Guitar Gulag and Other Essays

Clarence White...so tremendously overlooked. He even invented the b-bender. You can take your early era birds and that 8 Miles High shite and blow it out your patooti. David Crosby was, and remains (when Gene Clark is gone...where's the justice, where's the sense?) an annoying, worthless swine. Clarence soared, picked, twiddled and thrilled. Speed, grace, fire and skill. Dead early and with some great face art. It would be mean not to give my fav guitarist spot to Thommo but Clarence is up there. He never ceases bend my mind with his B string. The Byrds Live at the Filmore East is an end-to-end masterclass.

Fluffy furnished me, via some sordid practices at a major department store and the price of a coffee at a way-too-hip-for-a-guy-dressed-as-a-bank-teller-wearing-a-fleece cafe (I suspect they would be really upset to be called a cafe but I don't know what else to call it), with an imac. This has prompted the change to garageband from my hitherto lifelong devotion to cakewalk. Garageband is certainly a neat piece of software that confuses grumpy old gen Xers like me by trying to get me to pay for Norah Jones to teach me how to play one of her songs...or John Foggerty (but only Proud Mary. Where is Effigy sir!?)...or Sting (clearly the imac has not probed my mind to hear the contents of my poem Listening To Sting, as surely it would not offer him to me?), when all I really want to do is record me whining along to mah geetah. By gum does it make it easy to do that. Paddy is all analogue, which is ironic as there could never be an analogue of the inimitable Paddy (and once again Happy Birthday for yesterday). When I probed the home of he and his partner (knowingly maintaining the mystique of the blog and its reader) last month I found that he had recorded a tone-poem representation of a Silky meditation entirely on his four-track (still bearing the stickered name of his swift uncle on its housing). And I thought I was Gen X...