Interesting stuff...

The album is one of my all-time favorites. I love the songwriting, storytelling, playing, overall sound and production of the album. The track Sailing To Philadelphia just has so much sonic depth that it doesn't seem to have a beginning and end. It just fills a room with sound. It's one of my favorite mixes.

DaFiz wrote: It's time for a new guitar rather than a repair job. :-\ I just need to convince Madam some more. :-[

Part of the fun is going around to all the guitar shops and ogling the displays ?

She's not even cold yet! ?

But seriously, it's always sad when a guitar breaks. Maybe keep her around and do some research to see if you can't do a proper job of fixing her up yourself. You've got nothing to lose and wil learn loads in the process.

Soundgarden is one of my all-time favorite bands. They were a huge influence on me. I liked the first two Audioslave albums and exactly one of Chris Cornell's solo tunes - Sunshower. Other than that I think Cornell has lost it, especially since his work with Timbaland. It's not so much the change of direction that bothers me as much as it seems like he's selling out to be hip to a different crowd (the ones supposedly buying lots of music these days), at the same time pretty much abandoning his very loyal following.

X-rated Bob wrote: What you do is simply have no names and logos on it.

+1

Honestly, I've found that the mystery of not having a name your guitar drives people who see you play it nuts and I love screwing with people that way. ?

Rather one-sided on my part as well:

The Mixing Engineer's Handbook
Sound On Sound magazine (whenever I'm at a Paper Weight I'll buy a number and read them from thoroughly for weeks).

I must admit that I do a helluva lot of reading on the internet and not so much printed stuff and I don't read much fiction. I have an incredible thirst for knowledge on the subjects that interest me but it's much easier for me to find that I need on the internet.

Alan Ratcliffe wrote: Usually 3-4 weeks, but occasionally 5 or 6. Stewmac are very good with handling that kind of thing, so If it's over 4 weeks, I send them an email just to say it hasn't arrived yet, but that I will wait another two weeks before reporting it missing.

I've never lost anything - the one time I did report something as missing, I still got it - just three days after the replacement had arrived.

Same here. It has been anything between 2 and 6 weeks. It's happened twice that I've not received stuff 6 weeks after I ordered and they sent replacements immediately.

OMW

You gotta be friggin' kidding me. >

My first guitar was a Valencia that I got from my grandmother when I was 8. I actually still have it. It's an archtop with a massive bolt-on neck (no adjustable truss-rod). It sounds kinda like a resonater with no resonance with new strings and starts to sound like a banjo when the strings get old. ?

X-rated Bob wrote: I don't see why performers shouldn't be booed. Not that I encourage it, but you know, people pay good money to go to gigs. So what do you do if the person that you paid good money to see is clearly drunk to the point of not being able to perform properly, or gives a lackadaisical performance?

Or what do you do if they decide to use the stage for political grandstanding, or start making poorly though out soci0-political observations in the heat of the moment (as Clapton once did).

I think performers have a right to go down those routes if they want, and I think the audience has a right to react to that. I imagine that Dylan must have got a few booings in his time - and not just because he decided to play an electric guitar. Michelle Shocked must have copped a few too. The Beatles were not only booed in the USA in the 60s after Lennon made his infamous "bigger than Jesus" remark, but there were public burnings of Beatles records in town squares.

Personally I think the Stones should have been given a good booing 20 or so years ago. Then they'd either retire to count their money, or make a serious stab at trying to once again be the world's greatest rock 'n roll band.

My post is of course meant to be in the same context that Ray wrote about where people boo when the artist's music is simply not to their liking, even though the artist and his/her performance was good. Even if I agree that half of an artist's job is to capture the audience, I still think it's bad manners for anyone in the audience to do this.

When an artist does the things stated above (X-rated Bob's post) it can obviously turn people in the audience against him/her, and for good reason. The Sinead O Conner incident Alan wrote about is a perfect example of that and I agree with the audience's reaction completely. I think I would have booed her.

Booing and bad comments are nothing but really, really bad manners. I say just leave if you don't like the music/artist you're watching. If an artist is really bad, people will soon stop coming to their gigs, forcing them to quit. But that sort of behaviour not only discourages the artist on stage, but also spoils it for those who are actually enjoying it. I've actually seen gigs where people in the crowd starting klapping each other because of that, which obviously turns the whole thing sour.

Sadly I've found that people have no manners in general, especially when there's alcohol involved, which is usually the case at gigs.

Keira, you just make my day! No, you just made my week! It's a brilliant! I read this years ago and have been looking for it ever since, but with no luck.

+1 on the country thing (and on getting more Hank Williams, incidentally)

Along with The Band and "outlaw" country artists like Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, Neil Young got me into country music. Not the poppy mainstream type thing they call country music now - the real thing. Whiskey drinkin' music.

Bob Dubery wrote: It'd explain why he did an underwear advert a few years ago.

?

An underwear ad!? Only Dylan...

Neil Young is one of my biggest influences. He's a true artist and one of those guys who has more mojo in one note than many have in their entire life. I love the way he seems to work a guitar like a piece of farming equipment when he plays. I wonder if he's a fairly large dude - a Les Paul looks like a pretty chunky guitar on most people but it looks small on Neil.

Anyway, I also learnt a lot from his school of playing: If the note you're playing now isn't right, the one next to it probably is.

It's true Alan. And it's good to hear that from someone else, even though one knows these things already deep inside. I guess this isn't the first shift like this and it will probably not be the last.

BTW, all the best to Pieter, Mannemarak, Graeme and anyone else who finds themselves in the deep end.

Bob Dubery wrote: I wonder how it felt.

I wonder if the mystery tramp was selling alibis?

I wonder if he was mistaken for Napoleon in rags?

Did he feel like a complete unknown?

Excellent observation, sir. ?

Stratisfear wrote: Congratulations, Jo! I hope all goes well.

Thank you very much! ?

For various reasons, I've not been here for a while. Interesting that this should be one of the first things I read as I logged on this morning. I feel like I'm also at the deep end at them moment.

The last 2 or 3 weeks have been the most exciting, happy and dark and emotional time of my entire life so far, all at the same time.

On the upside: My wife and I recently found out that we're gonna have a baby after trying for about a year and getting pretty discouraged about the whole thing. Funnily enough, we got pregnant the moment we let it go. I'm overjoyed about this and I'm feeling things that I've never felt before.

My studio and work as producer seems to be taking off out of nowhere. I used to help out folks here and there, but now I'm on my 10th project this year alone and my studio keeps expanding while all my projects seem to be doing well, even outside of South-Africa. I feel alive in the studio, working to get the best out of who I work with. I've found that record-production includes every aspect I love about music. If I'm honest, this is probably what I want to do with the rest of my life.

At the same time my whole life seems to be changing. I've been touring/gigging pretty much non-stop since late-2004 in various bands, making a large chunk of my income off it. As much as I love getting on stage I've started finding over the last year or so that it drains me instead of making me excited like it used to. At least it seems like almost all the "money"-gigs do. Even though we've never been "high-profile", we've somehow managed to make money but the recession also hasn't been kind to us, resulting in less income and more and more venues screwing us money-wise. I also don't want to be away from my wife and baby.

My whole family has been through a helluva lot lately. I can't really go into details about it. Suffice to say that the stuff that happened are some of the things you always think happen to "other people". I don't know if or how we will ever recover from this. The shock of this has left my wife and I both being very ill with flu. Today was the first day in about a week that I felt OK enough to just get up. She still needs to stay in bed for the sake of our baby.

I know that my life is taking a very different turn to what I've been doing so far and I'm quite uneasy about it. I guess I'd like to still do the gigs I'm excited about, but spend most of my time in the studio but that's definitely gonna be a shift financially, at least in the beginning, and I'm a little scared about it because there obviously are no guarantees. We also need to find a way to deal with the bad stuff that's happened.

Funny how the things that touch you the most come from the most unexpected places. The other day guy who sells us paint (for the new baby's room) remarked in a weird, seemingly insignificant way about something completely unrelated: "You must have faith."

I just saw this and thought to share because I know there are a couple of fans here:

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Police-Ask-Bob-Dylan-For-Identification-After-Reports-Of-Scruffy-Old-Man-in-Long-Branch-New-Jersey/Article/200908315361725

I love Dylan and, judging by the amount of crazy stories about him out there, this seems like the type of situation only he will get himself into. I gotta say there's something cool to me about the greatest of the greats (IMHO) being hassled by cops for looking like a "bergie", where almost all the newcomers (read: posers) seem to be in competition for the exact opposite.

?