Rocque and Roll

Behold, Boston’s own The Upper Crust, a band that’s as fun to watch as they are to listen to:

Evolve

Apropos of my discussion a few posts back…

Old is the New New

Umm, yeah. Forgot to mention. This “new” site template, in case you haven’t been around long enough, is identical to the design I used back in the good ol’ 2k5, but this one’s adapted to be a WordPress theme. I had to pull some sleight-of-hand to make arbitrarily long columns with bottom borders, but there you have it. Tested to work fine in Firefox, Safari, MSIE and so on. YMMV.

In other news, I’ve been posting my photo efforts over at the Flickr instead of here because (1) the Gallery2 plug-in was/is hella slow; and (b) because everybody visits the Flickr and next to no one visits here, my pics have a better chance to be seen there.

Speaking of, now there’s a handy little Flickr thingie over on the sidebar, too.

And I found a thing that lets me keep track of books I’m reading and such. If all 3 of you out there who read this buy a book through here Amazon may send me a check for US $0.10 someday.

Rewinding a bit: I should mention, my uncles in the B&W pic below, with their mum (my grandmother, also RIP) in the middle. That’s Mario on the left, Tony on the right. (No I’m not Italian.) Uncle Mario was my first inspiration for picking up the guitar. On the rare occasion we could visit with him (he lived in CT while I was growing up in PR), he’d pick up his old classical and regale us with baladas in his booming, melodious voice. His joie de vivre is sorely missed.

This is what I was waiting for when I linked to that kxcd cartoon of a few days back:

See? So it’s not all doom-and-gloom. Just today, and using same instrument, I banged out the basics of what I hope will become a full-on jam song someday soon:

Listen up!

Yeah yeah, 4 bars of whatever. But, who knows, it might grow up someday! (Chances are, it won’t sound anything like this by the time it’s done, either.)

As often is the case, it started with a groove. This drum pattern popped into my head last night and wouldn’t go away until I’d hammered it out into Garageband on my MIDI keyboard. (Sorry purists, but my crippled wrists simply won’t let me do ‘real’ drums.) It was so out-of-the-blue that I didn’t even know what kind of tempo or speed or anything. (That alone took a few tries to get figured out.) What usually happens at this point is, I can’t think of parts to accompany the one bit, and the idea dies there. But today (while convalescing from some weird chest cold that also persists, but for reasons of its own) I’m bopping my head to the drum beat, grab the LesYamaha and these ‘jazzy’ chords come out. Wee! Then I put the whole thing on ‘loop’ and start trying to improvise another guitar part over it. Shazzam! All this Santana-ish stuff starts in, who knows from where. It was quite cool, though I had no idea what was going on. (I blame the guitar, personally.) Eventually I have to look all over the internets to learn I’m playing “9th” chords which apparently sound great when paired with something called a Mixolydian scale which I guess I also stumbled upon.

This is why I can’t get ahead with music: when the simplest damn things have to have all these outlandish names and diagrams and whatnot my brain just goes for a picnic because it knows it’s not getting paid for this and it’ll be damned if it’s going to work this hard for free. Greedy bastard. Methinks my brain doth protest too much.