I have the great, good fortune now in my retirement to spend as much time as I wish focused on all things guitars. After a harrowing visit to the Mayo Clinic for an annual physical, I was eventually declared good to go, so when I returned home I felt even more fortunate to have time to develop my musical sensibilities and skills.
To that end, I scheduled my first “gig” at the local coffee shop for early April. Along with my friend Grant, we will perform for a couple of hours on a Friday night. Cup of Joe is a pleasant, low pressure venue to perform… the coffee, tea and snacks are great and the people are kind…
Cup of Joe in Cedar Fall, IA
Grant and I will take turns alternating at the mic during the evening. He plays his original Folk-Punk-Americana on acoustic guitar, while I play finger-style and bottleneck country blues on a couple of resonators and a Taylor hybrid acoustic/electric guitar. So we are both feverishly sharpening our chops for the performance next month.
I am not particularly anxious about this gig, as I’ve performed at Cup of Joe numerous times at Open Mic Night… This time it should be more pleasant for me, as I won’t feel the time pressure that you do when all you have is fifteen minutes at the mic and there are people lined up to play after you…
In addition to working on my chops, I also have the freedom to read as much as I can abut all things guitars and blues… Here are some the books, on my short stack that I am either reading, have read, or intend to get to in the short term:
I just finished reading this wonderful book. Compiled by Jas Obrecht a lifelong musical journalist for journals like Guitar Player Magazine. Of the dozens and dozens of guitarists he’s interviewed over the years, he offers in this book some of the very best. It was fascinating to read what some of the best players think about their music and how they approach the instrument. Included are interviews with Neil Young, Jerry Garcia, Tom Petty, Carlos Santana, Ben Harper and Johnny Winter. Highly recommended if you love all things guitars! Published by the University of North Carolina Press, so it’s a classy binding.
I was so pleased with Obrecht’s Talking Guitar, I went ahead and picked up two of his other books that fall right into my wheelhouse of interest. Both new books are about blues players. The first about the early pre-electric country blues players and the second about the players who led the transition to Chicago/Detroit style electric blues. Reading these books should add to my knowledge base when I banter with an audience about the music I play…
Pedal Crush is a monumental tome about anything you could possibly want to know about the pedals that are used to augment and enhance the sound of a guitar. Published by Bjooks, I had to order this one out of Denmark. It’s coffee table book big and pricey, and I am just about 1/4 of the way into it. Including interviews with various pedal builders and guitar players who use pedals, it is a comprehensive and wonderful journey through this particular world of technology.
If you’re wondering why I am so fascinated by pedals, here’s my latest board iteration. It’s great fun to sculpt sound with a pedal board. For more details about most of my pedals, check here…
Michael Connelly cranks out one to two mysteries per year and they are some of the best detective/police procedurals being written today. I’ve read everything he’s written and it is almost always a fun ride following along behind Connelly’s protagonists. His longest standing and most popular character is LA Police detective Heironymous (Harry) Bosch. If you take Amazon Prime then you will note that several seasons of Harry Bosch serials are available for your viewing, and they are done very well…
I usually wait about a year after the book is published so I can get a good deal buying one used off of Amazon and snatched this one up a few weeks ago… the problem I have is that because Connelly’s books are usually such page turners they do not last long on the nightstand so while I read them I fret about what to read next. In my house I have a queue of books waiting, but it’s the choice I wrestle with… Sometimes a book that I’ve acquired will be read right away, but others may languish for months or years before they are gotten to. The Connelly books never wait very long… like excellent customers, they move to the front of the line…
Having zoomed through the Harry Bosch story pictured above in short order, I am now involved with Caleb Carr’s The Angel of Darkness, which is a sequel to The Alienist. Both books take place in the late 1800’s and involve Lazlo Kreizler psychologist & criminal profiler who hunts serial killers. I read The Alienist several years ago, really enjoyed it and while reading it grabbed a used copy of the The Angel of Darkness; however for whatever reason, the second book languished on a shelf for years. Perhaps I was saving it because I knew that there were no more Lazlo Kreizler books in the works.
Nevertheless, two things occurred that led me to pick up and start reading The Angel of Darkness. First, I discovered that Caleb Carr was indeed planning to publish a new Kreizler story! And secondly, I started watching the TNT TV series based on The Alienist.
New network for the Tarheels not supported by Mediacom.
I was aware that there was a TV treatment of The Alienist; however, I did not have access to a streaming version of it and I find watching a fixed scheduled TV series anathema nowadays; however, the television landscape has changed much for the better in my home as of last week.
First a bit of background. As you are all aware, Cable TV subscriptions are terribly expensive and the ONLY reason I subscribe to Cable TV is to watch my beloved UNC Tar Heels basketball team during the season. Well, much to my despair, I learned that the new ACC Network that would carry UNC games in the future would not be supported by my Cable supplier Mediacom and when I queried them about this, they were a combination of oblivious and unapologetic!
So, I dumped cable, purchased an Apple TV and a subscription to Hulu+ and now have access to the Tar Heels again. The transition away from cable went incredibly smooth and is saving money too! I am wondering why it took me so long to do this!
I also have access to a bunch of other stuff on Hulu, including a streaming version of The Alienist and after watching an episode or two, I decided it was time to dust off The Angel of Darkness and read it… so there you have it…
PS… Caleb Carr is an excellent writer and I look forward to The Alienist at Armageddon! It might move to the front of the line…
Last night I finally finished the 700+ page Don Winslow opus, The Border. It was (supposedly) the final installment of a trilogy about the Mexican and Central American illegal drug trade and the development of the infamous cartels. I did not enjoy this last installment at all but pushed myself through it. Full of paper thin stereo-typical characters, a plot spread way too wide, a la Game of Thrones, and contrived over the top political virtue signaling, it was, in my assessment an utter failure. This was an incredibly disappointing summer read as his last book, The Force, was an outstanding accounting of police corruption in New York City driven by an unforgettable anti-hero.
So, I am due for a cleansing science fiction read and out of my queue I pulled Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, which won a Hugo award years ago for its depiction of a post apocalyptic world and a theme of the cyclical nature of human civilization. I think I was vaguely aware of this book, but recently found it on one of those web lists of books that absolutely must be read, so I grabbed it off Amazon… I’ll let you know how it goes…
It was sometime in my early 20’s when I was in graduate school that I created a fundamental method for myself and that was if you’re going to invest yourself in some activity, first get a book and learn about what you’re doing. Looking back, I think one of the first books of that sort that I’d purchased was the Complete Book of Running, and I ran for years afterward using the knowledge gleaned from that read…
As a result of this practice, my home library has quite of number of background books in such disparate areas as bicycle repair, blues music, civil war reenacting, wildflower identification, prairie restoration, all types of photography, and even dog training.
If you’ve been anywhere in and around this weblog then you will know that one of my keen interests during my retirement life is everything about guitars. As my opening paragraphs would suggest, I’ve dug around trying to find books about guitars to deepen my understanding of the instrument. Thus far, two of the more interesting books I’ve found include, Clapton’s Guitar and the Guitar, An American Life. They were both excellent reads covering aspects of the social/cultural/historical elements of guitars and to some extent guitar construction, but still fell short of really offering a deep understanding about the structure of the guitar, how it functions and how it affects playability. Nevertheless, I recommend both books as fun and informative time well spent.
Then, one day I was noodling around on my computer searching guitar culture and philosophy subjects and ended up on Ervin Somogyi’s website. Mr. Somogyi is a world renowned master luthier, in other words a guitar builder. I had previously read about his apprenticeship program in Fretboard Journal #36 so I was curious enough to explore his site a bit deeper. He had in one section some fascinating and articulate discussions about guitar culture, which I perused and in later meanderings discovered that he had published a two volume treatise on guitar building. The first volume was focused in detail on how guitars behave as a function of choices a luthier might make during construction. The second volume was explicitly step by step how to build a guitar.
The basic pair of volumes (not the leather bound version) was listed at well over $200 which was a bit too rich for me; however, I only wanted the first volume regarding how a guitar functions. I never intend to build a guitar so the second volume was of no interest. Fortunately, I found a used copy of volume one in a Canadian used book store and though it was still more pricey than I would have liked, I bought it anyway and am so glad I did because it is a classic exploration of acoustic guitar design and function written in an interesting and accessible manner.
All elements of guitar structure are discussed. For example, Somogyi evaluates in detail the various trees that are available for harvesting quality tonewoods or general structural elements such as the neck. I was fascinated to learn that mahogany makes a great guitar neck because it is an equatorial tree that possesses balanced longitudinal torque because of how the tree interacts with the sun in its particular region of the world. This matters because the neck is less likely to twist over time. Given that I recently had a twisted guitar neck repaired, I appreciated the discussion.
No subject about guitars is too esoteric and the end notes take up about 1/3 of the book offering even more detail. Subjects of discussion include the various ways in which a guitar top vibrates and how the bracing underneath interacts, or how the back wood of the guitar cooperates with the top wood to project sound outward through the guitar’s sound hole. Everything you need to know about intonation is detailed.
Taylor 510 “dread”…
The aesthetics of guitar shapes are also considered which was illuminating to me. Take for example a comparison of the now discontinued Taylor 510 “dreadnought” shaped guitar versus the new Taylor Grand Pacific.
The 510 according to Somogyi’s view had very little aesthetic appeal. Though a good guitar (I owned one years ago) it was strictly utilitarian in appearance. The shoulders of the guitar are just plain horizontal and flat, the guitar has almost no curve at the waist… it’s basically just a box of wood with a neck and strings, lacking all elegance.
Taylor Grand Pacific…
On the other hand, consider the Grand Pacific. It is a reimagined dreadnought-styled guitar, and its shape is much more appealing. In fact, Somogyi would point out that the Greek Golden Rule of Proportion was applied by reimagining the waist of the guitar to give a perfect ratio of top bout size compared to the lower bout. Further, the shoulders of the guitar add a subtle sloping drop which enhances its elegance giving it an altogether more appealing shape to the human eye!
In sum, if you really want to understand the art and technology of the acoustic steel string guitar there is probably no better book than Ervin Somogyi’s The Responsive Guitar. It took me the better part of the summer to wade through it because it takes time to give thought and consideration to his analysis, but it is a journey worth taking.
As a final side note it is worth mentioning that Mr. Samogyi frequently points out the relative “newness” of luthier built steel string acoustic guitars. For much of the steel string guitar’s history it was an artifact of industrial factory production. The development of custom made luthier guitars grew along with the relatively new tradition of steel string finger-style guitarists. It can be argued that American finger-style playing was historically rooted in older country blues, played on factory guitars; however, Somogyi points to a new aesthetic in finger-style that benefited from guitars designed expressly for that purpose. In a later section of his book he carefully points out the necessary differences in guitar design between flat-picked (plectrum-driven) guitars and finger-style played instruments.
Somogyi points to both Ed Gerhard and Martin Simpson as notable leaders in the new finger-style revolution. I had the great good fortune of hearing the aforementioned gentlemen play live and to spend some “quality” time with them afterwards discussing their guitar philosophy. It was through my association, in the middle late 1990’s, with the Manhattan, Kansas based Birdhouse Productions who hosted several outstanding acoustic guitar players.
When I first announced I was going to retire the most common reaction I received beyond congratulations was a dubiously phrased, “What are you going to do?” Initially, I was caught off guard believing that my interlocutor thought my plan to retire was somewhat suspect. So, in response I would list off the many activities that I engage in, including photography and guitar playing/learning to prove I was worthy of retirement…
Then after I while I became fatigued with trying to prove that I was prepared to retire, and instead stated that, “I would do whatever I wanted to do, whenever I wanted to…” which, so far, has been pretty much the case within the resources I want to allocate to the “whatever I want to do” aspect of my time spent.
It’s actually a little more complicated than that… Though it initially it seemed that time is available to do anything/anytime, there are still chores around the house like cleaning and yard upkeep, as well as time at the gym to avoid backsliding health wise… Nevertheless, I do have dedicated activities that I hold sacrosanct and one of them is reading…
I’ve been a devoted reader almost all my life… perhaps when I was a nascent reader it was a little rocky, but by the time I was 10 years old. Ian Fleming and Edgar Rice Burroughs enchanted me into a world of fiction where all things are possible… I am still there in that fantastic world of spies, detectives, space ships and time travelers… I found the vintage paperback covers to some of my gateway books into a life of escape reading…
So, I’ve lead the life of a voracious reader… to prove the point, I was not a lit. major in college, but I managed to take a lit. class almost every semester, including classes devoted to Shakespeare, Greek Tragedy, the Literary Significance of the Bible, and Late 19th Century American Literature…
The fact is, my dedication to literature is a bit of a problem… there is no room in my home for anymore books yet I keep buying them…. I really should read more books on my Kindle, but I feel suffocated and constrained when I read books electronically… I like to flip ahead sometimes and that is difficulty with an electronic reader…
I have to make way sometimes by disposing books… some I give away to friends, others get deposited at the local library’s Book Nook… most if the books I toss off are not what I call keepers… I still hang onto the books that are “classics” or ones that really affected me.
Some of the giveaways make a difference. Yesterday, Coach Chip, a young man who coached my son Parker in club basketball when he was in early grade school and who subsequently gave him private lessons in our driveway shared on FB that his “travel” team just one second place in a tournament. I know how hard Coach Chip works and congratulated him. His response was: “All because of the book you gave me!” Well, I think there’s more to it than that but it was fun to hear from Chip. Below you can Coach Chip and the book I gave him… It was a first edition of Dean Smith’s Basketball: Multiple Offense and Defense.
I’ll be with this tome for a while, weighing in at just over 700 pages. Because I read the previous two books in the trilogy, I was pretty charged up when I first noticed this book was to be published and pre-ordered it on Amazon… Despite my early order, it has been sitting around for several months waiting for me… I have to steel myself for a Don Winslow book as they are typically very dark…
The Border is the concluding book in a trilogy focusing on the illegal drug trade that filters up into the U.S. primarily from Mexico, but also involves Central America. It’s a really deep dive into Mexican politics, corruption and the every day people trying to carve out a life who are often victimized. The other two books were, The Power of the Dog and The Cartel. If you ever saw the wonderful film Sicario, then that would give you some idea of the subject matter.
This book in particular, as noted by the title, is particularly topical given the daily turmoil on the southern border of the U.S. According to the reviews I’ve read Winslow offers his own dark insights as to what is really happening, going deeper and on beyond was the mainstream media offers.
I’ll be leaving next week for a road trip to North Carolina with my guitars, and this book will be along for the ride.
After slogging through to completion a history of the U.S. involvement in World War I, which was actually a rather dry accounting, I was in the mood for a summer page turner… Fortunately, I had one on hand, courtesy of a birthday gift from my son Parker…
This is the second book I’ve read by Blake Crouch… He happens to be a graduate of the University of North Carolina, so I feel a modest connection to him. The first book, Dark Matter, was a sci-fi adventure involving quantum mechanics and multiple universes and it was entertaining enough for me to consider reading his new one. Recursion is about the nexus of time and memory and thus far is a great/fun and interesting read. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart of stories about time travel and the paradoxes it entails, with the possible exception of Star Trek episodes where time travel was too frequently used to solve improbable plots…
Up to this point in my reading, I would recommend this book…
During the July 4th weekend, Nettie, Parker and I went to Kansas City. Among our activities, including witnessing the musical Hamilton, we also visited the World War I Museum and Memorial. It was, for the most part an excellent museum with attributes such as simulated trenches, shell blasted holes and a deep collection of military hardware and uniforms.
In my judgement, the absolute highlight of the museum was the introductory film about the root causes of World War I. The film itself pointed out how obscure the causes for the war were. Most of us are aware that the spark initiating the war was the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. If you’re like me the first reaction to that fact is: What?!?! There were actually a confluence of causes, many of which seem to still exist today including great disparities in wealth and national boundaries eroding in light of cultural differences across populations…
Archduke Ferdinand
Deeper into the museum there was another film located in this very interesting “simulated battlefield” theater which spoke to the war itself and elaborated on the forms of conflict, particularly trench warfare. The film ends with the briefest mention of U.S. involvement in the war, which I found to be unsettling. This was an American museum was it not? The museum staff were unapologetic about the film’s short shrift treatment of General Pershing and the AEF (American Expeditionary Force), suggesting somewhat evasively that it was controversial.
So, I picked up a nice used copy of Yokelson’s Forty-Seven Days off of Amazon to dig deeper and, so far, it’s an excellent read. In short, Pershing and the AEF, at great cost to American lives, broke the trench war stalemate and helped, in large part, to end the war. The controversy the museum staff alluded to had to do with the unequal treatment of African-American soldiers. The preponderance of American soldiers who fought on the front lines were white; however, there were some black soldiers who fought under the leadership of the French, but most worked behind the battle lines helping with logistics.
