The Blog

Some of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while might recall I’ve been playing Dr. Frankenstein in my basement, building a replica of the legendary Marshall 18-watt amplifier. You can catch up on the story here:

Day 1 – The start of the project.

Day 23 – Loopy from solder smoke, I have a mystical vision.

In February, with the wiring completed, Al “Igor” Scott and I tickled the beast to see if it’d twitch. Well, it twitched.

I’ll let Al tell the story. This is an excerpt from a post in response to people asking how the amp project was going:

Hey everyone, Rob DID finish it. And I took pictures when he switched it on. The thing smoked, caught fire and then burned the house down. It’s all on film. How come you don’t post it, Rob?

No….. That’s not what happened.

There was a loud piercing squeal. Like a smoke alarm going off. So we turned it off and looked at it. Hmmm. All the knobs were turned down. So we put them half-way up. Turned it on, squeal gone! Could it really be that simple? Seems it only squealed if the tone pots were all the way down. So we centered them. Pure silence. Blissfully hum free.

Rob got the Les Paul.

He turned the volume up full.

And the most gorgeous sustained distortion poured out. Rich, detailed, articulate, phat. Like that first taste of beer on Friday. Like butter on pancakes. Like sex with everyone you’ve ever dreamed of. At once.

And when wild man Rob held the guitar to the speaker (the way you know he likes to) the feedback careened out just like it does on TV!

We were in Rob’s basement, and just then his girlfriend arrived and said she heard it from the street. “You guys having a party?”

Who, us?

It was at this point that I noticed the 18 Watt has no gain knob. Just volume.

“Right,” Rob said. “You want distortion, you gotta play loud. Like our forefathers did.”

So we kinda did burn the house down after all.

Now Rob seems to be in the midst of figuring out the cabinet issue. I’ll let him post about that.

Rob?

Uh, Rob? Can you stop singing and finish the amp?

Here are some videos of the Moment of Truth:

Baby’s First Scream – It turns out the 18-watt design I used sometimes has a “ground loop” problem when the tone or volume pot is turned all the way off. I solved the problem by grounding the volume knob to the chassis.

Baby’s First Power Chord – After months of soldering in silence, this was a sweet, sweet moment.

Since that evening, the amp has sat cold and silent on my workbench while I mulled over the question of the cabinet. Hardwood or tolex? Handmade or profe$$ionally built? On 4/27, I finally ordered a cherry cabinet from Weber Speakers, which has an 8-10 week wait for all hardwood cabinets.

Every time a UPS truck passes my house, I jump…

Today I had my first singing lesson. Wow! What an intense, scary, illuminating experience.

My teacher, whose ad I found in Seattle’s alternative weekly The Stranger, is Susan M. Carr. Her website describes her as “a superior technical teacher,” and she’s worked with all sorts of artists I like—from Layne Staley (Alice in Chains), to Chris Ballew (The Presidents), to Jesse Sykes. My impression has been that most voice teachers are classically trained and classically inclined, and when I saw Susan’s list of clients, I thought, “Well, if she isn’t a fan of my kind of music, at least she’s used to it.” That, and “I wonder if Jesse Sykes is single. Could Susan hook us up?”

I’m looking for a singing teacher because I don’t like my voice. At my best, I’m shaky in an earnest, Isaac Brock kind of way. At my worst, I’m off-pitch, hesitant, and inaudible. I know there’s a rich, expressive voice in me, underneath all my layers of anxiety. Perhaps not a “Wow, he’s got a gorgeous voice” kind of voice, but definitely a “Now that guy really sang it like he meant it” kind of voice.

Susan asked me to start the lesson today with a song I’d written. I picked “Roadkill Serenade,” a twangy breakup song. I figured when my voice cracked Susan might think I was just doing a country yodel.

The song felt good—that is, my songs never feel great, but I performed it as best I could, trying to fill the house with my voice, remembering occasionally to pay attention to the meaning of the lyrics and let them inspire my delivery. Then Susan asked to hear one that brought me toward the top of my vocal range. I could only think of one song—“Hail! Thunder! Lightning!“—a song I’ve learned not to perform live. I love my recording of the song, but it took a dozen vocal takes to compile the final vocal track, and even then my favorite parts are guitar riffs and my friends shouting along during the final verse. When it’s just me and my guitar, “Hail! Thunder! Lightning!” is Fingernails! On! Chalkboard!

But I knew this was the time to screech away, so that’s what I did, pounding out the chords on my acoustic guitar, all the time wishing I could melt into a wash of distortion, heavy drums, and kooky cell-phone noises like I do in my recording. I did get my wish in one respect: Twenty seconds before the end of the song, right at the climax, my cell phone went off. The song fizzled to the sound of my suddenly grating “Wind Chime” ringtone.

Susan was attentive and responsive through my performances, smiling at a turn of phrase or dramatic pause, and while she didn’t praise my singing when I was done, she certainly didn’t look concerned. Instead, she had the same ease that I have with my nervous beginners, as if to say, “No, that wasn’t a beautiful performance, but don’t worry about it. This takes work.”

I got a glimpse of how much work this was going to take during the second half of the lesson, devoted to learning how to sing from the diaphragm. This is a concept that has always baffled me. I remember sitting in the back row of my high school theater during rehearsals of Guys and Dolls, waiting for my scene to come up while Mrs. Sablinski worked with Gretchen, the female lead. “Sing from your navel,” Mrs. Sablinski implored. As poor Gretchen (often the butt of jokes because of her big lips) belted out “If I Were a Bell” for the 10th time, a couple friends and I pulled up our shirts and lip-synced with our belly buttons.

Gretchen is probably starring in Rent now, and it’s only right that I should be paying $75/hour to yell “Key!” at a photo of Billie Holliday while pushing down on a pile of books stacked on a table. ‘Cause that’s how you learn to sing from your navel.

At the end of the lesson, Susan asked me sing a few lines of “Roadkill Seredade” again, using some of the techniques she taught me. What came out was a fuller, more commanding voice than I was used to. Instead of feeling liberated, though, I felt out of control. Where was this voice headed? And here’s another interesting thought…Who am I to presume to sing like that?

I drove home shaky but hopeful, testing my new voice. It sounded good.

I awoke this morning to white rooftops and the sound of my neighbors scraping windshields. I love it when it snows in Seattle, and it happens just a couple times every winter. Last night’s dusting was even more improbable: I heard on the radio that after February 20th, the chances of snow in the city plummet.

Instead, what plummeted was about a half-inch of graupel—little snow pellets, softer than hail, but icy enough to thwart an SUV that tried to climb the hill by my house.

I took a stroll around the neighborhood and discovered this crocus in a neighbor’s garden.

It’s always fun to get fan mail, especially from somewhere far away. I received the following email this morning, from a guitarist in Wales, that really sparked my imagination. Thanks for writing, Chris!

Hi Rob,

My name is Christopher Wood, 57yrs and live in Wales, in the Uk. Just come across your site and wanted to congratulate you on the same and to say that your approach to the simple guitar playing folk in this world, who struggle to progress with their music, has inspired me to make that effort and attempt to improve after 30 years of being content with a very mediocre standard of playing, and never practising.

It was my interest in Gordon Lightfoot that brought me to your site. So I hope I may get to play some of his songs at our local folk/singing club. It may also be that at last I will get to grips with ‘tablature’, something I have steered away from all this time!

Anyway, I hope all is well with you all those miles away. Should you ever get to look at a map of the UK, have a look for a place called Aberdaron, in the county of Gwynedd, in North Wales. I live at the end of the Llyn Peninsular in a little village…UWCHMYNYDD…its taken me twelve years to learn that one, being an Englishman in a strong Welsh
community.

All my very best wishes, and thank you for firing up my enthusiasm.

Take care
Chris Wood.

For the past two months, I’ve been meeting with six students every Thursday night for Jam Workshop, the first group lesson I’ve offered as a guitar teacher. Jam Workshop is a chance for guitarists who know basic open chords to venture up the guitar neck, learning how to play solos, riffs, and alternate chord voicings to such tunes as “Friend of the Devil” by Grateful Dead and “Harvest Moon” by Neil Young.

This class has been rewarding in so many ways. For one thing, it’s simply really fun to make music with a big group of people, especially when you’re leading everyone. I heard somewhere that orchestra conductors typically live longer, healthier lives than people in other professions. I believe it.

Returning to group teaching has also been a redemptive experience. For most of my life—ever since I was a sophomore in high school, in fact—I’ve thought that I was born to be a high school English teacher. I had this dream of a classroom full of laughter and enthusiasm, a fountain of creativity. Instead, I discovered that my enthusiasm was crushed under the demands of teaching 150 kids a day. After three years, I quit and cast myself adrift in a future without direction.

Thank goodness I discovered that I wanted to teach guitar. What began as a casual suggestion from one of my bandmates has become a truly life-changing job. But it wasn’t until my second or third Jam Workshop, watching my students talking and laughing as they worked in pairs, that I realized that I had finally created the classroom I had dreamt about in high school.

This spring I’m going to offer the Jam Workshop again, and also a Guitar for Absolute Beginners class. If you’re interested, you can go here to get details.

From the Feb. 6, 2006 New Yorker:

I asked people to post caption ideas—here’s my favorite, from Al Scott:

“The rest of my band has complaints, too, but their car wouldn’t start.”

Some people like lyrics, some like a good melody, and some just like the cars, the cars that go boom.

I love songs that are poetic. Unusual images startle me, strange phrases or ideas help me see different perspectives, and musical language can move me as much as a beautiful melody.

What songs do you think have the best lyrics? Here are a few of my favorites:

For sheer oddity: REM’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”
For fitting a whole novel into a song: Joni Mitchell’s “Song for Sharon”
For being 100% hopeful and 100% sad at the same time: Paul Simon’s “Graceland”

How about you?

I saw G. Love & Special Sauce tonight at the Showbox. I used to groove to G. Love in college—his funky blues guitar and marblemouthed vocals got me through many a chore-filled Sunday, and I performed a rap about Herbert Hoover over the song “Garbageman” for my portfolio presentation at Stanford’s School of Education. So I was psyched when my friend Brady said he’d scored a couple free V.I.P tickets from his buddy Jeffrey “Houseman” Clemens, who plays drums in the band. Sweet! Free drinks, cool badges, and after the show, while we were hanging backstage, I could do my Herbert Hoover rap for G. Love and crew. Hampyyyy in the houuuuuuse!

The show started off rough. Maybe it was the woman in front of me who was occupying the space of about ten people by dancing like she was being attacked by a dog. I can dig grooving to the music, but thrashing around is just not cool at a crowded concert. Anyway, once we moved to a less dangerous sector of the club, things picked up. The highlight was a hushed performance of “Blues Music” segueing into a cover of “Walk on the Wild Side.” Two of my favorite bass lines back to back. Brady, who played bass in a band with Jeffrey in New Orleans, must have been in heaven.

After the show, we went backstage and hung out with Jeffrey and the band for a while, then went back to the bus so that Jeff could give us a CD of a side project he’s doing. I was shocked to see that the bus was decked out in full rock star treatment—flat screen TV, leather couch, fawning teenage fans, the whole shebang. I thought that was solely for 80’s arena rock bands.

Driving home, I asked Brady if he’d want Jeffrey’s life. Brady is a great bass player, who has the skill and connections to play professionally if he wanted. But now he has a wife and two children, and his current band, King of Hawaii, rarely performs because the frontman is busy being a doughnut shop tycoon.

Brady says that while he used to want to be a rock star, those dreams are probably beyond his grasp now. “You see a lot of Musician Wanted classified ads saying, ‘No drug addicts, no losers, no dads,'” he said with a laugh. That doesn’t bother him much anyway. Now that he’s felt what it’s like to come home and see his kids sleeping in their beds, he wouldn’t trade it for Jeffrey’s world tours. “That’s a pretty lonely life,” Brady said.

I don’t doubt it. Jeffrey’s been playing this gig for 16 years. That’s 16 years of being gone for months on tour. Buses with leather furniture must be cold comfort after a while.

Still, the show inspired both of us to get back on the stage (I quit my band a few years ago). It must be a blast being the Houseman on stage pounding out some funky groove, or Jimmy Jazz locked in like a deadbolt in a doorjam, or G. Love strumming those bluesy 9th chords and rhyming on top.

All that The Sauce was missing tonight was some fresh material. And you know what kind of fresh I’m talking about. Fresh like my fresh-from-the-fridge rhymes. Kick it!

Herbert Hoover hits the hay, dams his stream of C. and drops a line.
Herbie, Herbie, Herbie, Herbie dreams of me I’ve got a dumpster in my gut
And graffiti up my spine. I got a lesson plan like the beached whale of Babble-on,
Objectives like Clinton’s administration.
I got reflections of reflections of reflections on reflection.

I got this student named Michael he thinks he’s Mr. Pedagogical,
He says my methodology is simply ineffectual,
And furthermore my pitiful delivery is massacred
Because of my, um, use of, like, distracting, um, like, filler words.

Evaluation! I got gum on my shoe now!
Evaluation! Skillful / Competent / Needs Improvement—OW!
Evaluation! Chalk dust on my eyebrow!
Evaluation! Skillful / Competent / Needs Improvement—

Herbert Hoover stole my milk money!

Stick that in the fridge, G. Love.