A miserable seven days is compounded with the news that Jim has got cancer. The weight loss and other issues didn’t make it obvious as his medical condition can be described as “complicated”. It’s pretty rotten. I’ve always tried to talk him up and tell him the positives and now I feel quite upset by it all. Tear for a man I never got on with, until recently. How does that work?
Category: Diary
Seeing as the net has become so fluid in terms of data exchange and I can squirt my updates from one site to another from a centralised point and there have been searches come up via Google Analytics that people do look for a “Darren Lock” page on MySpace, I have decided to set up an account there again.
http://www.myspace.com/darrenlock
It’s looking lonely over there as I only have two friends and those are the automated ones you get when you open an account!!!
The Guitar Center in Hollywood has a special place in my heart, mainly because it completely blew my mind when I went their the first time and the second time, I was truly impressed that I could pick up really expensive guitars and play them without a shop assistant jumping on my back and beating me to the ground.
My guitar shopping experience in the UK has always been a negative one where you either get the sniffy muso shop assistant who looks down their nose at you and deliberately tries to undermine you or banjax you in equal measure. I always remember phoning up Holiday Music in Leytonstone in the late 90s and asking if they had a VG-8 in stock. “No,” said the snotty assistant on the end of the phone, “That’s a guitar synthesiser (wrong!) and we don’t stock those”. Meanwhile, I’ve got a copy of Guitarist magazine open in front of me with their advert telling me they had the units in stock and that’s how I got their phone number!
But the Guitar Center is such a laid back place and the staff are friendly and helpful and there are so many different guitars to drool over, it really is Guitar Heaven.
Guitar Heaven 2004
Outside the massive shop front, there is a walk of fame where famous guitar players have left their hand prints. I snapped this picture of Tony Levin’s entry because it made me laugh so much – don’t worry, he’s not deformed or a space alien, he was wearing his funk fingers.
Tony Levin’s Hand Print on Guitar Center Walk of Fame
So where are we going with this? Well this is a stream of consciousness post because my attention was brought to Peter Gabriel’s recent performance at the self-same Guitar Center, and Tony Levin is his long-term bass playing chum and I have good memories of the place. So I thought I’d combine all these elements into one gooey mess.
Enjoy!
Been feeling a little down today so I thought I’d put up a couple of pix of the next generation because they cheer me up no end.
Had a meeting with the men from the bank today. New contracts have been inked and our final obligation is going to be met. We reset the clock back to zero. It is three years ago. Nothing has happened. We start again…
It has been a harrowing week, dear reader. I’ve spent every available spare moment working through my collection of 4-track master tapes. I have now finished this gargantuan task and have collated 9 hours of music, totalling 118 tracks. Some of these are complete songs, some of these are unfinished pieces, some are just fragments.
It was hard work. Various versions of the same song, badly recorded bits, awful playing, improvisations that were borderline attacks in noise terror – I had to sit through it all in order to transfer this archive.
Again, it made me realise how I’d documented my musical development. So it was a useful exercise in that way, but it was quite depressing. I don’t like looking back too often, I’m one of those folks who finds it hard looking through old photographs because I find it painful.
However, it wasn’t all bad because I found a couple of tracks that were good and I’d completely forgotten about. The thing about music (if you are prolific) is that sometimes you completely forget you’ve recorded a track and so it is a genuine pleasant surprise to find something in the audio rubble. It is almost like someone else has recorded the song, but you hear flashes of yourself, your style, etc. So that makes it familiar, but it is still a stranger.
I’ve made a long podcast detailing some of the more acceptable tracks – it is 1’30” in length so it is a long one but you get to hear me talking about stuff like mandolins, being hit by a car and other tales that inspired the songs, etc. Hey, it might even make you laugh (probably for all the wrong reasons).
09/08/10 Podcast
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Of course, you can also get this directly off my podcast feed.
Now this is a test post. The idea is that I make this post on my central website and this message update should appear on my Facebook and Twitter accounts, as if by magic.
Abracadabra – I wanna reach out and grab ya!