You made me worry...in Joplin, Missouri

Normally a story that included songwriting in a dream would be expected to be triumphant and inspired in some way. You know, something like "I awoke from a feverish sleep only to find that the muses had been whispering directly into my ear...the resulting masterpiece is both moving and genius in it's musical composition and imagery. It has been gifted both to me and all humankind by the universe itself...I'm pretty sure that world peace will result...or at least a violence free Black Friday at the Wal-Mart..."

But, as I had mentioned previously in my insightful and hauntingly lyrical post in my other genius blog Alaska Before You Do, I ate some smoked tofu and chia seeds before going to bed. I dreamt about having to re-home a pet duck.

We don't own a duck.

I also had a song happen. Lyrics, music...the whole bit....

Songwriters often wait for moments like these. Wonderful things sometimes happen.

That is not what happened in this case.

Just to give you an indication of what DID happen, I will share with you the first few lines...(please feel free to insert over-exaggerated twang here-on both the vocals and geetar):

I've been thinkin', 'bout too much drinkin'
I know my drinkin', it'll make you roooaaaammmm...
Now you make me worry, in Joplin, Missouri
baby won't you please hurry, and just come on hoommme...

Needless to say, I awoke with a start...and immediately went to find some Pepto-Bismal.

The last time a song came to me in a dream, I wrote this masterpiece: Flat Cat...(yes, it's a link...I double dog dare you).

And yes, I had eaten pepperoni.

And Now For Something REALLY Scary!

I thought in honor of Halloween I would post something truly frightening...which is this picture of 457 string guitar.

I might have exaggerated about the strings a little. It was for dramatic effect.

Anyone who has ever tried to tune a 12-string on a regular basis is aware of how scary THIS is. I remember my former musical partner (I will refer to her here as Jessie, mostly because her name is Jessie) played an Ovation 12-string as her primary instrument. Whenever we would be ready to practice, or (Gawd forbid) perform, I would tune up my trusty 6-string...and then wait for Jessie to tune up her 12-string.

And I would wait....

,,,and wait,,,,

...and wait...

I'd finally have dinner, take a nap, polish my guitar, and play my entire repertoire of John Denver songs...and she'd still be tuning.

I'm amazed that Jessie didn't end up pulling a Pete Townsend with that thing.

So, I'm pretty sure that whoever invented that pictured guitar THING did it as a kind of torture device.

Well played, sadistic, psycho musician. Well played.

The only thing that would have been scarier would be a guitar with TWO SOUND HOLES...so ALL of your picks would disappear into them! You would then be destined to spend an eternity maniacally shaking your guitar like an upside-down etch-a-sketch trying to dislodge them. You'd finally give up, throw in even more picks, and turn your guitar into a weirdly shaped maraca...

MUAHAHAHAHA!

(Insert evil music here-preferably Rocky Mountain High by John Denver. Hey, they used it in 'Final Destination'...).

Anyway, I hope you guitarists don't have bad dreams now...

In the spirit of Halloween, here is what my guitar, Charlene, is wearing for the trick-or-treaters. I think it's a pretty good costume,

She's dressed as a lesbian.

Happy Halloween!!

Guitar Case Art and Thibodeaux's New Guitar

My case...the more sensible version...

A new guitar case is a blank canvas with many, many possibilities. Many musicians use their guitar cases as a sort of "travel scrapbook," collecting stickers from the places they have traveled and played. Some guitarists like to express their likes, interests...things that move them...and may add favorite symbols, quotes, song lyrics...still others may use their guitar case art as a sort of soapbox to educate and disseminate information about pet causes, issues, organizations...

I personally used to use my guitar case for all three of these things-and in my younger days, I apparently was a feminist, tree hugging, crystal swinging, liberal, peace-sign loving, granola crunching, lesbian, agnostic, hippie yahoo...chock full of self-righteous arrogance and irreverent sarcasm...

I may (or may not be) still any number of those things, but what I have learned is that my guitar is INNOCENT-and I will therefore exercise caution in choosing what I put on my case.

I'm not sure whatever became of my beloved Takamine guitar, Gerdy. I like to think that she is safe on the bayou somewhere...being used by Duplessis Thibodeaux to further communicate the zydeco way...entertaining alligators throughout the land, helping cheerful and warm hearted people dance their nights away...

Chances are, however, that some air-ramper named Clyde ran her over with the baggage cart on the tarmac at Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport...because her case prominantly displayed rainbow flags, pink triangles, and a large bumper sticker that read, "Sorry I missed church, I was busy practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian."

I owe Charlene better...

Of course, I better still be careful if I fly in PAC-12 regions, especially at Sea-Tac International, which is Husky country. I had to put this on the case though. Charlene is a Cougar. I know it because I asked her.

Dropping the "F-bomb," and other ways to take up baking...

As anyone who has learned or taught guitar will tell you, learning to play an "f-chord" is a critical time in the development of a guitar skills base. It is often the time that about half of my students will decide to say "screw this," and to take up baking.

It can be a cruel thing, that "f-chord"....or, as I used to call it, the "*@^#%$* f-chord." Much like using the word "indubitably," I would do the musical equivalent of altering entire sentence structures to avoid having to use it. I have transposed many a songs into an alternate key just to get around using that sucker....

It's a sad thing when you see a new guitar player excited by the fact that they finally learned the "G, A, D" chord progression, and could therefore play 4, 962 country songs...only to then encounter a song that prominently features the "f-chord" and (after I show it to them) to have them look at me with that hollow, empty stare.

The "G major" chord is no picnic for a new guitarist either. But they practice with persistence, enduring frustration and hand cramps, finally getting the hang of it...and still the day will come when they will inevitably say to me, "I want to learn 'Hotel California.'"

I've come to call it, "The Inevitable 'Hotel California' Moment." It can also be called, "The Inevitable 'House of the Rising Sun' Moment." It just depends on the avenue by which the student would like to enter into the world of baking.

I can transpose a lot of songs to avoid the "*#@%$^ f-chord"...but these two just don't sound quite right in alternate keys. So, I hand them a muffin tin.

No, I'm kidding...of course. I learned it, and if I can do it, anyone can do it.

But, it IS one of those defining times that tests how committed you are to working through the frustration of sounding like you are trying to play guitar with your elbows.

Honestly, the only reason I made it through is because I had already tried baking, and was still experiencing guilt over the whole "exploding cupcakes" incident.

Anyway, don't give up. Stay strong. Once you master the "f-major" chord, an entire new world of musical opportunity will open up for you. Your 4,962 country songs will turn into millions of country songs...PLUS you will be able to check into the 'Hotel California.'

Right up until you have to learn the B-chord. That one is a real bummer.

How to Change Guitar Strings in 10 Drunken Steps...

No. No, no, no...

I'm trying another "how to" numbered list, like all of the blogging experts recommend. I hope that it works.

In this posting, I will be discussing how to change your guitar strings in 10 easy steps. Fortunately, I am drunk, so this should be awesome. For me, anyway,

So, how do you change your guitar strings?

Well, first make sure that you are playing an actual guitar, and not one of those "Guitar Hero" video game units. Those don't have strings, so you would look pretty silly trying to change them. Go back to your video game before you break it, and stop worrying.

For the sake of this entry, I will assume you are playing a guitar that actually has strings on it. I will describe how to change a standard steel six-string acoustic guitar.

STEP ONE: Purchase the strings. This SOUNDS easy, but  unfortunately it is a lot like trying to order breakfast at Denny's. How would you like your eggs? Toast, biscuits, or pancake? Silverware or no silverware? Choices.

You will have many brands to choose from, as well as a choice of materials, and gauges. It's very irritating. Base your selection on what kind of sound and feel you prefer. I like a warm, bright, mellow sound-and to sound just like John Mayer. The strings don't help at all with this, because he is a much better player than I am.

Whatever.

Make your choice taking into account the style and technique you will be using. I like to bend notes, and to use strumming, finger picking, and flat-picking when I play. I prefer Martin bronze-wound medium gauge strings. If the gauge is too light, I find the sound too tinny, and a heavy gauge is not as comfortable (in my opinion) for doing things like bending the string, or playing leads.

STEP TWO: Loosen the tension on your guitar strings. Use the tuning pegs to do this, and not scissors as I have inappropriately pictured. Loosening the strings can be kind of fun, as they drop rapidly in pitch until they are flopping loosely on the neck of your guitar. I accidentally wrote a song once doing this.

STEP THREE: Remove the bridge pegs from the bridge of your guitar. They SHOULD pull right out, but they won't...and you will find yourself searching around for something (anything) to help you pop them out. I used a butter knife once. That was stupid. Don't do that. Guitar stores actually sell little tools for this.

If all else fails, you can use pliers, but most bridge pegs are made of plastic and can break pretty easily. I would therefore recommend placing a cloth over them before clamping...and pull gently. And keep track of the tuning pegs. My cats like to bat them under the sofa to torment me.

STEP FOUR: Uncoil the strings from the tuning pegs. This is irritating, and you may have to do a little pushing, pulling, and bending of the string to uncoil it and unthread it through the hole. Don't be tempted to saw through with your butter knife, or to yank violently on it while calling it obscene names. This doesn't help. So I HEAR anyway. Just trust me.

STEP FIVE: Place the beaded end of each new string into the corresponding hole on the bridge. Some strings are handily labeled E, A, D, G, B, and E. Most aren't, and instead have their thickness labeled on the wrapper in some cryptic decimal number. As if I remember what .0047957 corresponds with, or the difference between .00077435 and .00759148. Good grief! I'm a guitarist, not a mathematician! I'm getting hives just thinking about it. Just take one string out at a time. They are in sequential order inside the packaging. God help you if you mix them up!

Sorry. I'm calming down now.

STEP SIX: The bridge has a saddle underneath it with tiny little grooves...one for each string. Set the string in the groove as you pull it towards the tuning keys again. At the end of the fretboard is another piece with grooves to help the string stay seated and aligned. I think it's called the "nut," but I can't remember, so I will refer to it as the "white grooved thingy at the end of the neck." Once you have the string resting in the proper grooves on both the saddle, and the "white grooved thingy at the end of the neck," it is time to thread the other end through the hole in the tuning peg. This would be a great time to start drinking. I recommend hard liquor.

STEP SEVEN: It is very important to visualize the direction you will be turning the keys when you are tightening each string. If you put the end through and just start turning, there is a good chance that each tuning key will be threaded from a different direction, and while a left turn on one key tightens the string, on the next key it will loosen the string. You will spend the majority of your time trying to remember which is which, and it will take you 28 years to tune your guitar, You will die old, bitter, angry, and with an out of tune guitar. You want directional uniformity.

"Directional Uniformity" is a good name for an anal-retentive rock band.

STEP EIGHT: Start winding. Leave a little slack, and be sure the string winds around the loose end, securing it in place. This prevents slippage. As you are winding, make sure the string is staying aligned in the grooves on the saddle, and the "white grooved thingy at the end of the neck." I personally wait until I have all of the strings started this way before I start winding for tuning. I do this to keep the tension equalized across the width of the neck, and reduce the possibility of of bending or breaking anything through isolated tension on one side. This is probably pointless and unecessary like a lot of the stuff that I do. NOTE: The threading and winding procedure to "lock" the string on the tuning peg is a bit of an art. It is much easier to visually explain, and you may want to Google one of the many excellent diagrams out there. I'd draw one, but I'm drunk. And besides, some people are very neat and precise. My tuning pegs often look like they have been wound by a blind and demented squirrel. But, they work. And I like squirrels.

STEP NINE: Wind each string, gradually increasing the tension, and therefore the pitch. You will need a tonal reference for tuning each string, so that you know how far to wind it. A piano, a pitch pipe, an electronic tuner, a tuning fork, a John Denver album...something. If you didn't know where to stop, you could wind the string so tight that only dogs could hear it.

It is a good idea to stretch the strings as you tighten them too. New strings will contract a bit until they are settled into the tension. You will notice that as you get one string tuned, and you move onto the next one, the first one will drop out of tune again. This is what we guitarists refer to as the "Fuc***g New String Stretchy Game," and it will drive you crazy. This is what really happened to Keith Richards.

Deliberately stretching the strings by gently pulling pulling on them during intial tunings will help them settle into tension faster. We all know that in guitar, faster is better. NOTE: New strings, especially the higher ones (B, high E) may snap the first time they are tightened. For no apparent reason. This can be startling when it happens. Use caution so as not to put an eye out. I'm not sure why your eye would be that close to your guitar string as you tune it, but it's something my mom always used to say, so I feel obligated to mention it.

STEP TEN: Your strings are on. Your guitar is tuned. You are drunk. You didn't kill yourself with the butterknife, or put your eye out in some sort of contortionist string winding accident. Go play "Stairway to Heaven," and have some fun!

Dumpster Nutella and the Elvis potato...

Trying to tour a "circuit" is quite a logistical challenge. If you are broke and starving, like most independent musicians, it is also a financial tightrope. It requires careful planning, and sometimes, dumpster diving.

I say this because (surprise), I have a story.

I ended up in a dumpster behind a Safeway store in Santa Cruz, CA. Well, it wasn't just me. It was also my musical partner, and my girlfriend at the time. We were hungry. Very hungry. And Jessie (my musical partner) had this great idea. She knew that grocery stores often threw away produce and other items that were less than perfect. They were perfectly edible, but not up to the standards necessary to sell them in the grocery store.

Hoping to find a bruised apple,some stale bread, or perhaps a potato shaped like Elvis, we waited until the coast was clear-and we ventured to the dumpster. That's when we hit the Nutella motherload.

It became known as the "Nutella incident of 1995."

Nutella apparently comes to grocery stores shrink wrapped on a cardboard flats. It comes in cases of 24 jars. One of the cases delivered to the store must have been dropped, because just ONE of the jars had broken and gotten Nutella all over the other jars. Rather than removing the broken jar and cleaning up the rest, the store had opted to throw them all away. The shrink wrap hadn't even been opened.

I can certainly understand why the store might have done this. It was very labor intensive to clean all of the jars...and Nutella, in addition to being delicious and obviously manufactured directly in heaven...is quite sticky. I'm sure that the store also wouldn't want to risk contamination, illness, injury and liability from broken glass, yada, yada, yada.

We didn't care. We thought we had been blessed by the Nutella fairy.

Well, we did at first, anyway. Our tour lasted for 8 months. There were many times when we were hungry, but from that point forward, we ALWAYS had Nutella. I mean, it was everywhere. We were in a little motorhome. We would open our cabinets and find a brillo pad, a dented can of tomato soup, our Elvis potato, and a shit-ton of Nutella.

We dipped our bruised apples in it. We spread it on our stale bread. We ate it directly from the jar. We tried it with Top Ramen noodles (I really don't recommend this). We tried Nutella covered carrots (I REALLY don't recommend THIS)...we came up with many new recipes that wouldn't normally call for the use of Nutella. But, as I mentioned, we had a LOT of Nutella.

It's almost twenty years later, and I'm just finishing the last jar.

No, not really. I lost custody of most of it when the band broke up on a porch in Beverly Hills. But, that's for another post.

It's ok. Most of our fans were squirrels, anyway. Go figure...

Top 5 Reasons You Should Learn to Play Guitar

Hi there. How YOU doin'?

Someone told me that if you want people to read your blogs, you have to come up with some numbered lists. Then, that same person proceeded to tell me the top 12 reasons you have to come up with numbered lists.

Which is NOT what I'm going to write about today. For several reasons.

Which I'm not even going to tell you. Ha!

But, what I AM going to tell you is the top 5 reasons you should learn to play guitar. It will be my very first numbered list in a blog. I'm excited. Tomorrow I am going to cover "How to change your guitar strings in 437 easy steps." And I'm going to get totally plowed before I write it, so it should be a good one.

But, for now...here are the 5 Top Reasons You Should Learn to Play Guitar:

1.) To pick up chicks. Guitar players seem to have some kind of magical powers. I'm not sure exactly what it is...but I can spend a significant amount of time in public places, and NO ONE even looks twice. I can dress up and go out to a club, and leave there without a single phone number. But, I could sit on a curb in my pajamas with my hair sticking straight up...and if I have my guitar, girls will stop and talk to me. I swear, it's better than a puppy.

2.) To create an outlet for expressing your innermost feelings. It's true, from laughing with humor, to healing from heartbreak...learning the guitar allows you to actually create the music that touches you. Without a doubt, my ability to crank my amplifier with gain wide open, full throttle, shattered glasses, pictures on the floor, ears ringing, head banging, crunching, thrashing, slashing, shredding, my cover of John Denver's  Rocky Mountain High...it has saved countless lives. Hey, you have to set the rage free somehow.

3.) To pick up chicks. Again, better than puppies. I can't emphasize this enough.

4.) Guitar is extremely versatile. You can break out your guitar  almost anywhere, and become part of life's soundtrack. As both an instrument for accompaniment, or as a self contained instrument capable of producing complete pieces of music...it is awesome. It helps if you've learned a wide variety of things, but it's not too hard to learn a few standard songs from most genres...and then you're set. From Christmas to campfires, weddings to funerals, kids' birthdays to entertaining at the senior center...I have learned enough of the standards that I can manage to find something to play for nearly every person and every occasion. Guitar really has added a lot to my life in this way, and part of that has been the experience of helping people smile. I love that stuff-and guitar has been a big part of that.

5.) Guitar is portable. I used to have a Martin Backpacker guitar. It was pretty cool. It was about a quarter of the size of a typical acoustic guitar, and it was light and shaped kind of weird...designed to be carried on hiking trails and camping excursions. It was actually small enough to be carried in a backpack. Although that is an extreme example of portability, let's see you get a grand piano or a tuba on a mountain top.

So, there it is. My first numbered list on my blog. I'm sure they will get better when I start drinking heavily again.

And, unfortunately, I made up the part about picking up chicks,

I'm investing in a puppy.