What is Going On Here?

First Lemmy, then David Bowie, then yesterday it was Jake Lloyd (age 26, possibly the biggest raw deal in Hollywood history), and now Alan Rickman? Snape? Hans Gruber? The voice of God in Kevin Smith’s Dogma? What the hell is going on here?

Was that Purple?

I am watching the Bruins game. They are in Philadelphia tonight. Just before the second period ended there was a whistle to stop play. I’ll be damned if the arena didn’t play a snippet of Deep Purple’s Stormbringer. The song my band in high school stole it’s name from! We even played it in our Purple mini-set. Nice job, Philly!

Note on this recording… David Coverdale isn’t the worst frontman ever. That title goes to another former Purple singer, Joe Lynn Turner. He’s a pretty close second though. I don’t know if things improved during his Whitesnake hair band years, but he’s just awful with Deep Purple. However, I found a couple of video clips of the band playing this song and I have to say that as bad as Coverdale was, Glen Hughes was worse. He’s outstanding in a studio setting, but on stage? As painful as he is to listen too (SKREEEEEECH), he’s even more painful to watch. Like… Just stop doing whatever it is you’re doing. Stop!

Burn is a fantastic album. Stormbringer is pretty crappy, but the title song effin’ rules. Come Taste the Band is weird because it lacks a Blackmore, but it’s cool because it gained a Tommy Bolin. Not a great record, but not bad either (Tommy Bolin’s solo album Teaser was released at the same time and it BLOWS PURPLE AWAY). After that, Coverdale and Hughes effectively vanished from my musical world. I’m okay with that.

Winner… Again

You can all stop worrying about the billion dollar powerball. I stopped at Ted’s Stateline Mobil this morning and bought the winning ticket. So you don’t have to waste time going out to get your own tickets now. It’s all set. I’ve taken care of things.

Pedal Board

So… Not all 9-volt jacks are the same? What the ever loving f***?

So I guess we will still have a few batteries for now. Also, I’m gonna need a few new small cables too.

Snow, Sort Of

My wife called me at work today. She said that she heard a traffic report saying that pieces of the route 495 overpass at route 93 was falling off onto the highway below. Ouch! I checked boston.com to see if they were reporting it. Nothing. I checked twitter. Again, nothing. I wonder if WBZ radio made it up? I used Waze to find the best route home, figuring it would tell me to avoid both 495 and 93. Nope, only 93. It kept me on 495 for longer than usual.

Of course, crumbling infrastructure was not the only reason for my slow drive tonight. Snow. Or should I say, the threat of snow. But not a lot of snow. Right now it’s just somewhere between a flurry and a dusting. The forecast for later tonight calls for an inch or less. That means we’ll either get nothing and still have panicked gridlock traffic tomorrow morning, or we’ll get a few inches and then have panicked gridlock traffic tomorrow morning.

Is it Spring yet?

PS: Note to self. Buy Powerball tickets.

What’s in the Bag?

Hey Robbie, what’s in that big bag?

I’ll tell you in a second…

Last night’s band practice wasn’t very good, but it was okay. We hadn’t played together in about a month and it showed. I half expected that I would have forgotten how to play every song. That wasn’t the case, but it didn’t mean I didn’t screw up left and right and get lost now and then.

I had a disconcerting technical issue. I think I know what it was though. After 2-3 songs my volume level dropped to almost nothing. It was weird. One minute I was roaring like a tornado of Big Muff Fuzz, and the next I was a whisper. I thought it was my uni-vibe pedal as a light that usually doesn’t light was lit from the minute I plugged in. I figured the battery was dead. I bypassed it on the board but it didn’t solve the problem. Screw this, thinks I. I pulled my tuner off the board and bypassed everything else. The signal path was guitar->wah->fuzz->tuner->amp. The problem persisted. So I bypassed everything and plugged straight into the amp. It worked. So I have it narrowed down to those three pedals. I am acting under the assumption that the amazing Big Muff pedal has a dead battery.

So what’s in the bag then? Speak of the devil, it’s my pedal board and all of my pedals from Mike the bass player’s house. Now I can add all the new pedals to the board, replace all of the 9-volt batteries with the new DC Brick power supply, and rearrange the whole thing to get the most noisy fuzz boxy mess imaginable! I’ll let you know when it’s up and running again. There will be an I-am-so-cool-check-out-my-pedal-board picture, I’m sure of it.