Category Archives: Music

Music, Running, Sports

Runnerus Interrupticus

In our last episode, our heroic author had just completed the first two-thirds of his 10k virtual race, planning to complete the final two miles from home.  We rejoin our tale…

I drove home from the Monarch Chesterfield Levee Trail, and landed in my favorite easy chair.  I was thrilled to have pulled off my longest distance in a couple of months.  After sitting and watching a little bit of the Olympics, I decided I couldn’t stand my own stench and needed to grab a shower.

When I got out, I checked Facebook, and saw that my next door neighbor Joe had two tickets to the Paul McCartney concert at Busch Stadium that night.  I commented that if Becky were in town, I’d be all over that pair of tickets like… well, like the Beatles on vinyl.

Just minutes later, my phone rang.

Neighbor Joe told me that he’d bought the tickets a week or so ago, when Busch Stadium opened up some additional seating.  Apparently, he’d thought to take a galpal, but at her ripe old age of thirty-something, the phrase “Paul who?” rained a little bit on his parade.  But, having another music lover along who could appreciate this event rekindled his interest to go, and that he’d sell me one ticket, and drive us both to the show.  I needed to be ready to go downtown in an hour.

Done!

I’ve been a fan of the Beatles as long as I can remember.  When I was a kid, I’d listen to my parents’ ginormous console radio, and hearing all kinds of tunes.  That’s where I first heard The Beatles’ music.  Fast forward a few years, and I was buying loads of Beatles and Wings albums, playing the grooves off the vinyl.

I kept hoping and hoping that they’d reengage, even if only for a brief while.  I watched as SNL waved a big ol’ check on TV to have them join together on their stage.  I heard the urban legend that on one fateful night, they were all there, except George, who didn’t know his way around NYC, and didn’t get to SNL in time.

And when Wings toured in 1976, I swore I’d get to one of the shows. I was 12, and just didn’t have the means or capability to get to Atlanta to see them.  The closest I got was the Wings Over America album, which I listened to so many times that I knew every sound — music, lyric, audience — by heart.

But when John was assassinated in 1980, that dream died.  (Although, Julian Lennon sounded a lot like his father, and could’ve filled in, I’d thought.)  And then after George’s death, it really cemented the truth that the clock was ticking, and if I was to see any of them live, I needed to move.

In the early 80s, I saw a concert in Chattanooga that had The Producers as the warm-up band.  The girl I was dating at the time and I waited around outside Memorial Auditorium before the doors opened, and ran to the front of the stage when we were allowed in.  She and I were big ol’ Beatles fans, and during the show, we heard that lead-in note for “Hard Day’s Night,” and went nuts.  I was pretty sure that was the closest I’d ever get to seeing anything by the Fab Four live on stage.

Macca has toured many times since those days, and it’s just never seemed to work out for me to go and see him live.  It’d always been a dream of mine to see him perform, and I knew one of these days, he wouldn’t be touring, and I would’ve missed my chance.

When the tickets for this show went on sale many months ago, they were snapped up in no time — minutes! — and I thought that once again, I’d miss seeing Sir Paul live.  Neighbor Joe solved that with his timely tickets, and in an hour’s time, I went from not knowing what I was going to do Saturday night to riding downtown to see Paul McCartney!

Approaching the Field
Approaching the Field

Being a native of Da Lou, Joe knows downtown, and knows where to park for events at Busch.  He parked in a little out of the way lot near the Eat-Rite, and we hiked the short distance to the stadium.  Standing outside the home of the Cards, we chit-chatted, and shared our joy of being there on Facebook.  Quickly enough, the doors opened, we passed through security, and found our way down to the field.

Yes, down to the field!

28 Rows
28 Rows

Joe had somehow scored tickets that were in the 28th row from the stage, dead center, and the view of the stage was incredible.  It was the first time I’d ever been on the field at Busch III, and I was struck with just how big this place was.  We were sitting in basically short center field, oriented toward the batter’s eye, so you could see all the seats in the stadium, and it felt like you were the center of attention.  Very cool view.

And there wasn’t gonna be a bad seat in the house.  Towering video screens flanked the stage, plus a giant one behind the band, ensured everyone was gonna see a great show.  This made for a big ol’ multimedia event, which added to the impact of the show for me.

Folks started to sidle in, beginning to really fill the place up.  Next to us was a girl (Katie; 20-something) and her father (my age-ish) from Montana.  They were in town for a trap shooting tourney, and just decided to come to the show.  They were a hoot to chat with, and were every bit as excited to be there as we were.

Close to 8:15, Sir Paul took the stage… and the rest was a bit of a blur.  This dude is 74 years old, and played for a solid two hours and forty minutes… and then came back for a twenty minute encore!

The 45,000+ folks in the crowd danced and sang along through the whole concert — me included.  Anyone who knows me knows that I’m pretty reserved a lot of the time.  Not here.  I was singing along at the top of my lungs, dancing in place, and letting my internal hair down.  It was really a wonderful night!

Some highlights… (BTW, it looks like the setlist will be found here soon.)

Remember my comment about The Producers?  Well, Sir Paul opened his show with “Hard Day’s Night,” which set the night in a perfect kind of motion for me.

He sprinkled Beatles songs, Wings songs, Macca songs together — even one from the Quarrymen days! — and stirred them up masterfully.  I can’t imagine another show you could go to that features fifty years of music woven together so well.  And it seemed like he had a story to tell for almost everything he performed.  So many bands just come out, play the music, and that’s that.  This was like having a historian onstage, telling some choice nuggets about many of the songs, and then performing them for you.  I loved that approach.

Live and Let Die
Live and Let Die

My favorite performances?  So, so many come to mind, but easily “Live and Let Die” stands apart.  I’m a big Bond fan — Sean Connery, that is! — and the only non-Connery Bond film I like is Live and Let Die.  I’ve loved the title track since it came out around 1973.  I dig the change in tempo here and there, and these fantastic crescendos in the track.  For each one of those big crescendos, the stage erupted in fire and explosions, even leveraging the Cardinals fireworks that are used for winning games.  From our vantage point, those fireworks came right over the top of the stage, creating this incredible shower of fire on stage and fire in the air.  It was absolutely the highlight of the show for me.  (The video below is from YouTube, and is someone’s view from the upper deck of this part of the performance Saturday night.)

Cellphone Fireflies
Cellphone Fireflies

Paul paid tribute to both John Lennon and George Harrison, both moving, and wonderful.  And I saw something I’d never seen at a concert.  For both “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be,” the crowd lit their cell phones up, the same way we used to do with lighters a long time ago.  I looked around me from the stadium floor, and it was like being surrounded by fireflies.  Utterly cool.

Mr. Kite
Mr. Kite

He performed “The Fool on the Hill” and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” — neither of which I would’ve bet on ever seeing live, and certainly not by Macca himself.  I loved the treatment for Mr. Kite — the video boards brought a psychedelic carnival atmosphere to that performance!

“Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five,” “Band on the Run,” “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” “Back in the U.S.S.R” … so many standout performances, and the crowd never relented (me included), singing along and dancing the night away.

There were a ton of cameras and booms… I’m really hopeful that this show was being recorded, and might be made available in the future.  Big crowd, big venue… I could see it happening.  And if Macca comes back to Da Lou, you can bet your buttons I’ll try to find a way to go.

So… we started this story yesterday with my needing only a couple of miles to finish the 10k I started Saturday morning.  I was on my feet for five hours Saturday night (I don’t know why you get a seat for these things!), and between walking the short distance to/from the car and dancing, I added five more miles.  Yeah, I danced for something like four miles.  🙂  And all that dancing was definitely  much more enjoyable than running, but was so very much more exhausting!!!!

Entertainment, Music

Waiting for the Show to Begin

A gazillion years ago, when I was a kid — around 1970 — I was a big listener of AM radio.  I’d sit in front of my folks’ ginormous ol’ console system, and listen to the local stations — WDXB, WGOW and WFLI.  This was well before FM radio represented mainstream music, and so I got to hear popular music, not the talking heads that seem to own AM nowadays.

I can just remember listening to The Beatles on the radio.  I knew who they were, and some of their music.  When Paul McCartney formed Wings shortly thereafter, I was a little older, and they became a huge part of my listening experience.  When Wings toured America in 1976, I can remember talking with my friends about how much we wanted to go see Wings at the Omni in Atlanta (the closest venue to Chattanooga).  That never happened for me, but I did do the next best thing.

I bought Wings Over America.  On vinyl.  Probably with money earned mowing yards.  🙂

This was a huge set, on three records, and had many of my Wings favorites, along with some Beatles tunes.  I listened to it a ton, wearing the grooves out.  I could tell you every moment in that live recording, every comment by the band, every high and low.  It was one of those recordings that got in my DNA, and I loved listening to it.

Fast forward a decade or so, and I finally found Wings over America on CD.  Once again, I listened to that thing like crazy in its digital perfection.  (Yeah, yeah, I know there’s a whole argument out there about the warmth of vinyl, and the harshness of digital.  I get it, but the convenience of digital music has made it the right answer for me for a long, long time.)

Fast forward again, this time to this year.

Somehow, someway, I got wind of Wings Over America being re-released in a uber-special box, with extra tunes, video, books, etc.  I hounded it on Amazon for months, perpetually having it in my wish list, occasionally moving it into my shopping cart, only to pull back.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want this newly refreshed edition, and it was certainly within my finances.  I’ve just grown a little weary of all the re-releases of the music of my youth.  It seems like every month, there’s some other musical crustacean re-releasing a newly updated or re-mastered edition of seminal music from our shared youth.  And some of those are amazing (like the recent Pink Floyd Immersion Editions), and others aren’t exactly all that.

This was different though.  This was Macca.  He’s “big-three” territory for me, with Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd being the other corners of that triad that formed the foundation of my musical tastes in my youth.  So I finally pulled the trigger, and waited for it to arrive.  (How did we ever get by without Amazon Prime?)

I watched my phone to see when Brown Santa (aka UPS) delivered it, and dashed upstairs to grab it off the porch practically before the truck sped away.  And like a kid at Christmas, I tore into the box, and retrieved my wondrous new arrival.

And it was wondrous.

Packed inside was a really amazing-sounding version of the concert I knew so well.  Plus eight tracks from the concert in San Francisco in ’76.  Plus a DVD of Wings over the World.  And if that weren’t enough, there were four books included:  a retrospective of the tour, a scrapbook-like book, a book of photos from the tour taken by Linda McCartney, and a fourth book that collected sketches from the tour’s official artist.  I climbed in my comfy chair, and devoured those four books.  It was amazing to see that tour through “grown up” eyes, but reflected through the eyes of my youth.  It just blew me away.

And like Wonka with his Golden Ticket, there was a little extra something-something inside.  I found a little card in the set.  This card contained a code to visit Macca’s website, entitling me to pull down ultra-high resolution 24-bit/96khz versions with almost no sound processing.  It’s just about as close as you could get to the master tapes… and they’re glorious!  The sound is bright, uncompressed, and simply astonishing.  There is so much depth — things in the background, subtleties in the foreground — in these recordings that I’d never heard before.

I vaguely remember seeing Wings over the World in the late 70s.  The books indicate that CBS aired it back then, but for some reason I have a memory of seeing it on PBS in Chattanooga.  No matter — it was here, and I reveled in seeing film from the tour I never got to visit.  (And yes, I know Rockshow is out now, and it’ll be hitting my door soon.)  I was transfixed, riveted to the screen, watching this crazy second chapter in McCartney’s career unfold through live concert footage

This box set was a time machine for me, carrying me back almost forty years, and giving me a little door through which to crawl every now and then, and re-experience a really significant part of my musical youth.

And now I hear that Wings at the Speed of Sound and Venus and Mars are being released in similar editions next month.  I guess Amazon and I have a little more dancing left to do.

Music

Sokath, His Eyes Opened

1 Comment

Okay, so not everyone will get the Tamarian reference, but stay with me here.

A long, long time ago, I started listening to music seriously. My earliest memories of listening to music stretch back to sitting in front of my folks entertainment console in the very early 70s, listening to music on the rock stations of the time in Chattanooga (WGOW, WFLI, WDXB). I was hooked, and found a passion that has stuck with me. I started listening to my folks’ albums — Dean Martin, Trini Lopez, and The Fifth Dimension among many others.

Around 1976, Mom and Dad bought us a turntable of our own, and I began to grow an LP collection that I retained until the mid-80s. That’s when I figured out that my musical tastes were all over the place. I was listening to just about anything, and enjoying most of it. And then in the late 70s, I discovered Pink Floyd.

I’d never heard anything like their music. I fell in love with Animals when I first heard it, and then starting listening to anything from their catalog I could find.

When I was collecting records hot and heavy in the early 80s, I happened upon a quadraphonic copy of Wish You Were Here. And boy, did I want gear to play it on. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to hear that kind of music in that way. Remember, this was before surround sound and all its variants. By and large, if you listened to music, movies or TV, it was in stereo at best. Alas, the gear to reproduce quad music never fell in my hands, and like the rest of my albums, that quad recording was lost to the mists of time.

Fast forward about thirty years. Pink Floyd re-released remastered versions of most of their catalog in late 2011, with three of the recordings — Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall — released in “immersion” editions. Each of these three was released with tons of extra material like live versions, alternate takes, and some video material. For Christmas and my birthday, Becky gave me The Wall and Wish You Were Here immersion editions.

And in the Wish You Were Here set was that same quad mix!

With some excitement, I dropped the DVD with the quad mix into my blu-ray player, only to discover that my ancient Sony home theater unit couldn’t figure out what to do with that funky audio stream from the player. Urgh. I went back to the internet, doing a bunch of searching about this DVD, to see if I could figure out what I’d need to play this recording. As it ends up, my crusty old receiver just wasn’t up to it, and I needed newer gear.

Not being one who is well-known for his patience, I shot to Best Buy, with a Marantz receiver in mind after doing a little research. They had it, I brought it home, and after a long setup process where the receiver quacked like a duck to understand the acoustics of the room (a la Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory — about 45 seconds into this clip), I was finally ready to listen.

I laid on my back on the basement floor, one speaker off each limb like some whacky hi-fi drawing and quartering, and I listened. And I was stunned.

It’s hard to describe to folks who’ve had 5.1, 7.1 and other exotic soundfields available to them all their lives exactly what it’s like to hear a 35-year old recording as though it was brand new. That’s what this was like though — a recording I know backwards and forwards, and suddenly it was new again. I just laid on the floor, eyes closed, and let the music wash over me. There’s just no way to describe what that was like, but finally I understood what all the hoopla about these old mixes was all about.  (Now you can hit the link for the Tamarian reference.)

This is definitely the way music was meant to be heard, and you can bet I’ll be looking for more recordings like this!

Entertainment, Guitars, Music, Politics

Patriot Day

A long, long time ago, I wondered in my personal journal what my generation’s Pearl Harbor would be. Frankly, I thought it would be something much more horrific than that Day That Would Live in Infamy — a doomsday scenario, with us and Russians lobbing warheads over the pole at each other. It was the early 1980s, after all, and that seemed like the most likely kind of event. Like so many others, though, when the fall of the Soviet Bloc took place in the late 1980s, I thought we were finally on the brink of acting like the human race I’d always aspired for us to be. Of course, there would still be strife and hated — there’s just too many different opinions out there on life, liberty and pursuit of happiness — but I thought that the promise of the Shining City on a Hill would be so uniting and so persuasive, it would be the kind of obvious human goal to strive for.

And then September 11th, 2001, rolled around.

I was sitting in a meeting at work, when someone said that a plane had crashed into a building in New York City. Obviously, that was a horrible thing to hear, but it was in that weird “spectator” state for those of us in the building. This was before cell phones with internet connections were ubiquitous, and really, all we had to rely upon was the word-of-mouth of folks who were just rolling into work, or folks who were looking at various news websites. By the time we were out of our meeting, it was obvious that something very, very traumatic had taken place, and I knew then that my generation had its Pearl Harbor.

I remember not being able to get any news in the building. Most folks’ radios didn’t work well in there — lots of concrete and RFI from all the computers — so the real lifeline was the internet. Of course, an hour or so into the tragedy, most websites were impossible to hit. If I remember right, CNN actually went down to a single, simple HTML page, trying to serve up simple, quick pages to a public hungry for news on what had just happened to us. As for me, I watched the news unfurl on the BBC website, as it was slightly less taxed than the domestic news outlets.

Upon finishing the workday, I came home, and watched the first video I’d seen of what had happened. It’s one thing to read about such devastation, but to see it unfold on a TV screen was truly surreal. Like many folks said on that day, it looked like a scene from some kind of Hollywood blockbuster. And I stayed glued to the TV the rest of the night.

Oddly enough, the thing that struck me the most about what I saw on TV that night was what wasn’t happening. Many of the “entertainment” networks — QVC, HGTV, MTV and others — suspended their operations, and either were hooked into a news outlet, or had a simple slide up, speaking of their support for the families of those lost on that day. I’d never seen anything like it.

Like many, many other folks, I was in shock. I wept, I prayed, and I tried to move on.

Fast forward to today, the tenth anniversary of that awful day. This weekend, I went to Branson for the semiannual Fiddlers’ Convention with some of the folks I play music with. I knew it was a special weekend because of the anniversary, but I also knew that I could find some solace in some of the most American music ever created. Last night, I joined the circle, and played out, for the first time outside the small group of folks that are my occasional musical circle.

I tried to keep up, and follow along as these very experienced players weaved music through the night. I really surprised myself, and think I did ok. And then, unexpectedly, there were two moments that really made the night memorable for me.

One of the guys that went to Branson with me broke into “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”. That old song is absolutely one of my favorites, and being a part of playing it in a small group was magical, truly magical. I was swept up in the music, and for the first time, felt like I was really a part of the music itself. I really don’t know how to explain it any better than that. And like part of a one-two punch, the circle started playing “Amazing Grace.” Yet again, I was struck with being such a part of this wonderful musical event. I heard someone on the radio this morning describing music as being something that could describe events using language beyond our daily ability to communicate. I’d have to agree, and that’s definitely what I was finding last night — comfort, and solace, communicated as more than the sum of the words that were sung and notes that played.

This morning, I began the quick journey back from Branson — just a few hours’ drive — and encountered a couple of groups marking the anniversary. The first was a group of motorcyclists, riding as a group on the outer road, sporting U.S. flags on the back of their bikes. The other was a long, long line of farm tractors making the turn off the outer road, each with Old Glory proudly displayed. This kind of display as I rolled across the hills of mid-Missouri reminded me of just how special our country is, and how poignant this date is, and likely will remain.

I’ve found myself trying to steel against the emotions of the day, and every once in a while, I’m caught off-guard by a gasp of emotion, a cry caught in my throat, inspired by things as disparate as hearing “Amazing Grace” played at Ground Zero as I was driving home this morning, to seeing a commercial featuring the Budweiser Clydesdales kneeling before the skyline of New York City. Through it all, I know that God will watch out for us — not because we’re so special, but because we’ve asked Him take care of us.

Guitars, Music

New Guitar : Taylor 426ce-LTD

Taylor 426ce-LTD
Taylor 426ce-LTD

Lately, I’ve become enamored of Taylor Guitars. Bob Taylor and his crew really make a beautiful instrument, and I’ve been really taken with the quality, sound and feel of them. The GS Mini I have is a terrific instrument, and the other Taylor instruments I’ve played at Fazio’s have been tremendous.

Cruising the Acoustic Guitar Forum one day, I found someone selling a 2008 Taylor 426ce Limited Edition at a reasonable price, and in great condition. Money sent, guitar received, and all was well in the world! I took it to Fazio’s, and had Bryan set it up, adjusting the neck and truss rod, making it play like brand new.

This thing is gorgeous. It’s top, sides, and back are solid Tasmanian blackwood, sporting a gorgeous shimmer. And the tone… well, the tone is out of this world. It’s thick sounding, complex, with lots of body, and compares nicely to my Carvin mahogany. I really love playing it.

It’s been with me now for about two-and-a-half weeks, and has been my “first picked up” guitar when I look to play. I’ve been comparing it with my Takamine and Carvin, and while they each have their own voices, I really like the feel of the neck on the Taylor, and find that I can play this guitar for hours at a time, without getting tired.

What a terrific instrument!

Guitars, Music, Photoblog, Photography

Well, It Ain’t Fireworks…

For a variety of reasons, I didn’t get to any fireworks this weekend. However, with the success of the raindrops under my belt this weekend, I turned my flash to another subject I’d been thinking about.

I set my Carvin Cobalt C350 on a flat surface, and mounted my flash and Canon 7D on a couple of tripods. By using my new DIY cable extension, I had a ton of latitude in placing the flash. I set the flash to strobe at 20hz, and plucked the low E-string, capturing 1/2 second of vibration. I need to try it again, though, as this image didn’t exactly turn out the way I had envisioned, although I do like it.

So my fireworks tonight is a little stroboscopic action, with the aid of some new strings. Enjoy!

Plucking the E-String

Music

Guitar Strings

I have a bad tendency with my vehicles.

(Wait… vehicles? I thought you said “Guitar Strings.” Yeah, I did. Just wait.)

I drive my vehicles long — big road trips — and trade ’em quickly, usually before the tires need to be changed. In fact, I can only think of two sets of tires I’ve bought in the last ten years or so. One of those is a set on my Jeep, which I’m beginning to think will be buried with me. I just have no itch to trade that one off.

What’s that gotta do with guitar strings? Great question!

Since I started learning the guitar about ten months ago, I’ve left a swath of guitars in my wake. Currently, I have two guitars — my Carvin Cobalt C350 and my Takamine EF740SGN… and that one’s for sale right now. 🙂 I’ve tended to trade my guitars like I’ve traded my vehicles … before they needed maintenance.

Yesterday was the first time I’d changed the strings on a guitar, and my victim was my Cobalt, which I play so very frequently. You see, I’d come into a set of Elixir Nanoweb mediums via an R. Taylor event at Fazio’s a week or so ago, and I’d been reading that the mediums would really bring out the boom in the mahogany-based Cobalt. And given that I’d been beating the stuffings out of the strings it shipped with (D’Addario EXP16’s, I think), it seemed the timing was right.

Frankly, it went pretty well. The only complaint I had was the bridge pins. Getting them out wasn’t a big deal, but getting them back in … and evenly inserted … was pretty dang impossible. It probably means that something’s wrong, but I didn’t dare shove them in farther, for fear of wrecking the top. I’ll live with high pins on the low E and A strings until the next string change.

And yes, there’ll be a “next time”. The Cobalt has really become my go-to guitar, and I expect to wear out this set of strings too. Now, I do believe there’s another guitar or two yet to arrive in the “permanent collection” at the Deauxmayne, but the Cobalt is special, and is definitely a guitar I don’t mind traveling with.

Hmm…. maybe the there’ll be room in the Jeep for the Cobalt when they put me in the ground. Probably a good thing I bought a four door!

Music

GAS: Big Muddy M4-11 Mandolin

A month or so ago, in my bluegrass class, my instructor mentioned asked if I’d ever played mandolin. I said no, and wondered why he asked. Apparently, I have a tendency to play on the backbeat, rather than the traditional guitar beats. As it happens, that’s when the mandolin does its thing. I borrowed a mando from Braddog, and wound up finding it suited my tastes. After a little more conversation with my instructor, I heard about the Big Muddy Mandolin company in Rocheport MO.

I looked at their site, and decided I would ask about a frankenstein between two models — a mahogany top, with a rosewood back. I started e-mailing with Mike Dulak, the luthier at the helm and owner of Big Muddy, and he was enthusiastic to give this little job a whirl. After a week’s time, I drove to Rocheport to take a look. This mandolin was beautiful, to say the least!

What I’m finding is that the warmth of mahogany is really projected with the rosewood back and sides — which is exactly what I was hoping would happen. It’s really different from anything else I hear at the bluegrass jams, and I like that a lot. The traditional spruce-topped instruments — A-bodies or F-bodies — are extremely bright sounding, where this instrument has its own voice, distinct from the others. I really dig that.

That’s part of why it’s been so quiet at the deauxmayne lately — I’ve been playing a lot of guitar and a fair amount of mandolin, and that’s keeping me hopping!

Guitars, Music

New Guitar : Carvin Model 50 Lap Steel

For Christmas, I picked up a little eBay present — a 1954 Carvin Model 50 Lap Steel guitar.

Now, this is definitely a project guitar for me. This thing was a little dirty, could stand new strings, and needs a little TLC to get back up to snuff… all of which will be fun. Kevin’s indicated that I should keep it stock, but I have some desire to pretty it up — new hardware, etc. — and maybe even replace the pots for volume and tone, along with the 1/4″ socket.

However, I still have to learn to play the thing. I’ve laid some questions out on some guitar fora to see if I can get some help figuring out what tuning scheme to use on it, where to get strings, and what kind of learning materials I can find to teach me to play the steel guitar.

And if I like playing it, I could see me picking up another of these down the road. Will it be a Carvin/Kiesel? Who knows… Part of me likes the idea of keeping to vintage instruments like this, but part of me would like to put a “new classic” instrument in the corral.

Of course, that assumes I figure out how to play the steel guitar, and find an opportunity to use that knowledge from time to time!

Apple Existence, Music

Apple Drops the B-Bomb

Just moments ago, Apple dropped the long-awaited B-bomb — the Beatles are on iTunes!

Now, for me, it’s likely not to be a huge big deal. I bought the big box set last year (and love it!), so there’s probably not much there for me. However, it does point to a thawing — at least a financial thawing — between Uncles Steve’s Apple and The Fab Four.

There’s even a series of commercials promoting this marriage of classic music and technological giant. I can’t remember anyone ever doing anything like that before.

It’s been a long time coming. Welcome to the party.