My Maserati

Well, today was a bittersweet day: I sold my Maserati, and the new owners came and took it away. For the past four years, for better or worse, I was a Maserati owner; now I am not.

When I was in high school, I went through a period of car mania, coinciding with my obtaining a driver's license. But, being utterly without resources, my interest in cool cars remained theoretical. For the next almost-twenty years, through years of college, law school, and living in apartments with only street parking, I was by necessity (and poverty) restricted to purely utilitarian cars that could sit out on the street throughout a Midwestern winter and would not be targets for thieves or vandals. My interest in cars remained dormant.

After I got married, however, we had a covered garage space, and I finally paid off my student loans and credit cards, and for the first time in my adult life I started to think that hey, maybe I could have a cool, fun car after all. We had a very high-utility SUV for day-to-day use, so when my old ex-mom Mercury Grand Marquis began to be more trouble that it was worth to fix, I looked around for something less practical and more interesting to replace it. I wanted to try a sports car, and I wanted to try a convertible, and so I looked for a vehicle that was both.

During my initial adolescent car phase, I had developed an interest in European sports cars---for some reason, I never really was that into muscle cars or pony cars, although I appreciate them and don't have anything against them. But something about the swoopier, higher-tech cars from across the pond appealed to me. Doing research I discovered several cars that fit my profile, and were within a price range I could reasonably contemplate, including some MGs, Triumphs, Fiats, perhaps some ratty smaller Porsches, and the Alfa Romeo Spider. Seeking out reviews, I noticed that on one site, while most of the reviews of various models were ambivalent, the Alfa owners uniformly expressed enthusiasm for driving their cars. I thought the Spider was pretty cool, and recalled the hallowed name, Pininfarina, from my earlier car phase, so I focused my hunt for one of those.

And I found a fairly nice one at a good price, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, my old stomping ground. An exchange of e-mails and photos, and a deal was struck. I went up on the train and drove it home. It was fun, it was zippy, it was red, it was Italian:


I was having a great time with my Alfa, reveling in sports car ownership, but fool that I was, I didn't know when to leave well enough alone. I became infatuated with all Italian cars; I joined the Ferrari Owners Club to hang out with the Tifosi. And I researched the history of Maserati, a name that everyone knows but nobody seems to know what they actually look like.

Maserati was formed by the five Maserati brothers in the twenties and built race cars through the thirties, with some success, but not enough success to keep the firm solvent: they went broke (for the first of many times) and the brothers were bought out in the late 30s by the Orsi family. They had a contract to stay on for ten years, but WWII ate up most of that, and in IIRC 1947 they left the company bearing their name, and went on to some further success building small-bore sports cars under the OSCA brand.

Meanwhile, the Orsi still built racing cars but over time started to branch out into street cars---first street versions of their racers, but by the late 50s they were building a series of high-speed touring cars. They were fast, luxurious, and exclusive.

Maserati 5000GT

It is worth noting that while many people lump Maserati in with Ferrari conceptually, in fact they are an apples-to-oranges comparison. Ferrari made sports cars: brutal little cars that were little removed from road racers, and even later when the connection was not as clear, the classic Ferrari models were still sports cars, designed to carve up the corners as quickly and efficiently as possible, and with minimal concessions to civilized niceties. Maserati road cars, on the other hand, were intended to go long distances, fast, in luxury. "Grand Touring" in the truest sense. So while Ferraris and Maseratis may have had some superficial design similarities, they had very different mission statements.

Despite a string of beautiful and powerful classic GT machines, including the 5000GT, the Mistral, and the Ghibli, the Orsis eventually sold Maserati to (gasp) the French: in the late 60s, French car maker Citroen bought the company. This resulted in some interesting technical facets to Maserati cars of the seventies, such as an elaborate hydraulic system that powered everything from the brakes to the retractable headlights and earned the ire of mechanics for its sheer weirdness, although cars like the Bora and Merak continued Maserati's string of jaw-dropping design triumphs.

Maserati Ghibli

But Citroen, too, sold the insolvency-prone company, to Alessandro de Tomaso, the guy who brought the world the Pantera. And he had a different idea of what Maserati should be.

Whereas previously Maserati had competed with the likes of Aston Martin, building very high-end, exclusive, special cars, de Tomaso introduced a new series of cars aimed at a different market niche, that occupied by the smaller BMW and Mercedes cars. This was the Biturbo series. Where prior Maserati GT cars had been swoopy and sleek, Biturbos were stubby and angular. Where prior Maseratis had been expensive and exclusive, Biturbos were---well, still expensive but not quite as expensive, and although they were still exclusive in that relatively few people had them, it was not quite the "you can't afford it" exclusivity of Maserati of yore.

This obvious move down-market did nothing to endear the Biturbo line to old-school Maserati enthusiasts, and although the Biturbo family are far and away the best-selling Maseratis ever and they kept the company in the black for many years, they remain the unloved stepchildren of the Italian exotic-car universe. Although I don't know the exact cause-effect relationship, in the early 90s Maserati left the U.S. market. The early Biturbos had some teething problems; by 1990 or so they had pretty much been worked out, but we in the U.S. never saw the best Biturbo derivatives.

After a couple decades (and a joint venture with Chrysler that produced the TC, essentially a LeBaron tweaked by Maserati, some of which had a Maserati engine), Maserati was sold again, this time to Ferrari, who put out GT cars under the Maserati badge that were basically junior Ferraris, using Ferrari engines and other Ferrari technology, to the joy and applause of the automotive enthusiast world. Ferrari of course acted as if prior Maserati history, particularly the Biturbo era, never happened.

As a result of this history, Biturbos, which were sold in this country from 1984 to 1987 and 1989 to 1991, don't possess the cachet of earlier or later Maseratis, and can be had relatively cheaply---certainly, they are the cheapest model from any exotic car maker to buy. But cachet or no, they are still Maseratis, and to a man smitten with Italian exotic cars, that affordable car dangling before him like low-hanging fruit can be nigh irresistible.

So it was that, when a 1987 Biturbo Spyder showed up on eBay for sale in a nearby suburb, I abandoned reason and judgment, and bought it.

The Maserati Biturbo Spyder I bought.

I wasn't completely foolish: there were several models of Biturbo and they came in various configurations. They all had a twin-turbocharged V6 and luxurious appointments (the inside of a Biturbo has leather on just about everything), but among the desired traits were (a) the fuel-injected engine, from 1987 on, as opposed to the earlier carbed model; (b) the five-speed manual transmission, and (c) the convertible body style. The Biturbo that sucked me in had all of these. It was one of the best models to get.

I should also say that actually, notwithstanding the bad press they get, Biturbos are not really bad cars, if they are sorted out and properly maintained. But, here's where the "exotic car" factor comes into play: Biturbos, like other exotic Italian cars, have relatively short maintenance intervals---whereas a typical Toyota can soldier on for tens of thousands of miles without trouble as long as it gets regular oil changes, exotic Italians tend to require extensive (and expensive) maintenance trips to the shop every 15 to 30 thousand miles. Now, for the last ten or fifteen years, many of the people who have bought Biturbos have been stars-in-the-eyes guys with more enthusiasm than money, and it is one thing to be able to afford to buy a Biturbo, and quite another to be able to afford to maintain it. The price of the car is like unto a Honda, but the price of service and parts is like unto a Ferrari. (Well, maybe not that bad, but not cheap.) Service and parts are more expensive, and required much more often.

As a result, just about every Biturbo still extant suffers from deferred maintenance issues. And that, unfortunately, is a slippery slope. Italian cars in general suffer if they're not driven regularly, so one little problem that sidelines a car for a while can multiply into numerous niggling little problems, which eventually results in disenchantment and the car being sold to somebody else, and the cycle repeats and worsens.

What I now know is this: if you get a Biturbo, plan on spending an amount of money equal to, if not more than, the cost of the car to get it sorted out. The only way to do it right is to go over the car, or have someone who knows them (if you can find such a person---good luck!) go over the car from bumper to bumper, replacing all the belts and hoses, checking and cleaning all the electrical connections, tuning up the engine---if you do that all at once and comprehensively, you can end up with a reasonably reliable, usable car. A sorted Biturbo can be a practical daily driver (if you don't mind it's prodigious thirst for premium gas). (Well, the electrical system---a chronic problem with many Italian cars, but particularly Biturbos---may need more attention; there's a guy who sells rebuilt fuseboxes.)

When I got my Biturbo, I knew that the owner had not been driving it regularly---he told me how it was "for special occasions," which I knew was absolutely wrong. But it seemed to be working fine, so I bought it, and instead of doing a comprehensive overhaul, I just drove it.

And let me tell you, the Biturbo may not be the most desirable Maserati model ever made, but that car was a hell of a lot of fun, and the most comfortable car for long-distance driving I've ever driven. It was a joy to drive on the highway, and even after a slog down to Springfield, I emerged without pains in my legs or back. Compared to modern cars the Biturbo doesn't have that much horsepower, but they way it's delivered is particularly invigorating. And the car cruises at speed effortlessly.

Although it was not strictly speaking a Ferrari, the guys in the Ferrari Owners Club were very welcoming to me. (Actually, you don't need a car at all to join the FOC; appreciation for the Prancing Horse is sufficient. The local FOC group was very nice to interested people.) Here are a couple pictures from FOC drives. The first shows my Biturbo with a gaggle of Ferraris by the Big Mary statue in Hyde Park:


Here's me grinning at the wheel in front of a picturesque church in the north shore suburbs:



But soon, the little mechanical problems, and some bigger mechanical problems, started to crop up. The coolant was overflowing, and a friend familiar with the cars determined that engine compression was getting into the coolant: a bad head gasket. So, full of enthusiasm and confidence, we changed the head gaskets, which is a big job on any car and a real pain in the kiester on a Biturbo. But when we bolted it all back together, it fired up, which was a great feeling. But then it started overheating. That was due to an electrical problem in the circuit that controlled the fans, which proved quite difficult to track down. When I finally got that fixed, it failed emissions testing, and when I addressed that problem at considerable expense, it developed some electrical problem. Throughout all this it was not reliable to drive, so the fun factor went out the window. Finally, about a year ago, while I was in line to get it emissions tested again, the car just died and would not start again.

Thank God for AAA. I had the car towed back to the garage, and there it sat. I was totally discouraged and could not bring myself to work on it any more.

Meanwhile, I had made another tactical error: I sold my Alfa Spider and bought a project Alfa GTV coupe. The theory was, I could use it on the track. (The Alfa Romeo Owners Club would not let me run in track events with my Spider because it didn't have a roll bar.) But the GTV I bought was a basket case. I thought it would be something I could fix up over time, but as I started working on it I discovered that it had rust in literally every panel of the car, and it was not worth the effort to fix. It had a solid engine, gearbox and rear end, so we pulled them out of it, stripped it of trim etc., and junked the body. I feel a little guilty about that now because those cars (1750 GTVs) are rare and desirable and I wonder whether somebody might not have been willing to save it, but it was in REALLY bad shape.

The Biturbo and "Scruffy", my ratty 1971 Alfa GTV.

But the important thing about getting the GTV, the big mistake I made, was that that gave me two project cars at the same time. And there were not hours in the day or days in the week enough for me to keep on top of both of them. So neither of them really got the attention it deserved, and neither of them was really set right. The Biturbo in particular probably should have had more attention paid to it. If I hadn't been distracted by my other projects, I might have spent enough time and energy on the Biturbo to get ahead of the game with its problems. But I didn't. I watched myself become one of those car owners I would have previously derided, who bought a car and then didn't do the necessary maintenance to keep in running right. The problems with the car were demoralizing, and seeing myself in that light was more demoralizing.

There were further complications with the Alfa, as I tried to move the good parts of Scruffy to a new rolling shell. But, that's really a separate story. To further complicate matters, a friend made me an offer I simply could not refuse on a 1973 Alfa Berlina, a sedan---one of the reasons I was less than totally enthusiastic about the Maserati was that I had noticed that most of the time when we were going somewhere that we could take a fun car, there was usually someone else involved. In retrospect it was foolish of me to buy a two-seater convertible: I couldn't drive it on the track, and I couldn't carry extra passengers. Hence the attractiveness of the Berlina, which had most of the sporting potential of the GTV but had a spacious back seat. So the Berlina was a good acquisition, except that it gave me three old Italian cars, none of which ran. (The Berlina was sans engine.) This was, to put it mildly, a source of occasional marital strife.

One thing I had figured out and resolved to myself was that this year I would get down to one single project car. It didn't take too much thinking to decide that the Berlina would be that car. So, it only remained to put the Maserati and the GTV (well, collection of GTV parts) up for sale. I listed them on enthusiast forums, and put the Biturbo on eBay. It didn't sell, but I did end up making a deal with a guy who saw it there. Today his son and a friend came and picked it up. Here's one of the last pictures I took of it; you can see the corner of the Berlina in the background.


Buying the Biturbo in the first place was a mistake, and I learned a lot from owning it, even if much of what I learned was learned the hard way. But despite my less-than-satisfactory experience as a Biturbo owner, I actually have a fairly positive view of the cars. In fact, if mine had been a sedan instead of a two-seat roadster, I would have kept it and spent the time/money to get it running right. And, I wouldn't say that I might not end up with another Biturbo at some point in the future. And while I didn't think so much of it at the time, in retrospect I will admit I got a bit of a charge out of owning a Maserati. At least, I once owned a Maserati. How many people do you know who ever owned a Maserati? Never mind the details.

Addendum to web site list

Since I posted my list of favored web sites, I've added another to my "check regularly" list: Shirt.Woot! It's an interesting concept: every day, they offer a new t-shirt design, which is only available for a limited time---new designs get a pass their first week, but, after that, if it falls out of the Top 20 on their weekly sales chart, it's GONE. A really popular shirt may be around for several months, but eventually they cycle.

They also have a weekly derby that anyone can enter, and vote in, and the top three vote-getting designs are offered as part of the next week's shirts. So the shirts don't just all come from the same stable of designers, and some of the derby shirts are very cool.

I like the idea of t-shirts as art---I was looking through my drawer the other day and noticed that almost all the shirts I have are advertising in one form or another. Now, one of the guys in the Tucker band commented once that I had an impressive collection of t-shirts from greasy spoon restaurants, which I suppose I do, but sometimes I want something that is interesting visually but not Superdawg or Joe Rogers' (Springfield's Best Chili). I've acquired four Woot shirts so far, all of which are of interest merely for their own designs.

I was hipped to Shirt.Woot by Kelly from the Xylenes. Some weeks back, they had a shirt with this image:

The Xylenes being an accordion-intensive operation, several of the gals acquired these shirts. I didn't get one (that light blue is not my color) but I did explore the site and find another shirt I liked:

And, I've checked back regularly since then (if you buy a shirt on its first day, it's cheaper) and found several more I like. Here's the most recent:

Check it out---there's probably something you'll find interesting.

Some of my Favorite Web Sites

Like, I suspect, most people who spend much time in the digital world, I have a handful of sites I tend to visit on a more or less regular basis. Maybe you'll find some of these interesting too.

After checking my e-mail, one of the first sites I like to go to when I'm getting going in the morning is icanhascheezburger.com, one of the leading lolcat sites. It makes me happy.

Then, there's my webcomics: Order of the Stick and Erfworld are both found on the Giant in the Playground Games site. They are gaming comics and if you've never played Dungeons and Dragons or certain strategy wargames you might not get all the jokes (I don't get all the jokes myself), but I like them. Girl Genius is the current ongoing comic from one of my favorite comic artists, Phil Foglio. It's really an amazing epic, and chock full of trademark Foglio humor and zaniness.

There are a number of music forums I visit from time to time, more or less often as specific interests wax and wane:

Guitarists.net is a general guitar playing site, which is frequented by a lot of beginners; I will admit, I like to hang out there because I feel that my experience and knowledge about guitar stuff can be of some use---in regular life it's just obscure and arcane! I've met some cool people there, and one guy who lives in Chicago bought a bass from me.

I've mentioned TalkBass in other posts---it's really the home of the bass playing community on the internet. The guitar community on-line is fragmented (maybe because it's bigger), but the TalkBass community includes players of just about every description, musical style, and skill level. They are remarkably polite, given the wide variances in perspective and strongly-held opinions.

The Gear Page is a more guitar-oriented page, which focuses on higher-end and boutique gear, but there is a lot of knowledge in that community. On GNet I usually answer questions; if I have questions of my own, I take them to The Gear Page.

Then there are forums devoted to specific brands that I like. I've mentioned previously my enthusiasm for Rickenbacker guitars and Acoustic Control Corp. amplifiers---well, there are on-line communities of enthusiasts of each of those brands. The RickResource forum is a great font of information on Rickenbackers, while the Unofficial Acoustic Control Corp. homepage and forum have lots of great info on Acoustic gear. And, I met another Chicago-based Acoustic fan on that forum, and he introduced me to Bill Tucker, which led to my current band situation. Networking!

Sometimes I'll cruise over to the GearSlutz forum, which is a forum for recording engineers and deals with esoteric recording gear---but, they have great stories about the stupid things they've seen and heard in recording sessions. I study these stories to ensure that when I go into a studio I don't sound or act like a dummy. And sometimes I surf through the Harmony Central forums. There's interesting stuff there, but the signal-to-noise ratio is worse than on other, more specialized music forums.

I don't spend as much time on car forums as I used to, but with the Alfa convention fast approaching I've been visiting the Alfa Romeo Bulletin Board a bit more lately. It is the home of the Alfa enthusiast community on the web. I used to visit FerrariChat a lot, but my interest in owning a Ferrari has waned, so I don't go there much anymore. It's an interesting place sociologically, since "Ferrari" has so much secondary significance beyond just the merits of the cars themselves. Lots of people are attracted by the mystique of Ferrari and the lifestyle they perceive Ferrari ownership to symbolize, so you get some weird discussions over there.

Another one I visit every once in a while is the Jack Vance Message Board, where Vance fans discuss his work, and various other things. When these guys go off-topic, the discussions can end up in some pretty strange and interesting places. Part of the allure is seeing and communicating with fellow travelers from the Vance Integral Edition project (of which I posted early on in this blog).

To keep up with physics news, I periodically check Physics News. If I hadn't dropped Calculus II in college, as a result of having the worst professor ever, who knows what I might have accomplished in the world of science? I intended to take it later, but that didn't work out. That's a story for another time.

Finally, a few blogs I like to check periodically. I follow a few friends' personal blogs, which I'm not going to list here since they are of interest because I know the bloggers---if you know them too you probably already know about the blogs. But I also check these:

Acquired Taste: This is the blog of Tim Stretton, who is coincidentally a friend but the blog is his "professional" blog about writing. Tim was a VIE manager and his first book, The Zael Inheritance, was serialized in the Cosmopolis Literary Supplement, an appendix of the VIE newsletter. He's written a couple more books since and has been accepted into the Macmillan New Writers program, through which his last novel, The Dog of the North, is being published in a few weeks. Tim's blog will be of particular interest to writers, but he provides interesting insight on the writing process that I think many book fans will find interesting, and the discussion of books is a great source of recommendations if you're looking for cool stuff to read.

Chocolate and Zucchini: I'm no foodie, but I really enjoy this food blog. Blogger Clothilde Dusoulier is the daughter of Patrick Dusoulier, another friend from the VIE. She's an interesting phenomenon. She has published two books in the last few years, a cookbook and a guide to Parisian restaurants. Now, cookbooks seem to be top-down affairs nowadays: one becomes a mini-celebrity on the Food Network and then puts out cookbooks trading on that celebrity. But in Clothilde's case, she simply started a food blog, and it became sufficiently popular that she was able draw on that popularity to get a book deal---more of a bottom-up model, and very populist. It is hardly surprising, though, because her writing is absolutely delightful, and her recipes are pretty good too.

Stuff White People Like: Never have I seen such a scalpel-sharp satire of yuppie culture. This guy (who I don't know and has no connection to the VIE) has a book coming out in July which I am avidly awaiting. Although, reading the comments to his blog posts, and seeing how many people so completely miss what he is doing, may shake one's faith in humanity.

A funny old gig story

Recently there was a thread on one of the music forums I follow, talkbass.com, about quitting in the middle of a gig, and it reminded me of a gig I played back last spring. I don't know if it really counts as "quitting in the middle of a gig", but here's the story:

It all started when I answered an ad by a drummer (let's call him Frisco Tom) who was trying to put together an oldies rock band, with an eye towards playing car cruise nights and things like that. There was a cattle call audition and while these people (Frisco Tom and a woman I assume was his girlfriend, although she introduced herself as his "producer"---let's call her Trixie) were not the most professional, it looked like it might be fun. And, one of the guitarists who had tried out was pretty good, and I thought it would be fun to play with him. I was invited to be in the band, and I said I'd do it if the guitarist I liked would, and apparently he had said something to the same effect, so we were good to go.

Frisco Tom worked near me, and occasionally we would meet in the lobby of the building, or meet for lunch. We had several conversations in which he talked a very good game about what he wanted to do, and expressed strong agreement with my desire to try to really capture the feel and arrangements of the original songs. Structurally, most 50s rock songs are not very complicated---it's easy to play just about every 50s hit ever written as one 12-bar-in-A medley. But if you listen closely, there are subtle distinctions between songs that put each performer's individual stamp on them, and I wanted to focus on those things and really try to nail them. Yes, absolutely, right there with me, he says.

After a couple weeks a band was more or less assembled. In what should have been a distressing turn of events, both guitar players in the band quit---the guy I had looked forward to playing with apparently had not told his wife he was auditioning for the band, and when she found out about it she shut it down. But, I decided to stick it out for a while. Tom and Trixie came up with a couple other guitar players, although they didn't seem to be as meticulous about the music as I was hoping for.

Now, from early on, Tom had mentioned an open stage at the local VFW hall, which he thought we should play. He seemed to think gigs might be forthcoming if we did well, and he swore that we could go there and blow everybody away. (Based on some open mics I've been to, that was at least potentially credible.)

Well, we had our first rehearsal with the full band, and it went okay---and Frisco Tom says that we should play the VFW open stage THAT WEEKEND. I thought that was a little precipitous, but he was very excited, and the other people seemed up for it, so I figured, okay.

We went there, and played, and a couple things became apparent:

1) I figured out that this, in fact, was the whole goal of the band: for Frisco Tom to get up in front of his buddies at the VFW hall and play. Any other gigs would be purely coincidental.

2) Frisco Tom's bar for what was an acceptable public performance was so low as to be nonexistent.

3) There was never any prospect of us blowing away everybody at the open stage---while some of the other performers were, indeed, awful, the main core group of guys were pretty decent musicians who had been playing together at this thing every Friday for years if not decades, and included at least one guy who had been an actual professional rock singer back in the 70s. (You've heard him on the radio.) They had a pretty high overall talent level and they were accustomed to playing together, in stark contrast to our group in both regards.

Mulling all this over subsequently, I concluded that Frisco Tom was simply delusional and decided I would not continue with his vanity project. But before I told him, he announced a new opportunity, which forestalled my actual quitting:

Ever since the first time I met him I had heard constantly about his son, who was apparently hot stuff out in L.A. doing nouveau rockabilly or something. Well, it turns out the son was going to be in town and would perform with us at the VFW the following week! I was sufficiently intrigued that I decided to stick around for one more show. The practice schedule got screwed up or something---I don't remember exactly what happened, but basically, they sent me some mp3s but we did not get together in person prior to the show.

So I showed up, and the first sign of trouble was, Frisco Tom informed me that he had cleverly (he thought) signed up twice, once under his son's name and once under Trixie's name. This is, as anyone who frequents open stage events will know, a gross breach of open stage etiquette---stage hogging. Now, Trixie was very nice but could not sing to save her life; the phrase "bovine bellowing" is particularly apt. And she was going to do a whole set of tunes. And she ended up going first. And the arrangements (if you can call them that) that they did were different from the recordings they had sent me. Worst of all, the practice at that open stage was, you got to do three songs; people who did really well were sometimes invited to do another song or two. Well, after three songs, she just launched into a fourth song, despite the fact that the performance up till then had been pretty much a train wreck. And after that, she launched into a fifth song. At that point the host basically kicked her off stage---she was preparing to do a sixth song.

Naturally, they were in no hurry to let us back up on stage again. So after almost two hours of sitting around, mortified, I decided that I was not that interested in seeing what Frisco Tom's kid would do. I had never rehearsed with them, the songs were simple 50s standards, and I knew that the regular bass player who came every week could hang with them easily, as well as I could. So I packed up and went home.

I didn't hear anything from them for a while, but I did notice that almost immediately all references to me were deleted from the band's MySpace page. Coincidentally, last week I got an e-mail from the band announcing (14 months later) that they were playing some car show. Good luck to them; I've had better things to do with the last 14 months than embarrass myself on a regular basis at the VFW hall.

Hectic over-scheduling continues...

So much for getting back on the wagon of posting regularly. On the chance that some of you are reading this occasionally looking for updates on what's going on in my life, I'll try to post some less-lengthy entries of what's going on.

For the past week-plus, Kris' cousin and goddaughter, Lauma, was visiting us; she left yesterday. We were a little trepidatious when we heard she was coming because she's 21 and from Latvia and we didn't really know what kind of person she would be or whether we would be able to show a 21-year-old from Latvia a good time, but fears were unfounded---she turned out to be a very pleasant young woman and we really enjoyed having her visit. Which was good because last weekend was very hectic. As I may have mentioned, we intended to play a Mothers' Day show with the Xylenes, so when that plan was hatched, I invited my mother up for that weekend. Well, the show got cancelled but I never called my mom about it, and when I remembered, I called and my dad said how much mom was looking forward to coming up, so they came to visit. Meanwhile, my friend Peter, who used to live around here and was my co-conspirator and boon companion in my car hobby, was in town and wanted to get together. And, somehow through a mechanism that I never understood, we ended up hosting a Mother's Day dinner for Kris' extended family. So it was a pretty busy weekend, but Lauma was a big help and made things easier rather than more difficult.

Me and Lauma at the art museum in Milwaukee.

This past weekend was pretty hectic too, with a meeting of our book club in Milwaukee and a Bill Tucker & Friends house party on Saturday, and getting Lauma to the airport and then going to my friend's daughter's graduation concert for the School of Rock Beatles class on Sunday, followed by some work on the club history article for the program of the Alfa Romeo Owners' Club national convention.

Rocking with Bill Tucker at the Castaway Collective, 5/17/08.

Back from Tour

Well, I returned from my tour yesterday. (Edit: when I started writing this, it was yesterday; now it's last week.) It was quite an experience. It has seemed for a long time like things have been building up to this, and now that I'm back I hope I can find an equilibrium again. I was proud of myself in January and February for averaging about a post a week here---I fell off that wagon in March, but I hope to get back on it again.

The tour was a really interesting experience. I'm not sure how much it was a typical band van tour experience, but it was fun and very educational.

Some weeks ago I signed on to play bass for Bill Tucker and Friends, specifically on a tour that Bill had set up of the south. Some of the gigs we were working towards fell through, but in the end we played three shows in five days. Along the way I learned a lot about a segment of society I haven't had much contact with.

My bandmates are all in their mid-twenties, about 15 years younger than me. I don't really know many people of that age group, and as I've been sliding into middle age I've seen myself settling down into a fairly regular, comfortable existence that doesn't involve interacting that much with the rest of the world, so spending six days in close contact with four twentysomethings, traveling through their community of friends and associates, was bound to be educational.

There was something of a paradigm shift that took place among American youth in the late 80s or early 90s, by which point I was already beyond the point where I would have been susceptible to it, so I didn't really appreciate it. But younger people who grew up in the 90s and 00s have been more seriously affected by it. I think it comes from a sense that We (the country, or humanity in general) is doing bad things, of which young people do not approve and with which they do not want to be associated, but at the same time feel powerless to affect. Reduced to simplest terms, whereas when I was growing up there was generally a sense of optimism, societally, nowadays I think there is more of a feeling of pessimism, if not despair. I think this underlies the "angst" that has defined a lot of youth popular culture since the late 80s or early 90s. People of course react differently to this, but some (including some of my bandmates and their friends I met on the tour) respond by to an extent anyway withdrawing from society and living in a strange and interesting countercultural world, under the radar of society at large. One of the most interesting aspects of this is an anti-consumer mentality: "DIY" is apparently a movement, i.e., people making things themselves instead of buying them, and/or repairing broken things instead of replacing them with new purchases. Another manifestation is a practice of buying as much as possible used instead of new.

Having lived a pretty much middle-of-the-road existence myself thus far, it was interesting and thought-provoking to live in that world for a week.

But anyway, here are some pictures from the tour. First, the band:

Bill Tucker, guitar and vocals; moi, bass; Chris Castellan, drums; and John Salt, tuba.

Here's John and Chris with the Sparrowses, a husband/wife rootsy/bluegrassy duo with whom we shared the stage in Bloomington, Indiana. They also put us up for the night after that show.

We had some time before the show in Bloomington so we held an impromptu parade.

Our arty band photo. Astute blog readers may recognize the Beer Nuts t-shirt. This was at a gas station somewhere in Mississippi or Louisiana, I think.

On stage at Sluggo's in Pensacola.

On stage (well, patio) at (well, behind) the Ole Mug in Foley, Alabama.

Just a quick note

The month has been rolling on and I've been pretty busy, so I haven't been posting at the rate I would prefer. But I'm still here and I still intend to keep this blog up---just no new big news or profound thoughts to share. I did finish my essay about Norwegian black metal, but for some reason known only to Blogger, it posted it as of the date I STARTED it, not the date I FINISHED it, so it's further down on the page---it's like it was from early February. So, scroll down to that and take a look at it! I spent a lot of time putting in all the fun links to interesting things.


I've had a chance to play a bit more with Bill Tucker and Friends, the band with which I'm going on tour in April. I'm really enjoying playing with them, and I think once we get comfortable with each other it will be a very good band. The Xylenes have been hit with a spate of illnesses so we had to reschedule our intended spring show---a month ago, we were hoping to play next week, but then we missed a couple weeks of rehearsal, and rather than do a shorter or less polished show (a relative thing with the Xylenes, but still), we decided to push the date off for a bit. We are now planning on playing a special Mothers' Day show, probably actually the day after Mothers' Day. We're going to try to get our mothers involved---Kelly's mom is going to get up and sing a duet with her, and Kris' mom is going to play the chime tree with us. We're going to learn favorite songs of my mom's and Amber's mom's to play for them, since they will be there; I'm going to see if my mom will play tambourine, too. Mort's mom and Dori's mom are far out of state and won't be able to join us live in person, but hopefully we can do something for them too. We'll offer flowers to anyone else's mom who comes to the show. As Amber says, our moms are absolutely our biggest fans---it will be fun and nice to make them a part of the show.


You know how sometimes you know something in the front of your mind, but it may not have actually sunk all the way in? Over the last couple months I've probably bought too many guitars, and I'm feeling a little over-extended. I'm having to sell a couple others, which is okay because I don't play them much and I'd rather have the new ones, but the sense of urgency is unpleasant. But in each case, it was a rare and special opportunity to get something that I might not come across again, and each individual transaction could be justified on that basis . . . but, what I've now learned in a more visceral way is that there is always some once-in-a-lifetime deal out there, and one can go broke simply taking advantages of great deals that will never come again, either unheard-of prices or rarely-for-sale items. So, I am now publicly swearing off buying more guitars. If you hear that I've bought another guitar in the next six months at least, feel free to remind me that I promised not to do so, and deride me for my lack of willpower. But I don't intend to buy any more, no matter how unique the opportunity that comes along.


At least, I have acquired some really neat instruments lately . . . I posted about the Rickenbacker 330 I got in January, and mentioned the Rickenbacker 660/12 I got a few weeks ago. Well, I also acquired another neat Rickenbacker, a 340 with vintage-style pickups and a tremolo, in the limited-edition Color of the Year for 2002, Burgundyglo! It was one of those "once in a lifetime" deals---this may well be a unique guitar. Now I have a little family of Rickenbackers.


But, since I'm actively playing bass in a band again, I've been focusing on basses too. I got an SX Precision-style bass a while back, just to have as a backup. Also, I had a Jazz Bass that I got from my sister, on the understanding that if she ever needed a bass, I would give it back, or provide her with another bass at least as good, so since I decided I didn't care for the Jazz Bass, I sold it, and needed to get another bass to give Maria if she decides some day that she wants to take up bass again. After many years, she's started studying guitar again, so maybe that is not as hypothetical as it once appeared. Anyway, I had to do some work on it and I used it as the basis of some photo essays about fret leveling and nut making, which I posted on a guitar forum.


But then other amazing bass deals started coming out of the woodwork. Gibson came out with a new bass last year as part of its "Guitar of the Week" program: the Les Paul Money Bass, a limited-edition double-cutaway Les Paul bass which was pretty cool. In recent weeks, dealers have been blowing out the remaining unsold ones at way way less than the regular price, and way under what (I think) they're worth, so I snapped one up. Here it is next to my Gibson Ripper, one of my favorite basses that I've had for a number of years.


But then I came across a very rare bird for sale: an Acoustic Black Widow. I've mentioned before I think my interest in Acoustic amplifiers. Well, they also sold a guitar and bass for a while in the 70s. Some of the later models were actually made for them by Mosrite, but seem to have escaped (for the moment) the skyrocketing prices that proper Mosrites have shown in recent years (i.e., since I sold the one I had for cheap, goddamnit). Besides being one of the ultimate Acoustic collectibles, it's also a pretty cool bass in its own right. It has not arrived yet.


If you're thinking, "Damn, Chuck, that's a lot of guitars to buy," what can I say: when you're right you're right, and you're right. If I had to do it over again, I probably would have passed on a couple, although I can't say I'm sorry to have any of them! It's just made things a little tight, and I've sold a number of my old instruments and have a couple more on the block. (If you're interested in a Yamaha SBG 2000, or a Gibson Reverse Flying V, drop me a line!)









And then another friend has offered me a good deal on a Rickenbacker 4001 bass . . . but I may be able to do a partial trade on that one and he's okay with me paying him later . . .

But THAT'S IT! Gear Acquisition Syndrome: it's ugly. But, at least every time I have that realization, "You know, I've bought too many guitars," it causes me to reevaluate what I'm looking for. And I'm getting better gear, and gear that may actually go up in value, or at least hold its value.

Rock on!