RIP Melvin Sparks

Honestly, I hadn't heard of him until I saw notice of his passing, and upon hitting play on this Youtube vid, I felt immediately sorry for his passing but joyful at discovering his playing.

The Thing That Should Not Vee

This is why I love Premier Guitar! As is clear, it is a guitar with Telecaster stylings on a guitar with a Flying V body style. It's called the Tee Vee and it's from RS Guitar Works. This one draws from the original blackguard look of 1950s Teles, while the one Premier Guitar reviewed is more drawn from a 1960s Custom Tele, sunburst with a rosewood fretboard.

On TDPRI, the great guitar sparkler Buckocaster once put holographic sparkle on a Tele-V body, but I don't think I ever saw the completed guitar, so this is not quite as original as it seems, but it's a great and wonderful thing.

I Want Red!

St. Louis and Sammy Hagar go together like Philly and cheesesteak, and since I lived there, I've had a soft spot for the Red Rocker. This footage was played on MTV in the time before Thriller, and IIRC it was filmed in St. Louis at the arena where the St. Louis Blues played hockey. I point in the part starting at about 5:30 where Sammy plays lap steel. Of course, he's getting that accelerating car sound, who would expect anything else from him? He's on top of a red Pontiac Firebird when he's playing it! The coolest part is the way he throws it. I think that might be the only lap steel ever hooked up to a wireless system.

Cool Stuff with Slide

Leatherman: Don't Leave Home Without It

I play at church, two services every other Sunday. This Sunday, as I'm getting ready to play second service, my strap falls off the neck-side strap lock. This suddenly drops the neck and puts all the weight on the tail strap button, and the screw hole was all but stripped, and with this sudden weight, just came out.

It was easy to get the neck button back to normal, although this does argue that the Grolsch/Dalco solution is preferable to Schaller straplocks, but I won't go there too far, because the urgent issue is the second button. Here, I pull out the trustly Leatherman and screw a new hole in the already-tortured end of my Tele. I tell the worship leader, "Hold on until I finish", but I was not a reason for delay.

I did notice before too long that my high E was halfway to F, but I could lay out and tune up with the tuner pedal during the first verse and come in strong on the chorus, so I count it as a win.

A Leatherman (or other multitool) is great for these kind of last-minute things. Don't leave home without one.

Roger and "Clarence" Together Again

I think, if you want to quickly grab all the trends in Rock through the 1960s, you can pick up everything you need by getting all the Byrds and all the Yardbirds. Every trend is represented. While the known songs from the Byrds are the early Byrds, my favorite era is Sweetheart of the Rodeo and after, the less vocal-harmony-oriented and more jam-bandish version, mostly with the masterful guitar work of Clarence White and his B-Bender. Marty Stuart has had Clarence White's B-Bender Tele as his #1 Tele for years now.

Here we have Marty and his band, the Fabulous Superlatives (which has to be the best band name ever!) backing Roger at the Grand Old Opry, doing a very true-to-the-Byrds take on Dylan's "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere".

Which One Is Pink?

How many of you remember Twisted Sister? "I Wanna Rock"? Metal meets Animal House meets Warner Brothers cartoons? If you remember them, you remember lead man Dee Snider, especially him testifying to congress besides Frank Zappa and John Denver against record labeling. You might remember Eddie Ojeda's pre-Wylde bullseye superstrat. And, if you really liked them, you'll remember Jay Jay French, who played a pink-to-red sunburst Les Paul.

The February issue of Premier Guitar has an interview with French. His daughter, it turns out, has uvelitis, which is the leading cause of blindness for American girls. The funding and awareness for this condition isn't near the levels of other illnesses, so French convinced guitar and amplifier makers like Fender, Gibson, PRS, Martin, Gretsch, Marshall, Vox, Mesa/Boogie and others to make 25 pinkburst guitars and amps to be auctioned off as a fundraiser for MERSI, the specialists in the field.  It's called the Pinkburst Project, and images of the instruments, along with more information of the disease and the auction.