All Hallows Eve approaches. All good christians stay inside. It must seem so frustrating that the harvest festival that they once tried to subvert has become such a lighthearted celebration of evil, darkness, debauchery and bacchanalia. What fun. I’ve played dress up so much in my life that I have no urge whatsoever to do it on Halloween night. I’ve done drag quite enough thank you. I leave it to the repressed jocks who cry “fag” at you all year long to get their closets clean on Halloween. It really is a license for minor fantasies. What people wear to the office Halloween party is probably what they want to wear everyday of the year. French maids, Mr. Spock, Bobby Orr, Cat Woman, Drag Queen, Pimp, Elvis, Nun. They’re all there. Why can’t we just let this happen. The Rockettes as a kick ass rugby team. Captain James Kirk runs the physical plant and planning department. Batman sits in the lifeguard’s chair at the local pool. A picture tells a thousand words but a costume seals the deal. The business suit gives way to the thong, fig leaf and crown of thorns. Buddy drags his giant styrofoam crucifix past the photocopy room for another day of filing. Everyone is half cut and flirtatious. Children eat only candy, stay up late and everyone plays with fire until it evens out. Junior eventually eats the apple and a bowl of oatmeal because his body craves it. Cats & dogs eventually get used to the erratic firecracker symphony and come out from under the beds. If this is evil then lets have a little more of it. “God gave rock n’ roll to you” says the bus driver dressed as Paul Stanley as he lowers the wheelchair ramp for the beautiful lady with the angel wings and purple sequined brassiere.
The road has kept me from the net musings but delivered me in the flesh. Maybe I'll get a chance late tonight to go to my happy place. The fine ales and wines of Quebec City and Montreal didn't help in that department.
Sorry to be away from my desk when you called looking for something interesting to read. I’ve been in Sudbury at the Ontario Council of Folk Festivals annual conference. It was a personal challenge for me because I’m not really used to just sitting down at the drop of a hat and commanding attention with a song. The folk world is all about that. All the performers there were so good at just getting up all alone and letting ‘er rip. Simon Kendall was describing his experiences at hotel folk conferences as climbing up around and through a tower of song. Its pretty appropriate. Every hotel room door is open and the invitation step inside the next and jam is unspoken. Often it is loudly spoken. It seemed the “showcases’” were happening from sun up to sun up. People playing on stages in conference rooms, in the lobby, by the bathroom, in hotel rooms, at half hour intervals. If you ran from one to the other you still missed half of what you wanted to see.
I had one of Doug Elliott’s out of body experiences for him when I took on bass duties for Arlene Bishop’s set. She absolutely nailed the songs and started the proverbial buzz zipping around the conference. I played the next night on my own at the Songwriter’s Association “pajama party”. I’m a little hard on myself so my version of how it went varies considerably from the views of people I talked to later. My own worst critic. Had the honour of being asked to play guitar the next day for a few songs with Liam Titcomb. He's very young in age but very mature in soul. We're trying to get a window of opportunity to write together. Home with a head cold and a pretty good afterglow. Leaving again in about 24 hours.
OK. I have the time and place. I'll be playing solo acoustic at midnighton Saturday Oct 18th at the Notre Dame Room at the Ramada Inn in Sudbury Ontario as part of the OCFF Conference. They have moved the giant nickel to the lawn in front of the new science centre so don't use it as a navigational tool or you may get screwed up.
Alistair have been making preparations for the cahnges in the site and have got the "Giddy Up" video ready for the net. There will also be a "bonus feature".
I'll be playing bass with Arlene Bishop at The 17th Annual Ontario Council of Folk Festivals Conference on Friday October 17th at 10:20pm in the Notre Dame Side Room at the Ramada Inn and Conference Centre in Sudbury, Ontario.
Arlene is an amazingly funny and talented singer/songwriter. Check her out at www.arlenebishop.com
I will also will be playing a solo acoustic set of my own somewhere late at night on Saturday Oct 18th in Sudbury. I'll tell you as soon as I know where the hell it is.
Thought I'd put up an interesting e-mail exchange with a reader in Halifax.
Dear Craig:
Have you heard from anyone in Halifax about Hurricane Juan? The SOB absolutely nailed us, ripping through the city and environs in one hundred minutes of unmitigated fury. Our two great public parks have been flattened beyond repair. Halifax was laden with massive old hardwoods and these trees both sustained and delivered the biggest part of the damage. It's quite something to see one of these trees that has been uprooted by the storm and crashed into the nearest house, where it remains leaning at a crazy angle with its base of sod and concrete ripped up in a bizarre wedge-shaped form of street art.
My house finally got power back yesterday after a week's outage. A very unusual week it was. People gathering at dusk to raise beers and stare in awe as work crews with powerful tools sawed down the fallen trees with surgical precision. Nights lying in bed with only a flashlight to see by and a little yard-sale radio the only source of sound from the outside world. One night Q104 played 'Nothing Beautiful', and your song held a very special meaning for me that night.
In a way that you often capture in your journal writings, the week held its pleasures and benefits to go with the hardships. Saturday our street worked and partied with the excavator ops and fully uniformed military men as we raked swept shoveled and ploughed away the remaining debris. Then yesterday the beleagured power guys came and hooked us up and our hearts were lifted with joy.
Looking forward muchly to the Vanilla Sanchez release and the promised new website goodies.
Bob McNeil
Bob,
Wow. From fires in the west to hurricane winds in the east and Toronto gets a strange new disease running through its corridors. This is the shit that kept Nostradamus busy. I'm sure it has some biblical explanation but those cats can make anything fit into their rubber template. Its wonderful how people work together when disaster strikes. It happens every time. Since 911 I've really noticed how important this reflex is to us all. In your letter I can hear you saying that this "working together" reflex feels exciting and life affirming. There is always beauty somewhere above the dust and rubble.
Two weeks ago I went to monday night hockey. My friend, and one of our stalwart defencemen, had bought a place a few years ago in Kelowna. He'd started a family and had been commuting back and forth to Vancouver and the rest of the world. I hadn't seen him in awhile so I opened with a hug and a, "Hey ______ how're you doing? The house burn down?" I am known to joke. He replied, "yup". After I backed out of the joke we talked for awhile about what happened. Its amazing what you lose in a fire. You don't care about your aquisitions you just wish you had your family photos, what you've created, and anything sentimental. I guess its a blessing when your tax records go up in flames. Its all about the human connections I guess -- from generation to generation and from person to person. The rest doesn't matter as much.
yours
Craig
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This is what the world has to offer me? I reach for these carrots dangling before me. It hurts my arm. I pull my back because my stomach is weak. How do these people know me so well? I await the next tele marketer. I will engage him in conversation about my prizes. I think about soft drinks and soft core pornography. I watch the skies for a tow plane with a Subway banner. I saw it yesterday following the shoreline. Dusk comes and the bright light boxes of Remax and ING Direct cast their unanimity across the flickering rooftops of the scurrying Honda Civics. My shoes are wrong. My hair is wrong. I cannot find a vegetable that tastes good. There are so many things to work on and they will all seem important if I can just stuff my imagination into some deep dark crack and come out to greet this fluorescent light. If I have money I can fix everything that is wrong with me. Lop off some skin. Extend my penis to huge lengths. I will take so much of that internet stuff that thirty pensioners will be able to ride my penis to the nearest MacDonalds for a free coffee and a shared newspaper with headlines about men murdering their families. They will tsk tsk and say, "what's the world coming to"? They will get back on my giant penis and go back home and stare at the phone waiting for a tele marketer to call. Their families never call because they are out raising money for mortgages, prescription drugs, hair loss treatments and pornography. I will take 28 of the mexican Viagras that I bought on the net and my boner will stick through the skylight of the house I bought with no money down. I will have a boner for a fortnight. That is the last time you will see the word fortnight because it is not a word common to the internet. I will be so proud of my giant boner and all it can do. In celebration I will take some more prescription drugs (to calm my boner), answer some e-mail chain letters and read the fifteen flyers that balloon my local paper to twice its size. Maybe I should use my massive penis to help cut down more trees to manufacture important junk mail. Maybe I should use my penis to get me elected governor of California.
At the time I was slave to what was available. Everyone was using. You could always find one and you felt somehow modern. Yes . . . the Roland JC-120. Arguably this was one of the lowest points in guitar amplification. Just as dubious 80’s fashion is poking its head from the sphincter of the fashion industry in the all to predictable “twenty year come around” some things will reappear for no reason other than they look new in the eyes of those who haven’t seen them before. As kids romanticize “Spandau Ballet” and “the Fix” as purveyors of cool then the Roland JC-120 returns as a “classic”. E-bay clogs with wise 30 somethings unloading their worthless crap for inflated prices to the next generation.
Last night I was returned to the point in history when I was given a chance to escape this cycle. For those of you who know nothing about guitar amplifiers I will provide some back story. Nothing much has changed with guitar amplifiers that can improve on the basic technological ideas that founded the species. The tube amps that Leo Fender designed and made in the 50’s are still operational, sought after and their circuits are the heart of most every other good sounding rig. Still we tinker and meddle. In the 60’s the vacuum tube was dying as a concept. The transistor revolution would obviously chase this warm old dog out of town. So many bad amplifiers were designed and marketed before anybody realized that the old school was still winning the battle. To this day the tube amp remains the way to go. That’s it in a nutshell. The Roland JC-120 was one of the most popular transistor amps of the 80’s. It had a built in “stereo chorus” effect that was all the rage at the time. It didn’t matter that it sounded brittle and sterile in an era where brittle and sterile ruled the pop airwaves. I was suckered and bought one. I couldn’t make it produce anything resembling the sound that I had in my head. I had owned tube amps prior to this and had produced plenty of sounds that came close but what I was truly looking for kept alluding me. I was certainly getting nowhere with this piece of shit. Was it the guitar? I had recently narrowed my sights on the Fender Telecaster as my main squeeze. It had a pedigree among the players I admired -- Keith Richards, Billy Bremner, Steve Cropper, George Harrison, Muddy Waters, Jeff Beck, ...they all used one. It was the simplest guitar. The neck fit my hand perfectly. The body felt right as part of my body and the sound . . .it could bite through anything if need be (me playing mine with Colin James Band...mine eyes are red...picture#6 far right side of page).
The band I was in had scored a couple of opening spots with a then little known Australian band called “Hunters & Collectors”. The band was great but my mind was for a very specific reason. The guitar player/singer Mark Seymour had the exact sound I was looking for. A white telecaster plugged straight into a beautiful old Vox AC-30. I was curious as to why his tele had no volume or tone knob on the top. He told me they just got in the way and he didn’t need them because the guitar was always turned all the way up anyway. Made sense. This was the sound I imagined coming from me when I played. It was all knuckles. Each note and chord seemed rich and fat and the feedback flew off all the right notes. A significant amount of top end never hit you like a dentist drill as it did with other amps. It spoke to me directly. It was the sound I had heard in all the records I loved. It was no coincidence that just about every Beatles, Yardbirds or Kinks track exploded out of an AC-30. The next morning I started looking for one. No luck. They didn’t import them or make them at that low point in the 80’s. I put out a wanted add in the Buy & Sell and got a call the day after the issue came out. “Wanted: Vox AC30, will trade Roland JC-120”. I remember carrying the amp out of the guy’s living room thinking I was doing something wrong. He was probably thinking, “I can’t believe my luck! Now I am finally living in the 80’s!”. I suppose the modern equivalent might be trading your new Toyota Matrix straight across for an Austin Healey Mark 3. Its a matter of how you see the world. The AC-30 is about as easy to maintain as an old British sports car but provides all the feel sound and fury of one as well. I had found the sound I would pretty much stick to for the next decade. I’ve since had 4 of them and a few other Vox models as well.
By 1996 I had blown up my AC-30s at least twenty times on the road. Each one had its own particular achilles heal and it was getting hard to rely on them performing faithfully each night. These little monsters have some serious ventilation and heat issues compounded by their aging components. I decided to try to find my sound in the guts of Fender and Marshall amps while on the road. Since the Odds “Nest” tours I’ve used Marshall “plexi” re-issues and with Sharkskin and Colin James I favour old “black faced” Fender combos or tweed re-issues. I used the AC-30s less and less and never live until . . .Regina wrecked it all.
Last week the Colin James band played a couple of shows in Regina with rented backline. This is usually how we do it when there isn’t a full tour going on. The crew arranges rented amps and drums that meet our ever broader specifications. I got a note from our tour manager a day or two before we left asking me if a Vox AC-30 would be OK to use in Regina because that was what was available. I replied to the affirmative and said, “I have some experience with those”. On the very first note of the first soundcheck I was instantly tele ported to my “happy place”. Each note that followed leapt and cavorted out of those bulldog speakers as if a genie were being released from years of slumber. All my guitars relaxed into my hands and did things they would never do with another amp. Dirty dirty guitars. The old flame had returned and made paltry all the lovemaking skills of every amp that had replaced her. My body turned with the guitar in all the ways it used to in order to make each note feedback at all the right times. Muscle memory returns. I didn’t have to think about it at all. The smell of the tubes getting hot leveled my blood pressure like the smell of mom’s cooking. I whispered, “you complete me” as Colin walked over to politely ask if I could turn down a hair. I smiled and said “sure” but didn’t really turn down too much. I could not be denied.
What am I thinking? Don’t really know. It doesn’t seem like anything is staying too long in here. Nothing dark and serious has had a foothold lately. In general terms these are the salad days. I walk the dog. I feed the kids. I help with homework. I avoid big jobs that need to be done. I remain hidden under piles of work that has been pushed aside for the big jobs of the recent past. I return to questions that I once knew the answer to but have now forgotten again. I forget people’s names that I really should remember. A lot of stuff I know I should know its perched on the tip of my tongue in danger of being swallowed again. I watch the skies for storms. I scan the horizon for approaching armies and shuffle back into my cave.