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Lord Summerisle

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Everything posted by Lord Summerisle

  1. Been the best part of a decade since I last posted here. But I have GAS for a Les Paul. I was going to buy an Epi Standard on the off-chance, online, but then I saw the Smokehouse burst finish on the Studios and thought "Yeah, I like that. Heck, I really like that." Can any owners of such instruments tell me about their experiences with them, good or bad? Thank you in advance for any input/advice. This will be a Sweetwater purchase owing to my location. Whatever shows up at my door, shows up at my door. EDIT: I see Sweetwater has an "exclusive" on this finish in a Standard. FWIW, I prefer the straight grain of the Studio to the book-matching of the Standard, and I can easily live without neck-binding, and $100 less is appealing. For blues (say Peter Green type stuff), what's the deal with "Alnico Classic" v "Probucker." I can mod it if needs be, but if stock will get me closer at the outlay for only a Benjamin more...
  2. Speaking of the 1970s, from the original patent application filed by George Ballas after his experiments with coffee cans with string tied to edgers and lawnmowers. Surprised me, actually, it seems he always imagined it as an electric tool, not a gasoline one. I guess at this point it was a PAF weed-whacker.
  3. 1972 called. It wants its jokes back. I tell you, my mother in law...
  4. Wow, that's a serious piece of kit. I mean, the weeds in Virginia seem never-ending, but that thing you posted looks like its built for rapid deforestation. I'm using a humble 10amp Greenworks corded model - much less impressive, and unlike @ksdaddy I don't even get a carburetor to mess around with. But it functions better than it did before!
  5. I wish to thank whichever genius came with the idea of simply poking bits of trimmer-line through holes, rather than having to wind up a whole spool of the stuff and then spend more time clearing jams than actually laying waste to the weeds. Last night I was about ready to throw the trimmer away and douse the entire yard in weedkiller. $20 at Home Depot this morning and yardwork just became a lot more pleasant. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Rino-Tuff-Pivotrim-Universal-Trimmer-Head-17093/206470721 Apologies. And to our friends in the UK, this is, surreally, about strimmers, otherwise known as trimmers in the US, or, amusingly, weed-whackers. Excuse me. Coffee break over. More weeds to whack. Maybe if I get the garden finished she'll let me play my guitar.
  6. Trogley says he's looking for an "origin story." I think that's rather a grandiose term to summarize a Gibson employee who apparently found himself with a hand-drill, a 3/4" spade bit, some oversized inlay dots, no ruler or measuring tape, and no inclination to go in search of other tools or supplies.
  7. I loved that CD back in the day (late '90s) when it was released. I bought a copy again, recently. The Peter Green / Danny Kirwan stuff is beautiful. I have to hit the skip button whenever a Jeremy Spencer track appears. It must have been weird seeing the original incarnation of Fleetwood Mac back in their heyday, a mixture of heavy, brooding blues, punctuated with corny Buddy Holly / Elvis impersonations and an approximation of Elmore James's most famous slide lick repeated endlessly over pretty much all of that "jocular" material. Very odd. I agree with you re: the Mayall album. The Supernatural and Peter's cover of the Stumble. It's all remarkable stuff.
  8. I take your point. In the 1990s I was a college student - someone (I forget who) rather neatly described this as "All of the freedom of adulthood with precisely none of its responsibilities." So yes, rose tinted spectacles. We could argue for some time about the generational lottery. I've always thought that if I could have had my pick I'd have been a British Boomer like my Dad. Once the dreary postwar '50s childhood was out of the way, the world was there to be enjoyed - and, unlike American Boomers, without the specter of the Vietnam lottery hanging over the party. However, I was born in the late '70s, and am glad to have had my youth in the '90s. As the '90s wore to a close, the worst thing to the happen in the west, apparently, was the peccadilloes and infidelities of the US President. And now here we are in 2020. The world changed on 9/11/2001, and the new century, now with one fifth of it gone (so scarcely a new century anymore) has been relentlessly bloody awful ever since. If I could get in the time machine, set the controls for 1996, and wake up somewhere in my knackered 1981 Volvo 244 with a Stone Roses cassette playing in its Alpine stereo, I'd take that deal. Ah, and I appear to have arrived back at nostalgia.
  9. I miss the 1990s. It's been crap ever since.
  10. Just in time to go and buy Neil Young's American Stars n' Bars as it hit the record shops; only I didn't, because I was probably more interested in milk at the time.
  11. @merciful-evans Yes, it's an interesting clip (from the early 1980s). But I suspect it's a bit like listening to a solo Peter Green album (also from the 1980s). It likely doesn't contain the magic that made people excited in the first place. The Youtube comments tend towards pondering which particular drunken fracas might have caused the black eye. If the time machine is available today, I'd prefer to go back to 1964 rather than 1981 to see Mr. Graham, whom I suspect was truly wonderful when on his game. Better than a 1964 BBC studio could capture. Actually, if the time machine is available. I'd prefer to go back to 1964 than 1981, period.
  12. Interesting that the thread began with George Benson. I'd have said the best guitarist of the 1960s was Wes, but then I wasn't born until the mid-70s by which time Wes Montgomery was long since in his grave. Do old records and grainy footage uploaded to Youtube provide enough evidence to make a judgment? London in the 1990s (the place and time where I was young) had a greying, pot-bellied middle-aged geezer in every boozer with a pint of London Pride in his hand telling you about how Davey Graham was the greatest to ever pick up a guitar. Nowadays he's mostly remembered because he was roughly one half of where Jimmy Page nicked it all from - the other 50% being Bert Jansch. I'd like to say these old geezers were right, but all that's left are old records and grainy uploads to Youtube. Besides, I doubt they saw him anyway. Davey Graham is like Nick Drake - long after the event it turns out he'd actually had live audiences of millions, all squeezed into the snug of a folkie pub one wet Wednesday evening.
  13. He took to playing slide as an act of revenge.
  14. "he rarely showered--as his greasy hair, black elbows and strong body odor showed--and his diet consisted mostly of ice cream and other junk food.” "[the] prodigious body odor which preceded him by the room’s length" Greenfield, R. (1996). Dark star: an oral history of Jerry Garcia. NY: Wm Morrow & Co. Of course, there was also famously an attempt (after his death) to use Jerry Garcia as a sort of spectral pitchman in VW adverts. He had never owned a VW bus, nor a Bug. Once the monies from Workingman's Dead began to flow in, he thereafter drove BMWs for the rest of his life. Mountain Girl still has his 1973 3.0CS. Some cliches about the Grateful Dead lifestyle are apparently just that - cliches. But not using deodorant and stinking to high heaven? That one seems to be quite accurate. This product placement sounds a bit misguided. The only ones to get it right were the ice cream salesmen - it seems he actually used their product, abundantly.
  15. I think at one point GM had more or less the same W body car coming off the lines with Chevrolet, Buick, Pontiac, Saturn badges on it? I think Gibbyphone was wise to cut the Epiphone product line in half. It was starting to look like one of those never-ending restaurant menus, the question being "What flavor of Les Paul would you like? We have dozens to choose from."
  16. I'm British and started playing in 1994 (relatively late, really - I was 16). But being British and picking up an electric guitar for the first time in the 1990s, of course I bought a Yamaha Pacifica 112 with the natural finish. Didn't everyone in that demographic? I've still got it. Currently moving house, and it's been locked away in its case for a couple of years, but I have a place planned on the wall of my new office/studio/ for it. Looks just like this one. Amusing to see ads from the UK now selling these things as "vintage." I guess if it's vintage, so am I, alas.
  17. Yeah, I like Sweetwater, too. In fact, the only online music companies I buy from are Sweetwater and AMS. I was just a bit amused to be let in on the secret that I could, if I moved fast enough, reserve a $20,000 guitar, when I think the most expensive thing I have ever bought from Sweetwater in the 15 years or so I've bought from them was a US Standard Strat in 2009. I know we're all used to junk mail, etc. But I'd have thought Sweetwater would have been a bit more invested in business analytics and targeting their sales pitches to specific customer profiles. As I said, it didn't bother me, I thought it was funny. I am very, very far from being the likely purchaser of a $20,000 guitar.
  18. He just sent a very special, personal email to me (and probably another 10,000 people, I'd guess), including his direct telephone extension, letting me in on the big secret that if I move fast I can reserve one of only 50 1979 EVH Bumblebees, which Sweetwater has managed to get its hands on. He's an optimistic chap, I think, this Sales Engineer - certainly if he glanced at my recent purchase history before sending me this private missive. I'm half-tempted to reply, asking if there's any truth in the rumor that Squier will be releasing a Toronado this year, and, if so, whether can he give me the skinny on when Sweetwater will be taking delivery.
  19. I've often wondered about that. I live in a part of Virginia where there is a large Mennonite population. As a lapsed Anglo-Catholic turned Atheist, I know next to nothing about Anabaptism, but many of the Mennonites of Virginia seem to drive, use cellphones, take credit cards when you buy stuff at the farmers' market, use tractors and agricultural machinery, and go to Walmart - a lot. The horse and buggy seems to be more a mode of transport for Church on Sundays, and a link to the past. When I've visited Lancaster, PA, the people there seem much "stricter." I understand that how people interact with the modern world isn't a pure ecumenical test, but I've always thought the Lancaster "Amish" are the real deal Amish, and the Mennonites in Virginia are slightly different. Anyway, I never go to Lancaster to stare at the Amish/Mennonites. I like the steam train at Strasburg, and the railroad museum. I also like to go to the Ephrata Cloister sometimes - "This was a community of people who never had sex." "What happened?" "They died out."
  20. I'm sorry to hear about how bad it was in Pennsylvania, Steve. Yours is a lovely state, which I always look forward to visiting. Speaking of the "it ends at farmlands" thing, it seems Lancaster County took a real beating. What happened, I wonder? Just the proximity to Philadelphia? Tourists early in the season, before things could be locked down? Hope things continue to get better for Pennsylvania.
  21. One mild observation: people of that era had a very different take on life and death to that which prevails today. This is not intended to imply that they didn't mourn individual deaths (the morbid late Victorian funereal fascination shows that they did), but in 1918 you are talking about a generation which, in America, was only 50 years removed from the Civil War (620,000 deaths), and in Europe and America, had just experienced WWI (117,000 American soldiers killed; an incredible estimated total death toll of 10 million military personnel and 10 million civilians for the conflict as a whole). An age before sulfa drugs, before penicillin, an age of high infant mortality, horrific childhood illnesses, and where getting your "three score years and ten" was generally regarded as an excellent and fortunate outcome to be celebrated. We now live in age where we fully expect to live into our 80s or 90s on a cocktail of prescription medications. I suspect to the people of 1918, the Spanish Flu was just another horrible wave of death, in an era where they were accustomed to the Grim Reaper spending a lot of time wielding his scythe. No doubt it was shocking, but much less shocking than it would be to our generation. And COVID-19, though undoubtedly nasty, cannot hold a candle to the Spanish Flu. The experiments from a few years ago, involving macaque monkeys and the reconstructed virus, shocked the 21st researchers with just how brutally awful that virus was.
  22. The difficulty here is very simple, and we all know what it is. This ain't Europe. No-one is going to give you 80% of your take home pay to sit on your behind and watch TV. The Republicans in the Senate, principally led by Lindsey Graham, made it very clear today: $1200 is all you're getting, Joe Schmoe. That's it. We're done here. So people have to go back to work. There is literally no other choice. 80,000 corpses provide a sobering disincentive to be in close proximity to other people, so we can tell ourselves that there would be 80,000 corpses whether or not we had closed down the country, or even, perhaps, there are 80,000 corpses because we closed down the country. It doesn't really matter. There will probably be 100,000 corpses by July. (shrug, watchoo gonna do? - just compare it to a year of cigarette smokers' deaths or an Opioid crisis, then it feels innocuous, even though those are deaths caused by behaviors, not a highly infectious disease). The news makes it clear that Americans want to spend money in the service economy, and workers in that economy are likely going to suffer horribly one way or the other: maybe get COVID-19, or definitely end up bankrupt and homeless. It's not really a hard choice, in those terms, is it? Possibly suffer, or definitely suffer? The same is true for workers in other industries. 500,000 to 850,000 Spanish flu deaths in the US a century ago, and mostly forgotten within a few years. People died of flu. **** happens. It's only been resurrected lately in the public consciousness because it's the closest thing in recent American history to COVID-19. The Great Depression? Spoken of in hushed and terrible terms for 80+ something years. Economic Disasters > Public Health Disasters (in America). This is not an ideal situation. But it seems that's where we are.
  23. 45 seconds of my life devoted to scan-reading a (poorly) hand-coded HTML page from the '90s about an '80s hair metal band on the club circuit. Not my cup of tea, but fair play to those involved for turning a buck out of performing music. I had no idea Duane was once a "pro," but then as I hadn't otherwise thought about him since 2010, it scarcely matters.
  24. wtf is that? Is that Duane in his glory days trying out for Poison or something? What happened to Duane?
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