It ain’t Country unless we’re talking trains, or trucks, or prison, or momma, or getting’ drunk. Only Steve Goodman’s song “You Never Even Called Me By My Name” ever managed to cover them all in a single song, and if you’ve heard that song you’d probably agree with me that you probably can’t improve upon it.

So this song is about only one of these cornerstones: prison. More specifically, life after prison. Or even more specifically, life after prison for someone who elected to leave early.

We live in the age of Twitter and Google, where everything we say and do is recorded, for easy access, for the rest of our lives. Unlike earlier generations, we all have to face the possibility that some foolish (and/or downright wrong) action of our past lives will follow us forever. It’s something that politicians and famous people have had to deal with for some time now, but modern technology is now bringing the phenomenon to the masses. Rather than singing about someone’s heartbreak over an ill-conceived tweet, I decided to stick to the somewhat more romantic image of the fugitive: the person living among us who is secretly hiding from his or her past.

The inspiration for this song were some classics such as “Cocaine Blues” and “Mamma Tried”. I wanted to do a song that was a little more powerful, with a strong kick-drum and a bass riff that hopefully gives it the hook it needs. And oh, yeah, how can you go wrong with banjitar as your lead instrument?

It is said that “good artists borrow, great artists steal”, so in an attempt to be a great artist, I stole the name of the character (“Willie Lee”) from Cocaine Blues, the line “You don’t know me but you don’t like me” from Streets of Bakersfield, and the line “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he” from Solomon (Proverbs 23:7).

Hope you like it.

Share on Facebook

Before I do that, I’d like to talk about a great iPhone application that I’ve been using for a little while. To start, let me make the point that I am in no way connected with the authors of the app, nor am I being compensated in anyway. This is a totally unsolicited endorsement. (It’s not that I’m above pimping somebody’s product for money, it’s just that nobody asks.)

The app is called iLift, and it’s a great example of new tech replacing old. Before I get into what it does, a little background…

A few years ago, I learned of a great product from TASCAM called the “CD Guitar Trainer”. Put a CD in (ask your parents what a CD is) and this thing would slow down the music without changing the pitch. It’s been a while since I used it, but I believe you could also change the pitch without changing the tempo. If you’re playing covers, and have to learn a new song in some other key for someone, that’s priceless. If you’re trying to learn a specific solo or riff, it’s a total godsend to be able to do this. It works by taking a tiny sample of the music and simply playing it as long as necessary to fill the time. It sort of sounds like the CD player is broken, but it gets the job done.

Of course, it’s not a perfect system. For one thing, they had inputs all over the device, so I never could understand how they expected anyone to stand it up and plug anything in. Me, I mounted mine on a music stand with heavy-duty Velcro. Well, anyway, the bigger disadvantage was that you had to use CDs, so I found myself burning new disks every couple of weeks with new covers on them. Very 2005.

So a couple of years ago, TASCAM came up with the MP3 trainer. As you might expect from the name, they did away with the CD part. That was a big improvement, but this device was really poorly designed. The inputs? On the bottom. I guess they figured if Apple was going to put the headphone jack of the Nano on the bottom, they could, too. (I really have to think that Steve Jobs wasn’t in the office the day they made that decision.) The MP3 trainer is about as far away from the iPod experience as you can get. You sync through a USB cable, but you can only sync certain folders, and the file names, et cetera, et cetera. Living as I do in the early twenty-first century, it’s hard to really describe how industrial in design this MP3 trainer is. It’s like a prop from the movie RoboCop. It’s about the size of an original Walkman, and it weighs more. Every time I hold it, it reminds me of seeing those old photos of Buddy Holly with his Stratocaster. Here’s this guy in 1950′s clothes and glasses holding this guitar that looks like it came from twenty years in the future. The design of the MP3 trainer reminds me of that, except that it’s Buddy Holly and the guitar is… every other thing in your house.

So now that I’ve complained at length about how poorly executed the MP3 Trainer is, I should probably add that I really got a lot of use out of that device. There’s no question it was money well spent. If you don’t have an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch (necessary for the product I’m about to talk about), I’d recommend the MP3 trainer. Hopefully they’ll come up with a new design at some point, though, because it’ll get on your nerves.

Finally, we reach the modern age. iLift is an iPhone app that plays a song out of your iTunes library and allows you to loop though a specific section, slow down or speed up, and change the key (even at less than 1/2 step increments). The interface is essentially just one screen, with big, easy-to-use buttons for everything. I love this app, it’s only as complex as it needs to be. It was definitely developed by a musician (and not by an art major, by the looks of that icon).

The only complaint I have is that you have to import the song into iLift before you can play it. You do this though the program, and it doesn’t take too long, but it’s an inconvenience. I’m sure this has to do with how Apple compartmentalizes the memory space for applications, but I’m hoping in future versions this can be overcome.

In the crazy phone app world, $9.99 somehow seems like a lot of money, but next to the dedicated hardware I used to use, ten bucks for this sort of thing is a great deal in my book. As far as music apps go, this is one of my favorites.

Share on Facebook

The new bridge was intended for a through-body instrument, so a little modification was necessary. That

I think the music gods may have been angry with me over my last post (The Joy of Homemade Guitars) for making it all sound so easy. I felt their wrath recently when I decided to upgrade my Telecaster (and replace the patent-worthy hex nut saddle). After all, all I needed were a couple of replacement parts. How hard can it be?

I decided that the two pieces that need to be replaced are the neck (no small part, I admit) and the charming but acoustically questionable hex nut saddle. Each seemed like it would be a fairly simple matter of swapping out the part. At least it seemed that way.

The saddle seemed very straightforward when I started. All I figured I need was a replacement saddle. Unfortunately, it seems you can’t buy just one, you need to buy a set, and a set turned out to be more than I wanted to pay (ie: more than zero). I decided to buy a replacement bridge assembly, which would give me the best bang for the buck. I could use just the saddle and keep the other parts for spares.

That was where reality stepped in. The replacement saddle won’t go onto the screw because it has coarse threads and the original part has fine threads. I can’t just substitute the replacement screw because it’s shorter than the original (this the first of several “WTF?” moments during this exercise). The reason why a shorter screw won’t work is that the saddle has to be more or less the same distance from the 12th fret as is the nut. I started to wonder how the screws on the replacement bridge would be shorter, because the bridges looked identical. I compared the two bridges and found that the original bridge was about 1/4 inch longer than the replacement bridge. Why? No reason.

So my new plan was to replace the bridge assembly as a whole. That would pretty much put and end to it, right? Well, the only problem with that plan is that on the original bridge, the ball end of the string is at the end of the bridge, but on the replacement part the holes through the bridge are on the bottom, for a through-body. With a little help from Dremel, I was able to make my own holes through the end of the bridge for the strings, but the whole thing took a lot more time than anticipated.

Next, the neck. I got a beautiful maple/maple neck from Might Mite. I was very excited to get this bad boy on my Tele, which was a fairly straightforward install. Everything was going fine until I went to transfer the tuning machines from the old neck to the new neck. Turns out, the holes pre-drilled for the tuners on the new neck are larger than the ones for the old neck, so the ferrules won’t hold. The prospect of buying new tuners is not Frey appealing to a guy who didn’t even want to buy new saddles.

Emails to Mighty Mite went unanswered. Again, the neck looks great and seems to be good quality, but I can’t understand why they wouldn’t go for Fender-correct holes for the Telecaster necks (for some reason, probably traditional, the Tele tunes are smaller around than Strat tuners).

The end result of all of this is that the refitting of a couple of seemingly-standard parts ends up being a much bigger deal, a deal that usually results in buying yet more parts. The downside (besides the expense) being that I find myself spending more of my free time working on my guitar than actually playing it.

Do I retract all of the great things I said about building your own guitar? Not at all. I think there are tremendous benefits to doing so: you learn so much about what goes into one, it’s hard for me to see how one really gains the insight without the experience. In the end (and I said this before), it’s not a magical path to priceless instrument for $100. Getting it right is undoubtedly going to take some money and some labor, quite probably more than you would have to spend than if you’d left it to the experts.

But if that’s your angle, you’re missing the point.

More Telecaster updates as work progresses. Meanwhile, why not come out and see The Nerve at McKenzie’s in Malvern on Saturday night?

Share on Facebook

Necessity is the mother of the hex-nut saddle

Of course, if you are ready (that is, you have $5,000 lying around), then go for it. Fender makes some nice guitars. Now, realize that no way is your $5k Custom Shop Stratocaster going to be five times better than the American-series Strat, but it’ll be a really nice guitar, to be sure. And what could be cooler than a guitar made for you? Well, I’ll tell you: a guitar you make yourself.

Brian May made his first guitar. Now, I am not a person who is easily impressed, but I’ll bet you that underneath his clothes Brian May wears a blue unitard with a big, giant “S” on it. You know those Dos Equis commercials, with “the most interesting man in the world”? I’m pretty sure that guy is playing Brian May. The story goes that he’s somewhere in his early teens when he admires a guitar in a pawn shop window but can’t afford it. So he goes home and made a guitar from wood reclaimed from a fireplace mantle. Let me say that again: he made a guitar. The tremolo bridge was a knife, a spring from a motorbike engine, and a knitting needle. OK, his father helped, but that hardly diminishes the accomplishment. A guitar is a pretty complicated instrument. To get proper intonation at every fret requires a lot of precise measurement, and this kid just went home and did it. Must have done a pretty good job, too, because he’s still playing his “red special” thirty years later.

Now, making a guitar isn’t rocket science (did I mention that May, besides being one of the most famous guitarists of our time, is also a rocket scientist?), but it is pretty hard to do. Even at Martin Guitar in Nazareth (awesome factory tour, BTW), where you can see some pretty old-fashioned techniques, the necks are machined by computer. If you are inclined to make a guitar, my hat is off to you. By all appearances, it’s really, really hard to do right.

I have never made a guitar, but I have built a couple. By “built” I mean that I’ve assembled a guitar. There’s a little soldering and a little woodworking involved, but all in all it’s about a million times easier than making one like Brian May’s Red Special, and it’s a tremendously satisfying (not to mention educational) experience.

I built myself a banjo from the Grizzly catalog. You know, Grizzly, known world over for fine musical instruments. Never hear of them? Grizzly makes industrial tools for woodworking: lathes, planers, etc. For some reason, in the middle of their catalog they sell kits for musical instruments. I put it together in about a day and I’m pretty proud of it. How does it play? I have no idea. I don’t know how to play the banjo.

The first (and only) guitar I built, I bought from a mom & pop reseller on eBay. It was a Telecaster-style guitar, all parts included, again for about $100. I had to cut and shape the headstock myself due to some issue with Fender’s intellectual property (Strange that you can copy the body of a Fender guitar almost exactly, but the headstock is protected). I also spray-painted the body a cool silver-blue color.

Once I got it together I plugged it in and started jamming. It was a tremendously fulfilling experience. The only real problem was that I took a $100 kit and built a guitar worth, I reckon, about $100. In other words, it was crap.

The whole thing was pretty rough all around. To give an example of the quality of the kit, the headstock had pre-drilled holes for the tuners. The holes didn’t actually line up with the strings leading off the nut, though, so they all bent slightly. It’s like someone got a hold of a Telecaster and started making replicas without understanding why anything was the way it was.

And the whole guitar is like this. I had to set the action of the neck way high to avoid buzz. With all the barely-finished edges it has, playing this Tele is about as easy on the hands as wrestling an apple core from a raccoon. And the metal used on the saddles was so soft that as soon as you put tension on them they’d slip from the adjustment screws. (I won’t jump to conclusions, but apparently somebody once found lead in something made in China.) My fix was to put a hex nut on the saddle adjustment screw. It is probably the most expensive component on the guitar.

It only stands to reason that, unless you’re going to put some real, skilled labor into the project, your instrument is only going to be as good as the components you buy, and For that reason I suppose you’re going to have to put some money into the project if you want good results. But even if building your own guitar is not a money-saving proposition, it’s still worth giving a try. You learn an awful lot about what goes into a guitar while putting one together. It forces you to give at least some attention to every component as you handle it, and you gain a better appreciation of how everything comes together. It gives you a test bed for modifications that you might be considering making to your more expensive instruments. And The experience of playing an instrument that you created is sublime.

I’m planning on building one of Carvin Guitars’ kits next. They’re not inexpensive, but I’m hoping to end up with a truly usable guitar, so I’m willing to put a few bucks into it. I’ll post more as that project progresses. As for the Tele, sitting in my garage for three years (and occasionally falling over) has given it a terrific patina. I’m going to replace the neck and bridge, and I think that will improve it’s playability a lot. And if not, I’m sure to learn something in the process.

I guess this post wouldn’t really be complete without a sound sample, so here is one which I suppose shows that even a homemade Telecaster can sound half decent if you add enough pedals!

Come on out to see me with Scot Silver and Kris Dragon at Baxter’s in Malvern on the 11^th.

Share on Facebook

After having been away for so long, coming back was something of an eye-opener. In my memory, Nashville was not a particularly unusual city (I’m not a city guy), just one with maybe a little better weather than most of the places I’m used to. The thing that struck me about Nashville this time (and I’m about to state the obvious, so don’t be disappointed when you get to the end of this sentence) is the city’s dedication to country music. Now, is that a blog-worthy observation, or what?

Well, it’s been five minutes since I wrote that last paragraph, and the Pulitzer committee still hasn’t called, so maybe I should elaborate a bit.

I lived in Nashville for four years, and I went to the Opry and I visited Music Row and I own a Stetson (though it’s straw, so I don’t know if that counts). And I never really thought that much about it. Nashville is called “Music City”, but I guess to me that was always just for the tourists. Music in this country is recorded all over, and I never really thought of Nashville as any more special than any other place when it comes to music. Sure, you go down to Broadway and there are souvenir stores with their life-sized Elvi on every corner, but outside of the tourist traps the place never seemed to me to be so extraordinary. In fact (and maybe because), most of my favorite artists are Nashville outsiders, those who don’t conform to the “Nashville Sound” (I can’t help but think of the Alan Jackson / George Strait song “Murder on Music Row”, which accuses Nashville of killing country music).

Once I really started looking around, though, I was genuinely impressed (and maybe you have to live a few years North of the Mason-Dixon line to feel this way) with how seriously Nashville is into its music. You can walk down the street on a Thursday afternoon and hear live music coming out of every store you pass. Up in Philadelphia, live music is strictly a Friday and Saturday night thing, and only if there’s nothing good on TV (Seriously, last Saturday’s gig was canceled due to the World Series). Sunday the Titans were playing at home (just across the Cumberland from downtown Nashville) and the city was rocking with live music. As it should be.

Most people up North where I live take country music lightly, and I understand that. It’s a form of music that doesn’t take itself too seriously (can you see Prince cutting a country album?). But it is a distinctly American form of music, with a rich history and more than its share of colorful characters, and there is a pride in the city for the music that I really don’t think I fully appreciated before.

So if I had a proper cowboy hat, I’d take it off for the city of Nashville. I did manage to get me a snazzy new pair of “work boots” (pictured), which were just about the most conservative pair in the store. Philadelphia is not ready for red-dyed alligator skin.

Come out to see me with Scot Silver and Kris Dragoun at Baxters in Malvern tomorrow night (10/30).

Share on Facebook

At the time I wrote the song I had just gone to a big high school reunion, the first reunion of any type I’d ever attended. I’d also just gotten onto Facebook, and was all of a sudden back in contact with all sorts of people from my past, many of whom I hadn’t had any contact at all for a decade or even two.

One thing I remember very strongly from the reunion was sitting with friends talking about events from all those years ago, when all of a sudden someone mentioned a particular teacher, and it was like something was unlocked in my brain. All at once I could picture the man in my head: his haircut, his suit (I’m sure he had more than one, but I remember one specifically) his voice and his mannerisms. Up until that point, I didn’t even knew I’d forgotten him, I had absolutely no recollection at all up until that moment and then, all of a sudden, it was back.

The flood of nostalgia from reconnecting with all of these old friends got me thinking: to what extent do the “good old days” still exist? Certainly, you can’t go home again, but it’s not exactly gone, either. there still seems to be a clear difference between things that have come and gone and things that never existed at all.

I have to say, though, that memory is a pretty bad place to put the past for safekeeping, at least if my own memory is any gauge. Everything each of us has ever done and every conversation we’ve ever had is now in the past, and over time memories seem to dim, until you have to wonder if they’ll disappear completely. And then, what becomes of the past itself?

That’s the concept behind the song: it’s not so much a desire to return to the past as it is the need to know that it still exists, somewhere. Why is that important? I really don’t know. But not having an answer doesn’t mean I can’t ask the question.

Come out to see me with The Nerve on Friday (10/15) at McKenzie’s Brew House (the one in Glen Mills).

Share on Facebook

About Moose In The House Blues

If you’ve ever had even one moose in your house, I’m sure you will agree, no musical style would capture the mood better than a good old-fashioned 12-bar blues.

This particular song is one that my then-five-year-old daughter and I had been improvising for a while. “There’s a Moose in the House“, you see, was her favorite game of all time. She asked me to “put it on the iPod”, so I headed to the basement to record it. Well, as soon as I heard it played back, I thought, “this needs a bass line”. That done, I thought “this needs a solo.” And then I thought, “this needs a moose”.

Anyway, what should have taken about twenty minutes stretched into a couple of nights. Eventually I had to cut myself off and just put it out there. I wouldn’t exactly say it’s the song I want to be remembered for, but if you’ve ever had a moose in your house, hopefully it will bring you some comfort.

Come on out to see me play with The Nerve for a cancer benefit at Wilson Farm Park on October 2 and Malvern Day on October 3rd.

Share on Facebook

The problem that Bandshell.always had was that there was no really simple way for the bands to set up their own sites without any computing knowledge. Since the service was designed to sell for only a few bucks a month (know any bands that have more than that to spend?), there really couldn’t be any tech support available. Although the website generated some inquiries from bands looking for a service like Bandshell.net, Without an easy way to give the bands a “starter site”, there was no way to launch beyond a small set of friends and bandmates for whom I was willing to do the set-up.

Ironically, web browser technology has finally caught up and Bandshell.net’s technical strategy is viable. Cross-domain scripting is now possible, the Bandshell.net model of hosting the site on one server and calling the Bandshell.net engine on another has many more possibilities.

These days, though, there is competition in this area from some very big names. Sites like MySpace and Facebook provide all of these services at no cost, and while I think the Bandshell.net experience is superior, it’s hard to compete with FREE. Plus, the social networking aspect is so important that most bands would rather have their presence on one of these mega-sites than to manage their own, regardless of things like aesthetics or features.

So another Dot Com dream dies, but it’s a cold, cruel world out there, and it’s time to move on. Too bad: the Bandshell.net logo would have looked great on the tail fin of my private jet.

Share on Facebook

Anyway, I’m really trying to find more time to put into songwriting, so I switched to some prepackaged website software, instead of trying to work it all out myself. Now, as it turns out, the software I picked is blogging software (did I mention I was distractible?), so over the next few weeks and months, I’ll be posting some original music, as well as some anecdotes about performing here in the local bars and clubs.

Since there’s basically nothing on the site yet, I’ll start by mentioning the banner picture, which was taken about two years ago at the Grounds for Music event in Wagontown, Pennsylvania. How do you get to Grounds for Music? You head West out of Philadelphia until you get to 1974, and turn left. If you like wide, open spaces, Grounds for Music is your kind of event (another photo is posted on The Nerve’s website, but it doesn’t exactly capture the place.) The photo was taken in the “parking lot” of the event, which, suffice to say, always has enough capacity.

Come on out to Stephen’s on State on Thursday. I’ll be there with Scot and Dave.

Share on Facebook

Share on Facebook