Thursday, January 31, 2008

Obscure Music Search: So much for being able to find anything on the Web

My wife, Kris, is Latvian. Actually, she was born in the U.S. but her parents came over from Latvia after WWII, and they all speak Latvian, have close relatives living in Latvia, and are still culturally connected to Latvia and the Latvian community here.

She has several tapes of Latvian pop music---artifacts of a commercial venture some relative was involved in back in the 90s some time. Music is a big part of Latvian culture and for a relatively small country they produce a lot of it. One day, out of curiosity, I put some of them on while puttering around the house. For the most part, they were pleasant enough pop songs; they were largely vocally driven and I don't know much Latvian myself (to the disappointment of my in-laws) so I didn't get the full effect. And, many of the songs were recorded with what sounded like the rhythm settings from an electronic organ for backing---not the sort of arrangements I usually get excited about.

But there was one song that really leapt off the tape: it was a bouncy little number called "Meksika" ("Mexico") by a band called Lauku Musikanti (the Country Musicians). They were a real, full band, with a full complement of instruments, including a very jaunty and engaging accordion. This became one of my favorite songs. Whenever I played it it made me happy.

Well, on Monday, attempting to share it with the rest of the band, I was devastated when my cheap tape deck ate the tape containing my only copy! So, I set out to find another copy.

One would think that after so many years of the sprawling Internet it would be fairly simple to find information on a band that had released multiple albums in a vibrant music culture and technologically savvy place like Latvia, but that was not the case. With Kris translating, we dug around various Latvian web sites, including Lauku Musikanti's page on what appears to be the Latvian version of MySpace Music. Their biography there informed us that they had formed in 1987 and that "Meksika" had been on their first album, which must have been out by 1993 since that was the date on the tape Kris had. But they only had detailed information about their most recent albums. A search for the older album was unsuccessful. We did find a current picture of them:

Unlike MySpace, to join the Latvian site you must be invited, so we couldn't sign up and send them a message through that site. Kris is going to see if someone she knows in Latvia can help us find a copy of their first album. If all else fails, one or more of her younger cousins seem to always be going over there to visit people or on youth tours, so maybe one of them can find it for me.

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Theater

Well, this week was shaping up to be a pretty ordinary week until Wednedsay, when some friends called and offered the wife and me some tickets to Jersey Boys, the musical about the Four Seasons. Chicago has a very high per-capita concentration of theater, and we've been to lots of shows, but I had never been to one of the big "Broadway in Chicago" shows downtown, so I was intrigued. I would not have spent the big bucks to see one just out of curiosity, but our friend's boss' wife's untimely illness presented the opportunity. (Not to devalue the big productions---it's just that there are so many little storefront theater groups doing great work for relatively low ticket prices, that you can see a lot of good theater in Chicago without having to deal with the prices and parking hassles of theater down in the tourist zone.)

The show itself was fun. The story of the band was (it turned out, when I later looked them up on Wikipedia) streamlined and idealized almost to the point of fiction, but it was engaging, and the music was good. Everybody knows the Four Seasons big hits, if you hear them, but I hadn't really had a sense of just how many great pop songs they had cranked out over the years. After "Sherry Baby" and "Walk Like a Man", I was thinking, Okay, now what? But over the rest of the show, as they went through the rest of the Four Seasons hits (and Frankie Valli solo stuff---the line between the two is blurry) I kept thinking, Oh yeah! I remember that one!

The Four Seasons rose to prominence and for a while ruled the charts in the post-Elvis / pre-Beatles interlude, and a huge part of the audience was people who had been young then reliving their youth---at intermission I heard several conversations around us of people reminiscing about the good old days. I suppose that is the point of the show, and I wonder whether the same sort of thing took place with people a few years younger at productions of Movin' Out or Mamma Mia! (If I was smart I'd start now putting together a feel-good nostalgia play based around the songs of one of the great 80s pop bands, for my generation. The Cars, maybe?) But even without the nostalgia factor working in my case, it was still an enjoyable show, and one of our friends left determined to get a Four Seasons greatest hits album, which was probably the other point of the show.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

New Guitar Day!

Actually, New Guitar Day was Thursday, but that's my big news for this week. Check it out:

That's a Rickenbacker 330/6 FG. It was made in 1995 but it's in remarkably good shape. And it plays and sounds as good as it looks!

This past year has been an interesting and educational year for me re music gear, and my experiences revealed something about myself to me.

There's a part of my personality that is a compulsive collector, that wants to have one of everything. I've been playing guitar for years but for most of that time I couldn't afford to actually buy most of the guitars I was interested in. In recent years I've been in somewhat better shape so coinciding with a renewed/increased interest in music, I started buying more instruments. I've always been the kind of person who'd rather have three okay guitars than one really nice one---one never knows when one will need the distinctive tone of Instrument X.

But at the same time, as I got more guitars, I realized that I didn't really get that much satisfaction from just having them, and no matter how many I had, I tended to gravitate towards the same two or three most of the time. I don't like having guitars I don't play. But at the same time, I really like the guitars I have. They're (almost) all really good instruments. Every time I think I should unload some, I play them and remember why I liked them in the first place.

In any event, I'm not really actively shopping for more guitars right now. There are two variants that I'd like to have that I don't currently possess (to wit, a hollowbody electric and something with P-90 pickups) but those are low-priority goals.

But...

I've really become a big fan of Rickenbackers lately. If Gibson and Fender are the Coke and Pepsi of the guitar world, Rickenbacker is the RC Cola. They've always been around and everybody's heard of them, but they're a little bit different from the big two and you just don't see them that often.

Their place in history was assured by the Beatles: all three guitar-playing Beatles played Rickenbackers at some point. Most early Beatles clips show John Lennon with his model 325; George Harrison famously got one of the very first Rickenbacker electric 12-string guitars, which he used prominently on songs like "A Hard Day's Night", and Paul McCartney can be seen playing his model 4001 bass in the "I Am the Walrus" clip from Magical Mystery Tour.

Actually Rickenbacker basses are very popular and have been used by legions of famous bass players, but the guitars have remained further out on the fringes. Electric 12-strings are an odd little segment of the guitar universe, but within that segment Rickenbackers are dominant. Besides George Harrison, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds used one to create that distinctive Byrds jangle, and Tom Petty is also commonly associated with Ricks. Other Rick players include Paul Kantner back in the Jefferson Airplane days, and more recently, Johnny Marr from the Smiths, Peter Buck from R.E.M., the Smithereens, and one of the guys from Radiohead.

Since it was a variant I didn't have and had a distinctive tone, I had long wanted to add a Rick to my collection/arsenal. And, I like and respect Rickenbacker as a company. Fender and Gibson have each been sold during their existence---a couple times, I think---and as a result there have been ups and downs in quality over the years: certain periods are considered less desirable by collectors; both companies went through "dark ages" in the 70s. But Rickenbacker is and has been a family-owned company for several generations, and despite opportunities to get bigger or capitalize on their name by bringing out a cheap line of imported mass-produced instruments, they have remained relatively small and still build all their guitars by hand in California. They've never gone through a "bad" period. They've undoubtedly passed by a fair amount of quick money by taking the position they have, but they are preserving the long-term stability and good name of the company, and I respect them for doing that.

Anyhow, over the summer, I found a good deal on this one:

That's a 360/6 JG. Getting it delivered was a bit of a nightmare, but that's a story for another day. I quickly fell in love with it and it became one of my go-to guitars. Although Ricks are mostly known for their jingle-jangle rhythm guitar sound, they are capable of much more. I used it exclusively for the last Xylenes show.

(There's a Strat in that picture too but it was just a back-up; I never plugged it in.) If you check the set list in the blog on our MySpace page, you'll see what a diverse set we played. The Rick worked great for everything.

Ricks sound different from other guitars so if you have an amp set to get a good sound with a Rick, it won't sound good with, say, a Strat or a Gibson, and vice versa. So of course in the back of my mind was the thought, I really should get another Rick for a backup, if I'm going to be playing this 360 regularly for shows.

And then lo and behold, this 330 popped up on craigslist, at a good price. I felt the hand of fate tapping me on the shoulder. I love the classic Fireglo finish, and the slightly more angular body style. And although technically it's very similar to my 360, it definitely has a different character when plugged in and played. I'm really digging it. But I think I'm definitely going to have to sell something now. Probably my Ibanez electric 12-string. Of course, then I'd need another electric 12-string...

If you're interested in Rickenbackers, the Rickenbacker corporation web site is really pretty good. For even more information, the RickResource fan site is the place to go.

Please excuse me; I'm going to go play my guitar.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Vanity

...or, "No Matter What You Put On Top, Underneath is Still a Pudgy Middle-Aged Man"

So, this week I had cause to confront again an issue that contributed to one of the things that may have defined (in part) 2007 for me. Among other things, 2007 was The Year Chuck Had Long Hair.

There was a time when I really, really wanted to have cool rock and roll hair. While I was in college, and having discovered "college" music, I wanted to look radical, with hair like Robert Smith from the Cure, but I was hampered by two things: one, my existing hair was not long enough to do anything too radical with, and two, I was living in Springfield and/or Quincy, Illinois, which were not particularly progressive when it came to hairstyles. And, the wide varieties of chemicals you can find today in any department store were not widely available. I remember going into the hair salon in the local Venture with a magazine picture of Sigue Sigue Sputnik as an example of what I was looking for, and realizing that hair of that nature was far outside the parameters of the poor woman working there. I had imagined that hair stylists were frustrated artists, who would be grateful for the opportunity to create something noteworthy, but in Springfield in 1985, that was not the case.

So, I stuck with my relatively conservative hair style for many years, but in August of 2006 I had an experience that brought the issue back to my conscious consideration. I'm in this band, the Xylenes. It was formed earlier in 2006 with some friends from work who had not played before, but notwithstanding that, our bass player's husband asked/allowed us to play at his birthday party, which was held at a local bowling alley. The spectacle was captured in photographs, some of which are reproduced here. Now, the show went pretty well, but I was a little bit mortified later when I saw these pictures. Aside from the fashion lapse of the Beer Nuts t-shirt and expansive shorts, I was really disillusioned with how I looked in these pictures.



See, being a rock musician has for many years been a part of my identity, of how I think of myself. But looking at these pictures, I thought, this guy doesn't look very rock. It had been a few years since I'd been in a band, and I'll admit it, I ballooned a little bit during that time. That, coupled with my clean-shaven, short-haired look added up to something that just was not cool. Looking at these pictures, I vowed to do something to improve my image. I adopted a motto: "Better to be a lawyer who looks like a musician, than a musician who looks like a lawyer."

Now, for someone with my lifestyle and lack of willpower, the most obvious route---start working out and eat less junk food---was not realistic; I've tried that on multiple occasions with the best of intentions but so far it hasn't stuck. (Although, I live in hope.) But one thing I could do was grow out my hair. So for over a year I didn't get it cut (barring a single "shaping" incident in the spring.) And I grew a beard.

And I suppose it worked, to an extent. I don't know; judge for yourself. I look less like an accountant in these pictures than I did before, certainly. (Not that there's anything wrong with accountants, but . . . you know what I mean.) But in these I'm freshly groomed, and I fear that the more usual effect was more like the picture below. In other words, most of the time---when I saw myself in mirrors or windows---I just looked like a scruffy bum. And when the cats walked across my pillow in their nightly perambulations, they would step on my hair and it would pull painfully.



My personal preference would be for the ultra-low maintenance haircut, i.e., the clipper buzz. For a while in the 90s I went with that look:



. . . but my wife has issued one of her rare ultimatums on the subject, so for now this one is out.

After months of trying to come to terms with the long hair, always hoping that it would eventually grow out to the point where it would suddenly look good and be easy to deal with, I must admit I gave up and got it cut. I told the barber I wanted it cut short but I don't think he believed me; he advocated a mid-length style, but that didn't really look much better (IMO). Finally I got it cut again and it's now medium-short (but still long enough to preserve domestic tranquility).

So anyway, this week we had band practice and one of the band members took some pictures to put on our MySpace page, including the one below. By unhappy coincidence, I was wearing the same Beer Nuts t-shirt as at the bowling alley show. It makes for a sad juxtaposition. I guess I'm going to have to come to terms with my general pudgy, middle-aged, short-haired un-cool-ness.

Saturday, January 5, 2008

So, what is "Asi achih!" anyway? A bit about Jack Vance

My favorite writer is Jack Vance. Tragically, throughout his extensive career he has flown beneath the literary radar due to having worked in genres that get no respect---science fiction, fantasy, mystery. However, I believe that he is one of the great literary stylists of the English language, bar none, no qualifications. The only other writers I can think of that I'd put in the same category are Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. I'm not saying he's the "best writer", although he'd be on my personal short list in that category too. He goes in the elite company in which I place him because those three authors have this in common: each has the ability to make my smile and occasionally chuckle out loud with delight at the cleverness of the way they say things. In just about any Vance work once he hit his stride (i.e., just about any of his numerous books or stories from the mid-60s on) one can pick a page at random and be assured of finding some clever turn of phrase or exceptionally witty dialogue. And in his use of language Vance is unparalleled. I've got a huge vocabulary, but Vance regularly surprised me. Many words that I thought were made up have turned out to be real (albeit obscure) words, used with great precision.

One of the great experiences of my life was being involved in production of the Vance Integral Edition. The VIE was an unprecedented project, made possible by the rise of the internet: a group of Vance fans from around the world pooled their efforts to produce a definitive edition of Vance's complete works. Because much of Vance's work was published in pulp magazines or cheap mass-market paperbacks, the editorial hand was often heavy and intrusive---much of his work was modified (in some cases, mangled) between his pen and publication. So one of the things the VIE volunteers did was to go back (to the extent possible) to the original sources and return the texts as much as possible to what Jack intended. In some cases the original manuscripts were preserved; in other cases the task involved comparing various different published versions and trying to discern which was closest to the original. And against all odds we did it: the VIE published a 44-volume set of Vance's complete work.

Through my work for the VIE I had the chance to actually work with some of the original manuscripts, which are collected in the Mugar Library at Boston University. That was a thrill, although Jack's writing is nearly unreadable. He wrote his initial drafts in longhand on whatever paper was convenient---including letters from his publishers or his son's math homework---but a lot of them were written on the back of typewritten drafts of earlier work. Reviewing some of the manuscripts at the Mugar, I discovered on the backs of some, partial manuscripts of books that everyone had thought were lost. Based on those discoveries, the VIE added an additional supplemental volume including the "lost" texts. That was extremely gratifying. (The whole story of Volume 14bis has more to it than that; perhaps I'll elaborate one day.)

Anyway, my work on the VIE gave me a heightened familiarity with Vance's work. When I was thinking about a title/theme for this blog, a certain passage came to mind. I've quoted a little bit of it above, but here's the full passage:

From Peoples of the Coranne, by Richard Pelto:

The Darsh espouse each other only through calculation. The women judge the weight of the man’s duodecimates; the men taste the woman’s cooking and test the comfort of her dumble: so are Darsh marriages made. The two probably will not engage in sexual congress; both will surely go out on the moonlit desert to pursue their amatory affairs.

The marital relationship is formal and cool. Each party knows what is expected of him or her and, even more keenly, what he or she expects. If thwarted, the woman retaliates with rancid ahagaree or scorched pourrian; the man in his turn will throw less duodecimate upon the table, and spend his time at the beer-gardens.

In the morning, an hour before Cora-rise, the woman awakes the man who sullenly dons his day-clothes and goes to look at the sky. He utters a phrase of rather hollow optimism, in loose translation: “It will be good!” and sets off to his sift. The woman looks after him with a dark phrase of her own: “Go to it, fool!”

Late in the day the man returns. As he steps under the shade he takes a final glance around the sky and says, again in rather hollow tones: “Asi achih!” which means, “And so it went!” The woman, watching from the shadow of her dumble, merely chuckles quietly to herself.

Much of that may be obscure, taken out of context, but the general thrust is apparent. Ah, the Darsh of Dar Sai, one of Vance's most piquant creations! A culture remarkable for their sour disposition and horrific food. Actually in Darsh use "asi achih" has a fatalistic sense to it, as Vance explains further into that chapter in a footnote:

A Darsh expletive of fatalistic acceptance: “So be it!” or “That’s the way it goes!” The Darsh do not gracefully or philosophically accept misfortune; they are good grumblers. ‘Asi achih’ indicates the final recognition of defeat, or, as in this case, the inexorable force of destiny.
I do not intend my blog to constitute "final recognition of defeat", but I liked the image of the man returning at the end of the day, declaring, "And so it went!" to the bemusement of his mate. Fortunately my wife only occasionally manifests the characteristic Darsh malevolence.

The foregoing quotes are from Vance's book The Face, one of five books in his "Demon Princes" series, which trace the quest of a man for revenge on the five criminals who destroyed his family. Certain things make more sense if you read all five stories in order (starting with The Star King) but any can be read independently. You could do worse than The Face or any of the other Demon Princes books as an introduction to Vance, but I avidly recommend the following:

Maske: Thaery
Lyonesse (
aka Suldrun's Garden)
Araminta Station
Night Lamp

Lyonesse and Araminta Station are the first volumes of trilogies, but if you are susceptible to Vance you will, upon getting into them, give thanks that there are more volumes to come in each story! Maske and Night Lamp are stand-alone novels.

If you are interested, a lot of VIE information is archived here.


Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Morning: Happy New Year

Last year for Christmas my wife and I got snowshoes. Unfortunately, for the rest of that winter, we never had snow on the ground on a free weekend, so we never got to use them.

Last night it snowed several inches. Eschewing New Year's Eve revelry, we turned in relatively early, so we were up fairly early this morning. With the rest of the city asleep or hung over, the blanket of snow was relatively undisturbed; we dug our snowshoes out of the basement and went for a hike around the neighborhood. We snowshoed over to the Forest Preserve a few blocks away, and navigated some of the trails through the woods. I'd never been in there in the winter before. It was beautiful.

It may sound quaint or sappy, but walking through the snowy woods I felt a sense of renewal and invigoration---like for the first time in many years this new year actually meant something. I felt a sense of optimism like I haven't felt in quite a while.

A couple months ago a friend urged me to blog. For the new year, I'm going to take a stab at it. This will document what happens in this coming year. Here's hoping it will be a good one.