, he actually thought he was in Arlington County in Virginia.
• "Incident on 57th Street," "10th Avenue Freezeout," "Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street," "Thunder Road," "Streets of Philadelphia," "Highway 29" and "E Street Shuffle" could not have been written without extensive help from Fodor's travel guides.
• The reissue will be called "Greetings from Asbury Park -- or Wherever I Am!"
  
• He was in the sixth grade when he wrote "Crush on You" in hopes of winning the love of his comely geography teacher. She laughed at the song, souring the boy on the subject for the rest of his life.
• Songs have fewer geographical mistakes since the advent of Google maps.
• There's a line in the sing-along song "Hungry Heart" that says "I went out for a ride and I never went back." He fully intended to return but just couldn't find his way home.

Bits & Pieces

Another Robert Johnson revival is brewing. There's a campaign under way to raise $250,000 to restore his boyhood home in Hazelhurst, Miss., according to news reports, as well a possible movie. The movie script is by Jimmy White, who wrote the script for the Oscar-winning "Ray" and certainly had lots of rich material to work with on Johnson.

Earlier this year another structure with a strong Robert Johnson connection -- the building at 508 Park Avenue in Dallas -- was in great peril. In 1937 that warehouse was the site of Johnson's second and last recording session, which produced songs like "Love in Vain," "Hellhound on My Trail" and "Me and the Devil Blues." Johnson's first recordings had been made seven months earlier in a San Antonio hotel and those two outings did a whole lot to shape rock 'n' roll.

The Dallas building is in a derelict neighborhood and the owners filed for a demolition permit in January but apparently the building is still standing. At least there are no mentions in the Dallas media of it being torn down ...

A friend was in Santa Fe, N.M., recently and kindly thought of me while checking out the vendors on the town square. She sent me this lovely copper guitar pick, embossed with Hopi-style bears.

She may not realize it but her generosity could lead to charges of aiding and abetting a felony when I am charged with crimes against music (indictments are expected any day now).

Something to Fret About

I have solved the mystery of the fretboard mentioned in item No. 10 of this post. After several weeks of diligent research (OK, actually it was a couple of minutes on GuitarWiki.com, which I previously didn't even know existed), I found out why the markers are placed on the third, fifth, seventh, ninth and then 12th frets, when it seems like the pattern should have placed a marker on the 11th fret.

There are two reasons, says GuitarWiki, the first being that the 12th fret is one octave higher than when the string is played open. Since I don't know the difference between a higher octave and high octane, I prefer the second explanation, which is that the 12th fret is exactly halfway between the bridge and the nut (I know what a bridge and a nut are but a couple of years ago I didn't).

My guitars just have plain ol' inlaid dots for fretmarkers. On the Alvarez the markers are something that looks like abalone and those on the Telecaster are a dark wood. Nothing fancy like this vine or thebear tracks or razor blades. If I was having something custom-made, I would definitely want my fretmarkers to be armadillos.

If you really don't like your fretmarkers, you can fake it with these stickers, which are called Frettattoos.

I Pick the Longhorns

As previously noted, guitars and Texas Longhorn football go quite well together. I bet if everyone started using picks like this one, it would greatly increase the mighty Longhorns' chances of winning a national championship.

You can buy them here and even get a strap if you like.

Duly Noted

It's been almost exactly 34 years since Bruce Springsteen arose and pulled off the rare feat of simultaneously being on the covers of Time and Newsweek. I was in college at the time and remember seeing the magazines side by side as I waited in a grocery store checkout line.

At the time I had heard of the guy but never heard his music and I recall that I was not impressed by the dual magazine covers or even interested in hearing Springsteen. After all, I was in Austin, which had all the music scene anyone could possibly want -- Willie, Jerry Jeff, Stevie Ray, Doug Sahm, the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Joe Ely just for starters. I saw no need to be importing music from New Jersey (although Springsteen did play Austin three times in 1975).

I'm starting to think I might have called that one wrong ...

Random Thought: I've spent a lot of time at home lately awaiting service calls. It's very nice to have a guitar on hand to help pass the time when you're sitting there alone waiting for the plumber/cable man/dishwasher installer/window replacer to call and tell you that he's going to be late ...

Eric Clapton had to cancel out of the huge, multi-night Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden last week. The reason: gallstones. Yes, gallstones.
Rock 'n' roll, baby! ...

Christmas list item for guitar nerds: the Electronic Rock Guitar shirt. Each fret contains two major chords -- one on the low side of the fretboard and one on the high side -- that are recorded from a real guitar. You use a magnetic pick to strum and it all comes out of a little clip-on amp. The ad says you can play dozens of classic rock songs with (here comes the part I like) "very little skill."

And just so the bass player will have someone to explain jokes to him, there's a drummer T-shirt, too, with seven different drum sounds. It goes something like this:

The iPod Serves up a Double Shot of Ry

The little elf in my iPod who operates the shuffle function sorted through 12,030 songs for this month's random playlist and came up with two songs from Ry Cooder's excellent-but-overlooked 1972 "Boomer's Story." It pleases me that one of the songs was "Crow Black Chicken," with the memorable line "I like chicken pie."

• "Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down," Waylon Jennings
• "Bring It on Home," Led Zeppelin
• "Cherry Ball Blues," Ry Cooder
• "Afterglow 61," Son Volt
• "Put Me Out of Your Misery," Stephen Bruton
• "Aw Shucks, Hush Your Mouth," Jimmie Vaughan and Omar
• "Crow Black Chicken," Ry Cooder
• "Trouble," Little Feat
• "That's Love," The Resentments
• "Sympathy for the Devil," Rolling Stones
• "Too Much Fun," Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen
• "Well, Well, Well," Lucinda Williams
• "Moanin' Low," Billie Holliday