The resurrection of the old Dodge Dart that brought so many of your basses to be shipped for a time (and hauled the SD Curlee stash home in two trips) into a bare-bones race car continues! You’ll recognize it by the God Bless Johnny Cash bumper sticker. It’s Duddie’s, from Duddie’s Adventures on YouTube. I was the ump-teenth owner and it was THE most simple machine imaginable – four doors, slant six, with a one barrel carburetor and a manual choke, no power steering or brakes. I bought it out of Austin as a running parts car for a ’67 Valiant I wanted to resurrect, but started driving it and it became my daily driver, rough as it was. Nothing a seat cover and 20 cans of flat black couldn’t fix. Now, years later and much faded, it gets brought back to life to go out racing. As you read this, it’s up at the No Name Nationals in Missouri with a stroked 360 Magnum, manual valve body full race 727, slicks, and 4.11 gears. It’s there to look good and kick ass, and it’s alllll out of lookgood…
https://www.facebook.com/100001052311540/videos/pcb.5839475156097504/1143401256590311
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5eJasXkZck
Here's a new band I totally dig - 3rd Secret. A foundation of Seattle-scene royalty draped in psychedelic velvet. One of the fascinating parts of being hip to generations of music is to see, when certain members of older bands resurface, what of the old band’s sound was them. I don’t necessarily mean tone – of course a player will “sound” like themselves. Whatever their instrument, that’s their voice. What they “sing” may change, but their tone and touch will be them. I’m talking compositionally identifiable in the song – like, if we look at work John Paul Jones did post-Led Zeppelin. Holy shit! You think it was mostly Jimmy Page, and much of the layers were… but the composition? The movement of those chords and time signatures? There was a lot more going on that had JPJ’s fingerprints on it. In 3rd Secret’s case, There’s a solid slab of Soundgarden in the song construction, and that’s a welcome something I haven’t had a fresh taste of in years. I remember coming home after a shift delivering pizzas in early ‘94 when “Superunknown” came out. I poured a drink, sprawled on the couch, closed my eyes and listened to the whole thing. Blew my mind. To me, it’s the attention music deserves. THEN it can find its place as to what it can be background to doing… but I like to do IT first. I’ll see if their album is out on any physical media and, if so, give it the same. Sorry, McDigital world; not streaming it out of my computer speakers. I need to hear it with real paper cones moving more air than the football defensive line at a baked bean dinner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6y2sWstXu4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KR2S8wzz5A
A Facebook friend posted asking everyone for their favorite one-hit wonders. Well, it's complicated. One hit wonder SONG? My Sharona, The Knack. One of the reasons I started playing guitar. One hit wonder BAND? In the late '60s, The Electric Prunes had their one quasi ersatz kinda-sorta hit, "I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night." Meh. But the band's later "Mass in F Minor" album was a psychedelic Catholic church mass sung in Latin over pounding drums and guitar feedback. A brilliant idea, right? ((cough))Sure. Half of the band was replaced by studio musicians who could read the charts, including... the guitar player later in Chilliwack ("My Girl"). There you have it - a triple-shot one-hit-wonder answer! And here’s a factoid - Sharona exists and is a realtor in California. “Doug Fieger wrote a song about me that changed both of our lives forever. My Sharona became an iconic smash-hit, and even though Doug and I didn't end up together we remained close friends all these years.” She was at his bedside in his final days. And this weirdo Electric Prunes album is one of the greatest psych albums ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbr60I0u2Ng
https://www.mysharona.com/about/about-sharona/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMHNyNg6Ybw
Shop stuff? Moving right along. In assembly, two Fusion basses and a Cortobass all have pickups and hardware, control sets I pre-wired, one of them has now been drilled for control holes, and they’ve been mounted and wired in. Other two to follow… one’s on the bench right now, in fact! In the green shop? The Mantra guitar got worked and is now in sanding! Watch for posts on this one, it’s an inventory build. Cool finish to come, and next update (gimme a couple of weeks) will be way more guitar-shop-centric than this random catch-up is.
But we’re on a roll, why stop now? Maybe a couple of times a year I’ll have a soda – definitely not part of my daily diet. Much more often than that, I have a pizza. But at least every few days, something happens with some kind of hot sauce, even just a drop on something. Well, last weekend co-pilot Maggie Mae the Heeler and I went on a mission to get pizza. While there, I noticed they had two brands of root beer in cans. So I bought one of each, and back home I decided to see which hot sauces I liked best on plain cheese, my pizza of choice, AND do an A-B comparison of A&W and Barq’s root beers. Root bi? Ri bi? Alrighty then. I mean that had never occurred to me before and it’s not something I’m probably ever going to do again. I figured, once in a lifetime this should happen. What does this have to do with guitars? Nothing. Absolute dick. Or, as me British friends would so eloquently put it, “Fuck-all.” But you’re read this far, see – you might as well get something out of it. And here it is!
Among the root beers, A&W had the more wine colored brownish-red tint in the glass, versus the reddish-brown of the Barq’s; to my nose, not exactly the well-tuned tool of a connoisseur of such things, they smelled the same. Which is to say just lovely. Barq’s had subtly spicier notes to the flavor, whereas the A&W a wee little more vanilla cream, though I’m not sure any more of those ingredients are present or if it’s the touch less seasoning allowing that little bit more of what’s there to come through. Both very enjoyable! As for the hot sauces, of the dozen in the fridge my three favorites on this pie on this day:
Number 3, The Pepper Plant Original California Style. A very unique sauce.
#2? Eddie Ojeda’s Twisted Hot Sauce Cherry Habanero. One of the best sauces I’ve ever tasted, honestly. And that’s not rock-star nut-swing because I played Twisted Sister songs in bands in my formative young years; nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, but this sauce is all that it is. Whatever the hell that means. I just poured some on my finger and licked it off. There’s your stuck-in-the-head image for the day. Bonus.
And, numero uno in this test – 13th Door #7 Pineapple “Jalapino” Green Mamba Sauce! Jalapeno and pineapple flavor, a wonderful sweet heat my mouth couldn’t get enough of as conveyed by mankind’s greatest food achievement. I think my tongue was slapping my face silly, and it looks as though it might have stayed that way.
Perhaps a good bowl of potato & lentil soup, flavored with smoked chipotle peppers, will be the fix. You all have a great weekend, eat well, find the merry where you can, and give it all a good soundtrack. Next batch of builds is getting started here, I need to jaunt over to the mill in the hills to see about some wood, and I’ll hopefully have a good update for you right here in a couple of weeks. ‘Til then, much love.
Listening to: Cowboy Roy Brown, Street Singer; John Coltrane, Black Pearls; Warren Zevon, The Wind; Can You Dig It? The '70s Soul Experience (compilation, disc 1).