Sunday Morning Off Topic

It's strange to think that a hurricane passed by us this week. All we got out of it was a couple of days of clouds, no big deal; I understand they got some real weather over at the beaches. This morning is cloudy still, and cool, but nice. Yesterday I raked the front yard and got a blister, no, I don't know what you call this, it's worse than a blister. Let's just say I wore the skin off my hand between my thumb and index finger. My wife, who is a nurse, had this cool bandage she put on it; I've never seen this before, it's like skin, you don't even know it's there. She had a name for it. It looks like a band-aid, but it's a different kind of plastic or something. Well, I don't actually feel that kind of pain, it doesn't bother me, but it's good to prevent infection in that raw flesh. Cool band-aid.

This has been a week with a lot of music in it. Let me talk about that. Yesterday my family gave me a new CD, the "Complete Clapton" 2-CD set, 36 of Eric Clapton's recordings, so great to hear this stuff. He really has done some great work over the years. I can listen to this over and over again. You know I did steal a few of his licks over the years, just a few.

Earlier in the week I bought a really interesting album. Robert Plant and Allison Krauss did one together. Okay, Robert Plant, former singer for Led Zeppelin, Dionysian occultist, and Allison Krauss, angelic (Appolonian) bluegrass fiddler and singer. I could not imagine how this would work, but it is beautiful. They picked the best material by everybody's favorite songwriters, and recorded it with these sparse arrangements that totally work.

I think of it like this. You don't realize it, but the band on a lot of the old Donovan recordings -- "Sunshine Superman," "Mellow Yellow," stuff like that -- was essentially Led Zeppelin, at least the instrumentalists. Some of those records are, I think, really amazing to listen to. Go back and listen to "First There Is a Mountain." Listen to the percussion, the guitars, the flute. It is raucous and peaceful at the same time, driven with youthful energy and spontaneity, channeled by great chops and great taste.

So if you think of Robert Plant coming from that background, using the studio creatively, hitting a box for rhythm if it sounds better than the drum set, this makes a little more sense than if you think of Led Zep with big fat drums and echoing electric guitars. And Allison Krauss ... I've already used up the word "angelic," there's no better word for her. I think Allison Krauss is what Emmylou Harris pretended to be, and I love Emmylou. Allison Krauss came up by way of the fiddle contests, proving herself as a child and then pushing incessantly upward in the industry, as people heard a sound and stopped and listened and were converted. If you've ever seen her, even on TV, you'll know what it is about her, she just sings from another place. So Plant and Krauss together represent the merging of two worlds, but in such a seamless way that you realize there was no gap between the worlds, really, in the first place.

I think it works because of T-Bone Burnett, who produced the CD and plays guitar on it. This is one guy whose career I would like to have. I had his first album, back in the day. He dropped out of sight for a long time, and now he's back mostly producing recordings by other artists. He plays the guitars on this one, and I have the feeling he has a lot to do with the "sound" of it, which is really what this album is about. It's not really "songs," though of course it is, mainly it's a sound that you can have around you, a personal, airy, earthy, fiery, watery sound that colors your world.

I have been writing songs lately, and playing around with some acoustic instruments. Yes, I am mostly an electric guitar player, I have my old Stratocaster with all the varnish worn off the fretboard, I got a Mesa Boogie amp a couple of years ago, yes, I can turn your eardrums to powder at a hundred yards. But lately I've been playing with some acoustic instruments.

It started when my wife got me a bowed psaltery at the Renaissance Festival. This is like a triangular harp, with the strings attached to pegs along the side, in staggered lengths, so you can take a violin bow and catch the exposed length of each string where it is longer than the preceding one and shorter than the next one. Because it's a harp, when you play one note the others resonate, and it has a lot of bright, sibilant harmonics -- the dog comes in and barks when I play it, if that tells you something. It's hard to play it fast, you would have to use two bows, but it makes a beautiful sound if you play it slowly. The notes are laid out like a piano, white keys on one side and black keys on the other, and it's got a couple of octaves of range, so you can really play almost anything on it.

The bowed psaltery kind of got me thinking, I guess, that plus seeing that bluegrass band at the Birchmere a while back, hearing the pure resonant sounds of strings and wood. This week I also got out my cavaquinho, which a friend in Portugal gave me a couple of years ago. This is a little guitar-like instrument, with four strings, about like a ukulele, in fact, the ukulele was invented after Portuguese sailors visited the Hawaiian islands and the locals saw one of these things. In Portugal I visited a cordophone museum. A cordophone is a stringed instrument where you pluck the strings rather than bowing them. This Portuguese guy had a museum where he displayed all these lutes, mandolins, guitars, and various things in between. One thing he did was to take old paintings, like from the Renaissance, with musical instruments in them, and try to make the instruments, because a lot of those things just don't exist any more. Like just about everybody in o Minho, he also made wine. So anyway, somebody gave me a cavaquinho (which, given that it came from Braga, might also be called a braguinha), which has a bright, hard tone, in a high range.

One other thing. I took a day off from work this week, had to put dollars into an old car to make it easier for a kid to do things I wouldn't approve of, if you know what I mean. Anyway, in the afternoon I did something I should have done years ago. I took an old instrument out from under the bed and brought it to the shop to get fixed.

Probably twenty years ago I gave this old Mexican guy in Fresno a crummy amplifier in exchange for a Weissenborn Hawaiian lap guitar. This is an acoustic lap steel, hollow from end to end. But the top was a little warped under the bridge, and in fact the bridge and pins were in an envelope that was stuffed inside the thing, so I never played it. It was old when I got it, probably going back to the twenties or thirties. I have had this thing in its dilapidated case all these years, never played it, and this week I took it down to Levins to see if they could put it back together.

You should see the guys at the guitar-repair shop when you come in with something like this. Day after day the guy works on badly-made and badly-treated instruments, some bratty kid's electric guitar that he can't play but wants to be cool and blames the instrument if he can't play it like Yngwe. And then somebody comes in and says, "This has been under the bed for twenty-something years..." and everybody comes out of the back of the shop, people passing by come in and have a look at this weird thing. He's going to want to wet the wood and clamp it for a month or so, see if he can get the warp out of it, though it's a lap steel and the action doesn't really matter that much because you don't press down the strings, you play it with a steel bar. He made it sound like it might be forty or fifty dollars. Not a lot of work, but it will take some time to re-shape that wood. It's a kind of thing where he's happy to work on a nice, interesting instrument like that, and I'll be happy to get it back and play it.

I've never played lap steel before, really. I have a couple of electrics, and of course I've tried to do the David Lindley thing with them, but that loses its appeal after a few minutes. I did play pedal steel for a couple of years, and I consider that to be the hardest instrument there is. Every time you step on a pedal or push a knee-lever, the whole tuning of the instrument changes. Plus there are no frets, so there are an infinite number of places you can put the bar that will produce a wrong note, with one tiny little place where it's right. You can't look up, playing steel, you are immersed in it.

I lost my steel when a keyboard player borrowed it and then left town. He wanted to see how it worked, well it is a kind of fascinating set-up. I knew a steel player once who told people he played the ironing board.

As far as I know there is no acoustic pedal steel guitar, only the Hawaiian ones with fixed tuning.

WPFW is unusually good this morning. Maybe the theme is ... screechy violins. Some of this drifts into atonality, most of it experiments with dissonance, at least. I think the violin is the best instrument. It has the most beautiful tone, and the musician has complete control over it, over pitch, loudness, attack, decay, everything.

This morning I asked my daughter if she knew what the difference was between a violin and a fiddle. She guessed it had to do with the bow. In fact, there is no difference between a violin and a fiddle. Physically, they are exactly the same instrument. Or ... the difference is that a violin is respectable. You hear violins at the opera, fiddles at the Opry. Fiddles are for folk music, dance music, real-people music, violins are for people in suits who sit still and very quiet and pretend to understand what it all means. To me, it's like, what's the difference between a wildflower and a weed? Nothing but respectability.

You might not be surprised to know that I see myself on the fiddle/weed side of things.

One more thing that I'm thinking about this morning. Last night I was standing in the kitchen reading the first few pages of Proust's Rememberance of Things Past. I want to understand his concept of "habitude," which I suspect will work into my swarm theory stuff in an important way, there's a term in the formula that's hard to explain, and Proust might have the explanation but that means you have to dive into this huge and complex two-volume novel. Anyway, the TV was on upstairs, and it sounded like an old movie, so I wandered up and watched the last ninety percent of The Misfits, with Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe. This movie was unbelievable, there is no way they could make a movie that good any more.

It was the last movie for both the stars, she was in detox during the filming of it and he died a few weeks after. The script was written by Arthur Miller, who was married to Marilyn Monroe at the time but their marriage was breaking up. I think it was his genius that made this thing so great.

This beautiful woman, a stripper, hooks up with these three guys who catch wild mustangs and sell them to glue factories. She doesn't really understand what they're doing at first, and then it dawns on her and she feels sorry for the horses. It seemed to me that the central theme was ... the civilizing influence of women. These guys would do anything for a buck, basically, they didn't care about the horses, but they did find Marilyn Monroe appealing, and so you saw, through the movie, each of the (loser) guys go over to her and offer to free the horses, hoping really for a shot at her. Clark Gable didn't, though, he was a manly man, not apologizing about what he did for a living, not going to be influenced by some blonde. Well, sort of. At the end he ... I won't tell you, but he does end up with the girl, let's say.

So men do what they have to do, and are basically animals with pride, and women with their sensitivity and their irresistible beauty just complicate things, golldang it all. But they know she's right, once she makes them think about it. And, plus, it is Marilyn Monroe, who wouldn't free a horse for a few minutes of sitting next to her? There is also a kind of theme where they're chasing down these horses and lassoing them, where she's breathing heavy through those wonderful parted lips, as if she is getting aroused watching the manly men work their criminal deeds, and you see the influence going both ways, but in entirely different channels. And maybe you didn't notice that we are back to Robert Plant and Allison Krauss again.

There's just so much to think about there. You couldn't have a movie like that now, it's sort of pre-feminist, sub-moral, you can almost smell the sexuality of these people, right and wrong are a matter of practicality in a world of physical action which is -- another theme of the movie -- dissolving around them as other people go to work in offices, which these guys just hate. The worst insult in the movie is when one of them tells the other he ought to go work in an office. You watch this old black and white movie now, and you sympathize with these characters, you know how they feel, they come from another world but not so different. Right and wrong haven't changed, but the way we think about them has.

Well, I guess I just used up the hour we gained last night. I hear movement upstairs, and I know that there are plans to start packing up stuff so they can re-do our floors and ceilings and walls after all that water damage. We have a lot of work to do, life is just brimming with possibilities.