_______________

‘Beautiful and tragic, RE Katz’s novel And Then the Gray Heaven embodies “the whole blessed void: a vast field of care” as it recounts the gradual process of laying the dead to rest.

‘Jules, a queer kid who “no one was watching to make sure … survived [their] childhood of humid horrors,” feels that it should have been them who died. But instead they lost B, a brilliant installation artist, revolutionary museum exhibit rehabilitator, and their person, to a steep ladder, a sharp fall, and the garage’s cement floor. Jules spirals out as they narrate, tracking the couple’s mutual descent and ascent in ravishing terms.

‘This near-perfect novel calls “bullshit on romance and beach condos and Florida itself … for people who lived [there] and got heat-stroke and sea lice and picked oranges for fifteen cents an hour” as Jules betrays how a great love and a geographic place can shape the bones of a person.

‘Not just another coming out story, the novel is infused with a lived-in queerness. It captures the dimensional nature of both nonbinary gender and queer sexuality, layering both into Jules’s and B’s relationship, their mutual history, and their found family in a way that’s inescapable, essential, and that captures all the safety that queerness offers and which “straight people don’t have a word for.”

‘Like Florida, novels about grief have “a reputation for being both uninhabitable and too overgrown with life,” but RE Katz’s beautiful novel And Then the Gray Heaven is eviscerating. It proves that “Downpour and decay are a part of life, and in fact, the very things that tell us we’re involved with the world and not just here.”’ — Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers

 

RE Katz Site
RE Katz @ Soundcloud
RE Katz @ Twitter
Critical color theory
Buy ‘And Then the Gray Heaven’

 

RE Katz And Then the Gray Heaven
Dzanc Books

‘When Jules’s partner B passes away suddenly, the harsh neon Florida stripmall swamp of their early years in the foster care system returns to haunt them. Jules is separated from B during the last days of their life in the hospital and then exiled from their family mourning, causing them to reach a breaking point that shimmers into a big idea. As final tribute, Jules takes the small remainder of B’s ashes with them on a cross-country romp to each significant place B worked during their strange and inspired life as a diorama artist. Jules’s burial adventures bring with them a pastiche of new friends, old chosen family, and a golden heap of B’s stories, daisy-chained together in Jules’s own grief fugue.’ — Dzanc Books

‘At once darkly hilarious and surprisingly heartbreaking, RE Katz’s debut novel defies genre expectations just as its protagonists defy the gendered, artistic and relationship constructs that surround them. And Then the Gray Heaven reads like a series of pearls slipping off a necklace—a series of stories, images, moments, songs and poems that at first appear absurd, then shocking, then brilliant, then, finally, divine.’ — Steph Post

Excerpt

Extras

And Then The Gray Heaven – RE Katz and Michelle Dotter

 

 

______________

You put a lot of pressure on the lyric, hoping the story moves by means other than narrative. Why resist narrative? What does the story gain from the lyric?

I wasn’t necessarily trying to resist narrative, rather trying to think through tendencies to narrativize. From my earliest drafts, Felix’s mind and voice have been precariously associative, and with each thought that slips away in the vehicle of its metaphor, the web of associations gets dense and denser. Something dreamily similar to narrative comes alive as the reader counts the recursions. Though, of course, orderly progression is out the window here. And I think something lyric comes out of the resistance to ordering the narrative activities. There’s an instability to any single image, and my own impulse as a reader is usually to make sense of all the sensory noise and nonsense bubbling under any image or word.

We also learn a lot about snails. I will never think the same about the stuff we expectorate from our lungs and how much that expectorant is like snails/slugs. What is the metaphor you’re working on here ?

And we’re in luck (or maybe in denial) because I think that speaks to how metaphors are working in SORCERERERER. There’s a kind of blurry line between vehicle and tenor, and it is a two-way street. Each carries the potential of the other in its buzzing little molecules. Felix is a snail, and he isn’t. His spittle and sputum are always in the process of becoming slugs, accruing those traits—and vice versa [purposeful non-period here]

In Sorcererererer, we are introduced to Felix, a man suffering from the consumption in a unspecified time and place–why leave those two elements unspecified?

JB: And yes, time is fuzzy in this one, but there is at least one specified place (perhaps a small concession toward clarity!): an old sanatorium in Elysian Park / Echo Park in Los Angeles. And that specificity is there as part of a critique running as a more directed stream under the piece against the paranoid instability of historical narrativizing, of the heliotropic myth and the west/rest cures and westward marches and of being entrenched in bogus destinies [purposeful non-period here]

If you’re in the area with a little free time, those old grounds presently include an active respiratory hospital abutting a few scenic paths up in the hills above Dodgers Stadium—take a stroll and put your newly slimy associative mind to the test. [purposeful period here]

 

HOBBY HORSE ANATOMY: BAWDY AND BODY IN THE BINDING OF ISAAC
Poems @ Dream Pop
EXCERPTS FROM PERMEABLE FORTRESS
Doublt
Buy ‘Sorcererer’

 

Jace Brittain Sorcererer
Schism Press

‘O! I loved this feverish yarn set in the cartilaginous environs of the ear and/or the mucilaginous environs of the Menlo Sanitorium, where patient Felix has collapsed on the footpath, attended by a clutch of snails. Part speculative Walser biography, part fan-fic of the Schumann-Brahms-Schumann love triangle, part dime-store mystery about a lost volume in a spooky library, part late-nite documentary on the lives of snails, this batty, brainy book has something for everyone.’ — Joyelle McSweeney

‘Sharp, grimly comic, vertiginous, extraordinary in its myriad misbehavings, Jace Brittain’s Sorcererer celebrates the illegibility of the body, the mind, and language within a librarial architectonics designed by Borges and described by Beckett to Leslie Scalapino on a stroll through Heraclitus’s garden, or, as one of its protagonists proclaims: ‘stay vim stay vigor.’ Brittain’s un-novel announces the arrival of an important new voice in the post-genre wilderness.’ — Lance Olsen

‘Jace Brittain’s thickly spare, indelibly sticky prose spirals at the “final edge of heliotropic civilization,” gooping the horizon line between history and illusion. All across Sorcererer’s pages, the ailing body of western knowledge coughs up its secrets and myths, its fatal false promises. This is an unbecoming book, a book of slime-enciphered messages, language fluxing from the sentences’ cracked shells. Read Sorcererer with the slowness of snails, with your feelers, backwards and forwards. Leave your own oozy traces on the patterns you find.’ — Joanna Ruocco

Excerpts

dreamt as mountain i

The degree to which isolation and seclusion aren’t synonyms. The songbirds of predawn aren’t politically suspect but as some person starts a gramaphone to sing, Felix rushes his eyes to form and drags uphill. The record loses steam before. And soon in silence the same light burns and exposes invisible streams from clinging packets of snow, pathetic thin ice barely covering the absent puddle already slipped from. Cadaverous the piles that hope to be flowers revelling in cold mud Elevation which returns to him something that.

The crackling paper of that thin ice, the foot and the crackle they make among the trees ghastly sentinels So Felix too From here down on the sanatorium as a
dollhouse The others even more diminutive. That whine in the air again Breathes Felix.

 

dreamd as mt ii

Clean, cold, pure, toxic, cursed, stinging. Insufficiently respiratory. Just what I.

A deep breath of evil. Tomorrow crisp, healthy, restorative, lift a piano above my head. Mighty toss the record player into the canyon. Clattering pathetic horn of a downed and false herald. Don’t shoot the is maybe only after. So. Don’t shoot the messenger later. Rotting clarion dissected in equity by this mountain’s scavenger democratic chaos cult, detritivores learning the tune, inheriting the wonders of the moldering folds and reeds. Discords. Unflattering untraceable dissolution We should all be so Even eat so lucky.

 

drempt as mtn iii

Other spring, other mountain, the building coiling long hallways tight, unlike the statics tell her the circle in the dew cold grass and the clapping and song but Os won’t believe in the discovery of kindness. Also Os recalls how easy for some to find kindness out here. Im Wald. Out Under the. Hidden. Deeply A Static she knows to be cruel laughs and claps and shares a spectacular gesture and How easy to lose one’s eyes in that swirl of limbs and free command to some childhood melody.

 

traumed as mountn iiii

Os from a grassy edge lifts gossamer ice so careful or it softly shatters or with fortune wetly drapes a virgin shroud over her hand Melts as a death mask and she lies down out and under. The mist too and everything is gauze Yes To be disembarrassed of life.

 

dremd as mt v

Citing the Fiduciary but what They can’t abide is a joyful disembarkment Let me die Os screams as. Like a hospital the hospital slides discretely from the hills and toward the sea.

All gross abatements begin at the.

Extras

2nd yr MFA Reading of Jace Brittain

1st Year MFA student reading @ The Pool, Jace Brittain

 

 

______________

‘In Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax a Style, she writes:

Prose is linear. It is read and is said to move. It must by nature, therefore, generate a symbolics of spatial or temporal movement widened by its context beyond the limits of the actual sentence read from left to right in so many seconds. In whatever context, the movement may resemble accumulation or attrition, progress or other process, even stasis, or any one of these interrupted, turned, reversed. In space or time or both, it can go in any direction as continuous or repetitive, accelerated or retarded, smooth, halting, or halted.

‘This is the most comprehensive description of what prose does that I’ve thus far encountered. It allows for nearly every kind of prose practice imaginable without a sense of hierarchy or judgment. The only absolute phrase is the first one—Prose is linear—which I will attempt to complicate in the last part of my talk, but for now I will allow its usefulness in describing how language moves across a page: that is to say, how the sentence is a line. Nonetheless, Tufte’s definition offers “enormous variety” in how language can and does behave within the architecture of prose. Yet, as a practitioner and connoisseur of prose, something for me remains unsaid in the above. What I’m missing is perhaps unsayable. It has something to do with the title of my talk: “The Sentence as a Space for Living,” something that wants to get at an emotional or bodily register in relation to prose. In this next part I will try to elucidate this feeling of being in the sentence. When I say, “the sentence as a space for living,” what I hope to conjure is the idea of language as a three-dimensional space, traverse-able by the body; a space one enters, moves through, exits. It is not possible that I mean the physical body, because language is abstract: it does not exist properly in the world. What I mean is something like one’s reading body, the one that stands before a word and gapes at it, marveling over its beauty or mystery. That body of mine that feels excitement when it encounters a semi-colon used perfectly, or when it enters a described space that hovers just above visibility. I suppose an alternative title for this paper could be “The body in prose.” But, this isn’t quite right either, because to say that there is a “body,” however abstract we allow it to be, is to place something between the mind and language that isn’t there. And, it’s this absent thing that becomes as I read.’ — Renee Gladman

 

Renee Gladman Site
RG @ Instagram
Dwelling Places: On Renee Gladman’s Turn to Drawing
The Sentence as a Space for Living: Prose Architecture
Buy ‘Plans for Sentences’

 

Renee Gladman Plans for Sentences
Wave Books

‘”These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut.” So begins Renee Gladman’s latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. A tour de force of dizzying brilliance, Gladman’s book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, we are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.’ — Wave Books

Excerpts

Extras

Renee Gladman Q&A

Prose Architectures Flipthrough

 

 

________________

‘“People say, ‘Why don’t you retire?’” Waters scoffs. “I’d drop dead if I retired. I jump out of bed every day to go to work.” After six decades of productive perversity, slowing down would pretty much require shutting off his brain. “I have to think up something weird every morning!”

‘Maybe it isn’t so surprising that Waters is more in demand than ever. In some depressing ways, we live in an America his movies anticipated—with charlatans, extremists and malignant narcissists crowding the public square, as constant altercations break out between a repressive far right and a radical-chic far left. The same day I spoke with Waters, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene gave a bizarre interview decrying “Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police” that immediately went viral. (She meant Gestapo.) If you didn’t know better, you might think Greene was a character played by Mink Stole, the Waters lifer who specializes in snippy villains.

‘The difference between his outré work and the hysterical pitch of our current public discourse—besides, of course, that no one’s drafting laws based on his absurdism—is that his intentions are always playful and good-natured. Waters likes to poke fun at what he still calls “political correctness,” not because he’s joined the self-serious war on wokeness or cancel culture or any other term pundits invoke to protest the march of progress, but because he thinks humor is the best route to social change. He wants to see liberals form mock “pronoun police” forces and hand out tickets. So you want to upstage the insurrectionists who relieved themselves in the halls of Congress? “Maybe we should form fecal flash mobs,” he chuckles.

‘Liarmouth is very much in this punkish tradition. A road novel with an outrageously Watersian attraction at every rest stop, the book follows self-styled criminal mastermind Marsha Sprinkle and a doting accomplice as they grift their way up the East Coast. (Scammers may be trendy right now, but they’ve been a staple of Waters’ oeuvre since 1970’s Multiple Maniacs cast his friend and muse, drag queen Divine, as a freak-show impresario who robs audiences at gunpoint.) “I think it’s the most insane thing I’ve ever written,” Waters says.’ — Judy Berman

 

Dreamland
John Waters Page @ Facebook
‘Liarmouth’ @ Goodreads
John Waters Is Ready to Defend the Worst People in the World
Buy ‘Liarmouth’

 

John Waters Liarmouth
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

‘Marsha Sprinkle: Suitcase thief. Scammer. Master of disguise. Dogs and children hate her. Her own family wants her dead. She’s smart, she’s desperate, she’s disturbed, and she’s on the run with a big chip on her shoulder. They call her “Liarmouth”—until one insane man makes her tell the truth.

‘John Waters’s first novel, Liarmouth, is a perfectly perverted “feel-bad romance,” and the reader will thrill to hop aboard this delirious road trip of riotous revenge.’ — FSG

Excerpt

Marsha Sprinkle has always been glad she’s self-employed. She’s her own boss and that’s the way it must continue to be. She can’t imagine having regular office hours, punching time clocks, or paying taxes. Fellow employees are impossible for her to picture unless she can dominate their every move. Marsha is better than other people. She knows that. Smarter, too. Maybe not about the needless crap they tried to teach her in school, but about important stuff like how to put things over on other people who think they have the right to speak to her before being spoken to first. The ones who make unashamed eye contact as if it were their God-given right to invade her privacy. Marsha just feels everybody else on earth is … well, too familiar. Common. No one has the right to know her.

She knows she still looks good. Forty years hasn’t dented her sexual magnetism. Not that it matters to her except when she can use her appeal to punish. To trap. To enslave the clueless men who actually believe they will one day penetrate her. Thrust their filthy member into any of her openings above or below the waist. Especially into her own mouth, the oral cavity that refuses to tell the truth unless it is whispered privately for her alone to hear. Marsha won’t even imagine sex. All that moaning and thrusting and humping with another human. Sweating. Drooling. For what? That’s what Marsha wants to know. For what?!

Oh, she knows how to walk the walk, thrust out her natural-born tits and effortlessly swivel that still-well-rounded behind while ignoring men’s panting gazes, just to frustrate them, torture the lamebrain bastards who even for one moment think they could invade her insides. Like the moronic Daryl Hotchkins, her crime partner, her fake “chauffeur,” her sexual slave, who actually agreed to work for her if he could have sex with her just one day a year. That’s right. Once. Every 365 days and not one more, and Marsha made sure Daryl understood this. Divide all that lust time up hourly and you sure as hell get a low minimum wage, yet Marsha feels she is still overpaying Daryl. It has been a long haul to Marsha Sprinkle’s vagina, but today, Tuesday, November 19, 2019, is that day, the end of his one-year journey. He doesn’t know it yet but there’ll be a detour. A dead end. Marsha Sprinkle is no man’s used-up calendar.

But first things first. It’s a workday and she has to concentrate. She has always felt safe in whatever foreclosed McMansion they’ve squatted in. “Squat” is a word she dislikes, so homeless, so housing crisis. Daryl knows how to fool the neighbors, showing them fake leases he’s typed up and jerry-rigging the electricity so these rubes pay for not only their own home’s power but Marsha and Daryl’s, too. They aren’t squatting, they have taken charge of a house no one else could control.

Marsha likes how impersonal the interior design is in this “starter castle,” as she once heard a real estate agent refer to her current unlawful occupancy. She needs empty rooms around the ones she deigns to inhabit, voids she’d never enter but needs to know are there, sadly existing but not benefiting from her presence. And of course, the countless other giant bedrooms with full baths are the perfect dumping grounds for the thirty or so rifled-through, picked-clean suitcases she and Daryl have appropriated from the baggage-claim carousels at Baltimore/Washington International Airport.

The ridiculous cathedral ceilings give Marsha the required headroom respect she needs to feel one with the house’s vacant hauteur. Rich yet possessionless, fancy but hardly to the manor born, a style no one could call their own. The overpriced and oversize furniture left behind had failed to flip this white elephant of a house, and that suits her just fine. It can’t compete with her. She’ll never let the plush sectional sofas, the neoclassical mirrored tables, or the ludicrous Mediterranean chandeliers forget that she’s the boss. Marsha is like a McMansion herself: too big for the land underneath it, defying both nature and the environment, and daring anyone to move inside … her.

Extras

John Waters reads from Lady Chatterley’s Lover at City Lights Books

John Waters reads CARSICK

 

 

_____________

‘In the Temple of Surrealism’s fourth annual bulletin, we bring you news that the human race is in grave peril due to the mutation of a common virus we identify as MASS HYSTERIA. Also known in medicine as Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI), MASS HYSTERIA sweeps through all societies that do not heed the calls of our LEADER, and the messages and attitudes of the SURREALISTS.

‘It may surprise you to learn that until the Temple’s landmark enquiry into the subject, commissioned especially for A Void #4, there were no immutable laws of MASS HYSTERIA. Many “experts” could not even agree on basic principles, such as whether the disease is fundamentally ethereal, psychic, psychosomatic, biological, or if it exists at all.

‘After only a couple of hours researching the current global outbreak, however, our genius managing editor and head of experimental research at the Temple, Chairman Lev Parker, had the mind-blowing revelation that there are common properties that can be observed in all outbreaks of MASS HYSTERIA: The more severe the hysteria, the less willing a sufferer will be to accept a diagnosis of MASS HYSTERIA. (This shall henceforth be known as the Iron Rule of M.H.)

‘MASS HYSTERIA can only be transmitted via the medium of abstract symbols: written and spoken language, and visual signs communicated by other humans. (Our trials with saluting monkeys yielded inconclusive results.)
Since transmission takes place on the symbolic plane of representation, folks who are not sufficiently educated in abstract thought are more vulnerable to MASS HYSTERIA.

‘Babies and the severely mentally impaired are unable to perceive or process language so they are, mercifully, immune to it.

‘Narcissistic personalities are particularly susceptible to MASS HYSTERIA due to their inherent inability to think on a level above the personal. The narcissist is a more likely spreader and intensifier of MASS HYSTERIA, since the narcissist is biologically programmed to draw attention to himself via the contaminated symbols of the hysterical group’s cohesion.
Not all cases of MASS HYSTERIA are symptomatic. It is possible – indeed, common – for passive or ostensibly neutral members of a community to unwittingly infect others with poor thinking habits.

‘When cases of MASS HYSTERIA are reported, those who resist a diagnosis of MASS HYSTERIA are most likely to be infected next, if they are not already contaminated.

‘On the plus side, MASS HYSTERIA is hardly ever fatal in isolation. The symptoms are largely psychological/ behavioural, and include irritability, paranoia, panic attacks, and new superstitions appearing out of nowhere. The more MASS HYSTERIA there is in a society, the stronger this disease becomes. The larger the pool of infected recipients, the more powerful its grip over individual minds. The more hysterics there are in a society, the more they are likely to display symptoms such as uncontrollable shouting, random acts of cruelty when they think nobody is looking, and taking an active role in mob justice.’ — A Void

 

Morbid Books
THE OTHER ZONE
DEAD SEXY
ASK A SHAMANIC COMMUNIST
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Lev Parker & Penny Metal A VOID 4: MAGAZINE OF MASS HYSTERIA
Morbid Books

‘When a population reaches a critical mass of hysteria, it can achieve “herd immunity” to vaccines. By this point, symptoms will include the fetishization of power and authority, and the total subjugation of individual will to the energy of collective passions. The more irrational and cruel a society becomes, the more logical, kind and morally right its population will believe itself to be. The only way to flush out MASS HYSTERIA from such a society is by forcible extermination, psychological warfare, and/or waiting and hoping that future generations are less hysterical than their parents.

‘Given our frightening discoveries, this anthology will educate you about the dangers of the deadly virus before we all go mad. A Void #4 therefore serves as a learning pack that gives you a brief history of the deadly mind plague, presented with deliberate ambiguity, from obscure angles, alongside artworks by the sensible and sane. While there is no definitive test for MASS HYSTERIA at present, we present you with a handy, yet convoluted diagnostic tool to help you determine if you or one of your loved ones is coming down with the “Idiot Flu.”’ — A Void

Excerpts

Extras

Want Your Freedom Back?

A Void magazine issue 3 Orgasmic Literature

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Oh, cool, about your appropriate brother. Bonus. I can only imagine: the annoyance. Well, I can do more than imagine because the same thing happened constantly back when I was editing my lit. zine Little Caesar. I doubt if it still exists, but there used to be this book, a kind of directory you could buy that listed every literary magazine with its address and a very brief description, and it was common for poets to just go through that book and just seemingly randomly pick magazines to send their poems to, and that was a constant drag. Oh, no, I hope your love of yesterday wasn’t an embodiment of you, but I fear it was? Eek. Multiple choice: Love or love or love, G. ** David Ehrenstein, I have the vaguest memory of Les Paul and Mary Ford popping up on my parents’ TV. ** Bill, Hi. Cool that the Brian Weil book hit home. Right, I think I met him back in the days, possible even at an Act Up meeting, I can’t remember. Have a lovely weekend, Mr. Hsu. ** _Black_Acrylic, Me too. I had a Les Paul as a teenager for a brief time when I was in a high school rock band. The same model as Jeff Beck, gold and sparkly, who was my rock guitar god back in the Yardbirds/Jeff Beck Group days before he turned into a fusion dude. Nice that your future home looks liveable and promising. It doesn’t come with mass amounts of built-in book and record shelves?! ** Nick Toti, Hi, Nick! Good to see you! i’ll do my investigative duties re: Sigmund Snopek III. Nice name, obvs. Things are good, a little too busy, but I’ll take it. Yeah, at the moment we’ll shoot in/around LA in October assuming things remain in place. I wish you were there too. How’s your stuff, man? ** Clayton, Hi, Clayton. Really good to meet you, and thanks for coming in here. I assume you dig being a college radio d.j.? I was one when I was briefly in university, and I loved it, even though they thought my tastes were too weird and stuck me with the dreaded 6 – 9 am slot. Thanks a lot about my novel. What’s going on with you? I mean, obviously, if you want to come back and hang out and talk, etc. anytime, feel more than free, that’d be great. Warmest greetings in any case. ** T. J., Hey, T. J.! Oh, easy for me to say, but of course I love your idea of setting up that film series. If there hadn’t been such things in LA when I was in a formative phase, I would have been cooked. But, yeah, that was LA. I know that the writer and blog.l. Jeff Jackson set up an experimental film series in North Carolina, and I think it was shockingly well attended if I’m remembering right. But, yeah, I hear you. ‘Mike’s Murder’, wow. My cousin is one of the actors in that film. Brooke Anderson. They were shooting it in LA back when I was running the reading series at Beyond Baroque, and one night my cousin, Bridges, Winger, and John Travolta showed up at a poetry reading I was hosting. Caused quite a fuss. Anyway, yeah. I plan to do what it takes to have a non-boring weekend, and I hope yours is like the good aspect of the 4th of July, which, in my head, means the fireworks part. ** Okay. As you have already seen, I’m recommending five recent books to you that I’m hoping you will take a gander at and possibly even find something readable amongst. See you on Monday.

* (restored)

 

Here I am, terribly interested, attracted to something that my brother wouldn’t be caught dead with – like he threw the switch and the light went on. It never seemed to interest him – there was no curiosity about it at all. If you want the light on, throw the switch and it’s on. I wanted to know “What’s making this light light? How is the light built?” All the things that continue to expand go on to more complicated things. It’s an education – you’re striving to be informed of all this stuff that you’re curious about.
— Les Paul, interview in Tape Op #50, 2005 (reprinted Tape Op #72)

American guitarist, songwriter and inventor Les Paul was born in June 1915, and died in August of this year at the age of 94. In that time he pioneered the solid-body electric guitar, made wild innovations in the recording arts, sold millions of records at a time when , and played brilliant, inspirational guitar for over 80 years. A more detailed biography than I am able to offer can be found at his Wikipedia page and the detailed biography on his own website. There’s also a great documentary film called Les Paul: Chasing Sound! that has run on PBS and the BBC.

What I’m going to do, then, is to try and provide a looser overview of his achievements and what they meant, in the familiar D.C.’s “this is someone and this is what they did” mode. I think that Les was a fascinating character and a remarkably creative mind, and these are some of the reasons why.

 

1. The solid-body electric guitar

The one thing about Les Paul that news outlets consistently mentioned back in August was his role in the development of the electric guitar. His name has been attached to one of the bestselling models of electric guitar, which he helped design, for over fifty years. He is as central a figure to the history of the instrument as Leo Fender, Jimi Hendrix or Elizabeth Cotten.

The significant expression here is ‘solid-body’. Earlier forms of the electric guitar had been around since the thirties. At this time, the most popular design of guitar was the arch-top acoustic guitar, commonly referred to at the time as a ‘Spanish’ guitar. These very beautiful instruments have hollow carved bodies, like violins or cellos. They are built with painstaking care, but they aren’t terribly loud; guitarists in dance bands were frequently rendered inaudible by the rest of the line-up, which would typically include massed ranks of brass and woodwinds, and a drummer dedicating himself to being audible above them.

As such, many guitarists of the time found themselves obliged to experiment with amplification to raise their playing to audible levels on the bandstand. Electrostatic coils from telephones and gramophones were cannibalised to serve as primitive microphones. The guitar’s relatively marginal status made it fertile for new innovations in a way that the violin was not. The resonator guitar invented by John Dopyera featured inset aluminium speaker cones coupled to the bridge; meanwhile, the Italian luthier Mario Maccaferri experimented with building flat-top acoustic guitars incorporating a sort of acoustic amplifier inside the body of the guitar itself. These last were made famous by the Belgian gypsy Django Reinhardt, one of Les Paul’s enduring inspirations, seen here with the Hot Club Quintet de France in 1939:

Django himself is something of a legend. His inimitable style and swing – along with the chastening example that one of the fleetest guitarists ever recorded happened to have only partial use of his fretting hand – has inspired musicians from Les Paul and Willie Nelson to Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath.

The first archtop guitar with a built-in pickup was introduced by Gibson in 1936. Despite a $150 price tag, it was rapidly and earnestly adopted by many players of the day, including a man who has a greater claim than most to be the first virtuoso of the instrument, Charlie Christian. If you’ve never heard him before, you might want to take this opportunity to do so. This was recorded in 1941:

Art is one thing. Engineering is another. The overlap between the two is murky. So when talking about the industrial twentieth century, it becomes very hard to point to such-and-such a person and spotlight him as the uniquely responsible party. The idea of junking the carved bodies altogether and making an electric guitar out of solid hunks of wood seems to have arrived in the ’40s all in a rush, with Leo Fender and Paul Bigsby both building and selling solid-body electric guitars before Gibson did, and Rickenbacker’s prior art of the Electric Hawaiian and Electric Spanish guitars. Fender’s first solid-body instrument, the Esquire, went to market in 1950 – it would later be rebranded as the Telecaster, toted by guitarists from George Harrison to Keiji Haino – while the mercurial Bigsby never put his own instruments into any sort of mass production. But the fact remains that Les Paul had built his first prototype, a Frankenstein’s monster of an instrument he affectionately dubbed ‘The Log’, all the way back in 1940:

The key innovation of The Log is the fencepost in the middle. The hollow wings are stuck on for show and ergonomics. As Les had confidently predicted, the Log was distinctly different from the characteristics of the archtop guitars that players like Charlie Christian had been using.

In mechanical terms, the solid body is less resonant, so less of the plucked string’s kinetic energy is dissipated, meaning that the string takes longer to return to rest. In musical terms, this means that notes ring for longer and more clearly; additionally, the lows sound deeper and the highs sound higher. It’s not necessarily ‘better’ – but it’s certainly difference.

The 1940s were tough going for Les – his demonstrations of The Log met with little interest at first, and two serious accidents in 1940 and 1948 involved long periods of rest and recuperation – but in 1951, Gibson placed Les’ designs at the centre of their response to the new Fender electric guitar. The first production model was introduced in 1952. This went through a surprisingly volatile period of evolution in the six years before the ‘Les Paul Standard’ model made its belated debut. Today, 1958 and 1959 Les Paul Standards are some of the most coveted and highly-prized instruments on the auction market.

It would be another six years before the Standard became the à la mode guitar of the British blues boom. Eric Clapton played a Les Paul Standard on his hugely influential album with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, and this zippy little single from around that time ably indicates the instrument’s capacity for searing through brain tissue:

Clapton’s replacement, the great and enigmatic Peter Green, was every bit as capable of chilling the blood. Most commonly invoked is his instrumental “The Super-Natural”, but it’s the startling, vaguely ambivalent hush of Fleetwood Mac’s “Albatross” that I always think of first. Here, Peter’s guitar tone is soft, powerful and fluid in a way that shows another side of the instrument and a different kind of power, like Wes Montgomery heard from inside the womb. It’s as much a part of this music as Tom Verlaine’s trebly squalling or Tom Waits’ hairballs.

Awkwardly enough, by the point that the Clapton/Bluesbreakers album inspired this massive surge in interest, Gibson had actually discontinued production of the Les Paul models. The Standard had been replaced in 1961 with an all-new design introduced as ‘the New Les Paul’ until Les, who didn’t care for it, petitioned the company to take his name off it. It was subsequently marketed as the SG. Production of the Les Paul Standard only resumed in 1968, but has continued uninterrupted to the present day. Although especially popular with jazz and blues guitarists, the model’s versatility has lent itself to many musical quarters. Local heroes SunnO))) for instance. This lovely promotional photograph sees Mr O’Malley sporting a very fetching Les Paul Custom, left, and Mr Anderson modeling what appears to be a black Les Paul Goldtop.

SunnO)))’s music is an admittedly extreme example of anything in particular, but it’s representative of what solid-body electric guitars make possible. Putting Charlie Christian’s guitar into any sort of high-gain amplification would result in utterly uncontrollable howling feedback (for a taster of this, check the Velvet Underground’s “I Heard Her Call My Name”, where Lou Reed’s hollow-body Gretsch squeals like a cat in heat each and every time he stops flailing at it). Those guitarists who have used archtop guitars in such situations – Larry Carlton or Freddie King, just for instance – tend to be using archtops built with solid cores, direct descendants of the Log.

In a certain sense, this is difficult to talk sensibly about. The solid body guitar is a modern archetype. It changed the course of popular music. And while I can’t respectably contend that if not for Les Paul it would never have existed, I find there’s something special in understanding that someone did have to bring it into being, not in some revelatory stroke of ingenuity, but in patient and deliberate experimentation. The imagination and the initiative to put notions into motion; without wishing to sound didactic, I think that’s tremendously important.

Before I have the chance to get carried away with pronouncements here, let’s take a look at what Les did with it himself:

 

2. Some really ridiculously fun music

I’ve always thought that Les Paul and Mose Allison would have made a good pairing on record, because to me their personalities and musical presences seem very complementary. Both play music with a side-of-the-mouth Damon Runyon sassiness that doesn’t quite qualify as either jazz or country, but instead creates this blithe-spirited confection of both – song and dance and answering back all at once. They don’t quite take themselves seriously, bless them. So it is that from my outpost here on Airstrip One, a decade after I first heard either of them and six decades after they began cutting records, I can climb to a high point and look out toward the north Atlantic and listen to them, and it still sounds like the future to me.

Les was gigging on a semi-pro basis from 1928 (that is, from the age of thirteen), and eight years later had migrated from Wisconsin to Chicago, where he began playing in jazz bands. It was around this time he came under the influence of Django Reinhardt’s recordings, and it’s easy to hear how Django’s cool, calm and kinetic style got under his skin. There’s the same playful, damn-right-I-went-there curl of the lip clearly audible in both men’s playing. Here’s Django again, with his tune “Minor Swing”:

Whereas here, from 1944, is Les Paul live with Nat King Cole and others at the inaugural Jazz At The Philharmonic concert, a last-minute stand-in for Cole’s regular guitarist, Oscar Moore. The whole track is a marvel, really but things really take off from about 7:00 onwards if you’re the impatient kind. Please do your best to disregard the exploding head.

However, many of Les’ biggest hits and loveliest records were cut with the radiant Mary Ford. The couple began working together in 1946, having been introduced to one another by Gene Autry, and married in 1949. Here is a video of them appearing together on Alistair Cooke’s Omnibus TV show in 1953, performing their hit record “How High The Moon”:

And here, from around the same time, is an episode of The Les Paul & Mary Ford At Home Show. The sting over the initial graphic that sounds rather like a synthesizer is another one of Les’ innovations, varispeeded guitar. This features “Alabamy Bound” and “Darktown Strutters’ Ball”:

Mary Ford’s way with a melody is one of the enduring pleasures of my world.

There’s a verve and zippiness to Les’ guitar work here that seems to prefigure Scotty Moore and the kind of chunky, clang-a-lang moves a modern ear might associate with – sharp intake of breath, teacup rattles in saucer – dirty ass rock’n’roll. This meretricious melange of musical miscegenation notwithstanding, Les and Mary hit it big and their records sold in the millions. Between 1950 and 1954 they had 16 top-ten hits, the vast majority recorded at home in their garage; in 1951 alone, they sold six million records.

Their work together is available nowadays in a number of releases of variable quality and generosity. I’ve found that the “Best of the Capitol Masters – 90th Birthday Edition” album is a nice place to start.

There’s a curiously Futurist twang to many of Les’ productions. Ever the artful and conscientious recordist, he nonetheless didn’t have access to certain devices modern studios take for granted, and so there’s a sense – especially with the early recordings, which as we’ll see later are triumphs of diligence and inspiration over diminished means – that the frequencies and levels are not quite tamed, that the overall sonic picture has a few more unburnished edges on it than we’re quite accustomed to, in a similar way to some of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop productions. Personally, I’m all for it. I like being able to feel the texture of the sound in this way. It creates a sort of dynamic tension, Charles Atlas style, between the engineering and the entertainment that provokes. Gorgeous, artful arrangements that aren’t quite allowed to turn into Mantovani anaesthetia because they’re still, when you get right down to it, garage demos.

Speaking of which, Les & Mary’s recording of “The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise” inspired this lovely Stan Freberg parody from 1952:

Les and Mary faded from the charts somewhat in the late 50s, as many stars of the firmament did around that time, and the couple would divorce in 1964. Mary Ford retired from music, remarried, and lived happily in California until her passing in the late 1970s.

For his own part, Les went into semi-retirement, although he continued to tour and record on an occasional basis through the 60s and 70s. The 1976 collaboration with his erstwhile protege Chet Atkins, Chester & Lester, is full of good humour and charming music. Illness would waylay him for most of the 1980s, but from 1994 up to the time of his death, he regularly played Monday night shows at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City, routinely ambushing visiting dignitaries and inviting them to sit in with his band.

YouTube user trondant (http://www.youtube.com/user/trondant/) shot this excellent film of Les in situ in 2003:

Let me be in no way unclear, as the man says: I really like this music. It charms and thrills me. It occasionally stings, but lightly. It has nothing directly to say to me about class consciousness, wanton romantic despair, or all the other egregiously fraught personal bullshit that I have a wen to frame my chosen entertainment inside. So for the while that I am listening, all of those things cease to matter, for which I am very thankful.

The rest of the world is full of certainty, and I alone am tentative – or so it seems to me, and this, of course, is the rub – but for the time that I spend listening, the two of them, Les and Mary, are altogether themselves and having a conversation with me, and I am entertained and consoled.

Maybe this is rather a lot for me to read into twangs and clangs, but it seems to suit me fine for now.

There’s no time that I don’t learn, with the worst and the best. I don’t even know that there is such a thing as the worst and the best. I just feel as though everybody has a gift, everybody has something to say, and there’s some good in there if you look for it, right? When I dial that radio, I may listen to Jimi Hendrix one night, the next night I’m listening to Segovia, any one of them can get me fast, because they play things that are terribly interesting. […] It’s actually a pleasure that we can play – what other occupation can starve so pleasantly? [laughter]
–ibid.

 

3. Sound-on-sound and multitrack tape recording

Up until recent times, most of the records that you know and love were made on magnetic tape. This itself was a recent invention. Startling as it sounds, before 1948, all recordings were cut direct to acetate. (Not that I profess to understand exactly how, but here’s a 1942 documentary on the manufacturing processes of shellac 78s). Even Hugh Tracey, who as an ethnomusicologist making field recordings in southern Africa faced tougher working conditions than Phil Spector’s tape op, had to use a clockwork recording lathe (towed on a trailer behind his truck) that cut audio directly into aluminium plates.

Magnetic tape had been successfully patented in 1928 by Fritz Pfleumer but it wasn’t until the late thirties that German company AEG successfully developed the world’s first reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorder. It wouldn’t be until the late forties, however, when Jack Mullin personally liberated two AEG tape recorders and fifty reels of tape from a German radio facility and hauled them back to the USA, that the technology could really take off.

Not that Les had sat around waiting for any of this to happen. By 1948, he had already developed and released a rendition of “Lover (When You’re Near Me)” recorded in his garage using a recording lathe that he’d designed and built himself (key components, he tells us, included a Cadillac flywheel). Here it is:

This finished product is the outcome of a fantastically precarious process that I will now attempt to describe. Les would play the first part, recording it direct to acetate. Having done that, he’d remove the acetate and place it on a turntable. He would then play the first disc back on a turntable while playing a new part along with it, recording the commingling sounds of both onto the new acetate. Repeating this process would add more parts..

Les would develop a variation on this demanding technique in the early 50s when he acquired his first open-reel tape-recorders, but that would introduce problems all its own. On the tape system, each new edit – each addition – was destructive. There was no erase or undo button in the event of a screw-up. Neither had been invented yet. As Les puts it in this clip from the (excellent) Les Paul: Chasing Sound! documentary film, “you’re burning the bridges as you go”:

Throughout these restless experiments and throughout his life, Les’ relationship with technology seems crucially playful. The varispeeded guitars on ‘Lover’, for instance, were achieved by cranking his cutting lathe to run at half-speed while recording, meaning that when the acetate is played back at normal speed everything sounds twice as fast and correspondingly higher-pitched. Familiar to anyone who ever put a record on a turntable at the wrong speed, it’s the same stunt that Ross Bagdasarian used in the late ’50s to create the Alvin & The Chipmunks records.

Here’s Les again:

“In 1932 in Chicago at WBBM, the sound effects guys were working on thunder. They took a phonograph pickup, took the needle out and put a spring in, let the spring dangle down. They hit it with a tymp [tympani] stick, with the cotton ball on it, and it’d go boom, like thunder. It was great – you could control it. Then the other guy says “What happens if you put a pickup on the other end of the spring, and feed that back in?” And they got this reverb – the spring reverb was born. The echo, the delay – the first thing was the delay, phase, all those things came about first with disc-to-disc. And all I did was put the playback head behind the record head [on the tape recorder] and I had “hello-hello-hello,” the repeat. That was the thing that I wished to create, which was a type of ambient sound.”

(This mechanism Les describes here was the principle behind all the echo units marketed through the 60s and early 70s. When the psychedelic thing hit and sensory distortion became the in thing from way out, such devices would swiftly become ubiquitous. Terry Riley constructed sound-on-sound pieces like A Rainbow In Curved Air using a similar tape machine set-up to Les’; a few years later, Brian Eno and Robert Fripp would demonstrate ‘Frippertronics’ on their No Pussyfooting album. Later on, electronic translations of this effect would be developed by companies like Roland and Electro-Harmonix. Guitarists like Bill Frisell, John Martyn, Vini Reilly and the Edge have placed its shadowy potential at the heart of their styles.)

Throughout the 1950s, Les worked closely and consistently with Ampex on designs for some of the first professional tape recorders. In 1953, Les had given Ampex the commission, if not necessarily the idea, to build the world’s first eight-track tape recorder, unofficially dubbed the Octopus. Distinct from the machines he’d modified to produce his hits with Mary, this monstrous contraption was the horny-hewed ancestor of the multitrack machines used to record essentially everything from around 1958 onwards to the present day. But what does that mean?

The musicological implications of multitracking are basically these:
(a) you don’t have to record an entire performance all at once
(b) you can build up entire pieces from individual parts, one-at-a-time
(c) you can record a particular part in isolation from everything else, ostensibly getting a ‘clearer picture’ without the overspill of the drummer or the brass instruments; each instrument, perhaps, gets its own strip of tape …
(d) … and having assured yourself of (c), you can go on to do post-processing of it – distort it, put effects on, cut the midrange, drop the bass – without affecting anything else on the recording.

In summary: the world explodes. The extent to which this allows one to make ‘better quality’ recordings (hi-er fi, if you will) is as eminently and mind-numbingly debatable as the definition of ‘quality’ itself – Les himself seemed a little ambivalent about this – but I take full responsibility for venturing the opinion that this was the critical breach, the exact point at which sound recording ceased to be purely documentary and began to become an imaginary art as well as a science. (Not that this is an unambiguously good thing, necessarily, but even so…)

As an example, think of a record that might be incredibly meaningful to you: let’s say for instance that it’s one of my favourites, “Tractor Rape Chain” by Guided By Voices. Now, I have to admit that I don’t have the slightest notion what that song is literally ‘about’, but I know the consistent, reproducible feeling I get when it comes on. I observe things with a piece of music I really bond with: the shape of it, the texture, the curves and vertices of its form. (I don’t think I’m unusual in doing this, either, except in terms of a wont for expounding on it at length.) So with this song, I notice that exact and particular way that Robert’s vocal sits in a subtly echoing place of its own that it doesn’t share with anything else on the recording. Or how about the way that when they get to the chorus, one of the two rhythm guitars abruptly quits as if someone threw a switch, suddenly making the whole song feel like it’s lost twenty pounds and lined up a date for the evening into the bargain.

This kind of direct manipulation of apparent space and time relies for artistic impact on contrasts, which wouldn’t be technically possible without multitracking. So no Anthem For The Sun; no World of Echo; no The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady; no Secrets From The Clockhouse or Cut or Love’s Secret Domain or America Eats Its Young. It wouldn’t necessarily be a better or a worse world, but it’d be very different.

This said, in all earnest acknowledgement, multitrack tape recording is the kinda thing that someone would have come up with sooner or later if Les hadn’t been there, or had been doing something else. However, people don’t tend to spontaneously emit new technology, unless they’re Nikola Tesla. The material of what passes for human progress, it seems to me, is one big mess of endless machinations and derivations and re-derivations and screw-ups and the occasional complete fluke, but Les had the imagination to consider “what if…?”, and the persistence and initiative to go and find out how the what might come to be an if:

“Made some noise – sang into it, played into it – first record, it’s out there, it’s recorded, I went crazy. I could hear what I was doing and even though it wasn’t great fidelity, it was there. The regular steps that anybody would take that’s interested would be to improve upon it. So the next thing to do is get a microphone. The guy says, “You mean a transducer.” So I learned the word. And it was just a thing where, as a little kid you’d say, “I’ve got a problem and there’s something out there that can solve the problem.”

 

4. Unverifiable personal testimony

In the late 80s, when my father had just about recovered from the cancer that had almost killed him, he took up the guitar again. I was around eight or nine years old (I’m now twenty-eight). After a year or so of strumming a Hohner classical guitar, Dad decided he would get himself an electric guitar and saved up and bought a Les Paul Standard.

Treacherous memory tells me that we didn’t really have furniture as such in our house: there were seats and surfaces and tables and things, but I don’t think it’d ever before occurred to me how beguiling an inanimate object could be. It looked like this:

I could – and, as I recall, did – spend hours gazing at it while he played it, seeing the body catch light in its glossy coat, seeing how burgundy stain bled into a honeyed glow beneath the pickups and bridge, and listening to him run through the changes to song after song, most of which I’d never heard in the original and several of which I still haven’t. In primary school music lessons (third grade, I think) I’d begun to play the descant recorder. Thus equipped and reading the top-line over his shoulder, our moody rendition of Traffic’s “Forty Thousand Headmen”, had it been recorded, would surely have been a breakout smash all over the world.

I remember looking at the headstock, which has Les Paul written on it in gold script, having no idea it was a Person Name rather than a Thing Name, and vaguely wondering if it was French, and thinking that ‘Gibson’ didn’t sound particularly French, and if it was French, why was it a plural noun? If it was a plural noun? (Already the academy had lost me to rock’n’roll, see. It happened that quickly.)

These evenings made me want to play guitar myself as much as I’d wanted to do anything, and I took it up myself in the next few months. My guitar for the first two or three years was the reassuringly cheap Hohner classical guitar passed down to me. I played it until the grooves in the nut at the top of the neck had worn away, and then got Dad to help me make a replacement with a vise, a file and a hacksaw.

Generally speaking, there are only two vices that teenage boys indulge in when left alone in the ancestral pile, but I had a third. When I was alone in the house I would sneak into my parents’ bedroom and look at the Les Paul. The guitar case had a combination lock on it, and I spent months trying to figure out the combination. It got so that the smudgy fingerprints put him on to me, and he started resetting it regularly. But I’d got the knack, or thought I had, and he got tired of changing the combination before I got tired of figuring it out. The lock kicked like a mule when I finally got it right. THONK!

I looked down at the guitar, resplendent in hot pink fur, and went and put a hand around the neck. It was sufficiently snug in its case that I had to tug it free. It was amazingly heavy. Talk about feeling fateful. It might as well have had an Once And Future Dickhead inscription somewhere: whosoever draws this guitar from this guitar case shall probably get caught red-handed playing along to ‘Starship Trooper’.

In the fullest flush of youth, my favourite music in the whole world at that moment was ‘The Yes Album’ and Frank Zappa’s ‘Hot Rats’, and I couldn’t play a damn thing off either of them. Knowing some scales would probably have helped. But surely this thing, the Grail of Sounding Decent & Being Able To Bend Strings, would make all the difference…? Reader, it is not something I am commonly disposed to do, but I cannot be certain that I did not micturate.

Well, no. I couldn’t play the thing halfway decently, of course. It kept pulling itself out of my lap. They’re really built to be played with a strap, even sitting down. With a Fender, which I was a bit more familiar with because a friend owned one, you can balance it right there on your leg and go to town. With a Les Paul, all that maple and mahogany will pull the backside of the thing over your leg and off into the great beyond. All in all this badly freaked me out and after a few minutes I ended up putting it back in the case pretty quick before I could bust it and turn it into just another imaginary thing in the world, patched together from parts that didn’t matter.

Patched together … well, quite. Our understanding of where we came from appears to fragment as we get older. Memories seem to lift away from each other along associational lines, like screen-printing in reverse. I think it’s probably something to be thankful for – every month and year a careful step away from the annihilating totality of childhood emotion – but I digress. What I mean by this is to say that when I think, now, twenty years later, of basking in the presence of that guitar, I don’t remember how lonely I felt in our home, or how completely at a loss I felt at school with anything like an everyday social situation. But I remember hearing my father strum through “Pictures of Lily” by the Who, singing it in our front room as I did my arithmetic homework, and vaguely wondering how pictures of a woman could make the person in the song feel better. I remember this one blues figure in B minor that he’d learnt from a cassette tape that actually had bent strings in it, and seemed to wander all over the neck like it owned the place. I remember him never quite getting “The Wind Cries Mary” right (because it had an E flat chord in it), and that it didn’t matter. I feel very fortunate that my memories of growing up are coloured by these things.

I’d still recommend learning an instrument, or at least screwing around with one, to anybody. Making yourself available to music – the same goes for any creative force, but this one was mine – seems to do things that are uniquely and distinctively useful in the business of being a human being. I’m very grateful, as I am grateful that the music Les and Mary made is available to me, affording what it does in the way of grace, good humour and judicious amounts of cornball pizazz.

I suppose it might have worked out much the same way if Les Paul hadn’t done the things he did, and perhaps my Dad would have bought a Telecaster instead and I’d have gotten here in one piece after all. But he, Les, did, and he, my Dad, didn’t, and I, myself, have.

(There are many like it, but this one is mine.)

—

Further reading:
Les Paul’s Wikipedia page
The Gibson Les Paul’s Wikipedia page
Les Paul & Ampex by George Petersen at Mix Online
The Les Paul: Chasing Sound! website

 

Famous users:

Jimmy Page Talks About His “Number 1” 1959 Gibson Les Paul

Peter Townsend plays his

Steve Jones played a “Gibson Les Paul Special Double Cut” in 1976/77

John Lennon

Me And My Guitar interview with Ace Frehley

Bob Marley

jeff beck les paul guitar tone

Mick Ronson Talks Trademark Tone

Johnny Thunders

Peter Green/Fleetwood Mac

Mick Jones/The Clash

The Exemplary Firebird Pickup Tones of Neil Young’s ‘Old Black’ Gibson Les Paul

Frank Zappa

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Barkley, Hi, Barkley! Awesome to see you! Thanks so much about ‘I Wished’. That’s so good to hear. No, I’m still ridiculously depriving myself of a Switch fearing I’ll never get everything I need to get done if I have that item  to spend all day every day playing with. Some kind of wannabe monk thing or something. But the nudge will help. How are you? I hope you’re extremely great. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I know, it was like a whole book of poems. Speaking of, I hope your yesterday love starts filtering your in-box. Ouch. Love submitting a poem to SCAB that starts ‘spring is here, and it seemed like a perfect time to slaughter every twink in sight, so…’ (not a good poem, but at least it would be more fun to reject), G. ** Shane Christmass, Hi, Shane. I’m in the pro- ‘Serpent/Rainbow’ camp too. Thanks for the link. Cool, I’ll go imbibe that first chance. ** Misanthrope, Not hating is definitely an important part of writing something. Well, I guess unless it’s a love/hate thing. That can work. MFA-ish? Eek. Okay, I’m going to trust you on that, buddy. ** David Ehrenstein, Mm, that’ll help, but Macron is not a wildly popular guy here. It’ll be another lesser of two evils kind of thing. Craven’s early films aren’t bland at all. Yes, I skipped including the Meryl Streep film. Didn’t want to tarnish his legacy. ** _Black_Acrylic, I never saw ‘The Runaways’, but I love The Runaways themselves. And I like Dakota Fanning. Cherie was in a couple of quite good B-movies back in the day. ‘Foxes’ is a good one. ** T. J., Hi! ‘Nightmare 3’ is my favorite of them too. High five. Really nice viewing session you had there, obviously. Agree about ‘I a Man’. I haven’t seen that Antonioni, which is weird. Huh. I’ll see if it’s lodged somewhere that I can access. What’s going on with you otherwise? It’s raining here, but what else is new. ** Bill, Thanks! Yeah, I was sure I had done Craven, but then I searched the archives to be sure, and he had somehow slipped by. Good old Eugene Robinson. And, yeah, the Bunuel album is really raucous and fun. ** Steve Erickson, Thanks. Ah, I’ll tone down whatever curiosity I had about ‘Rock Kids’. Thanks for heading me off at the pass. Congrats on the radio play! Now you can tell the requisite ‘first time I heard my song on the radio’ story to your future biographer. ** Rafe, Hi, Rafe. Unless I’m crazy, you’re in for a serious treat with ‘The Book of Lies’. Let me know what if anything it did for you. Glad the gig was of interest. I saw two  of the ‘Scream’ movies, and, in both cases, I thought they were kind of interestingly clever, but also kind of annoyingly so, and I didn’t really come away with much of anything positive. Some people seem to especially like #4. Thanks about my Friday, and, naturally, I hope yours is fucking electric! ** Okay. Here’s another restoration from the old days made by yet another lost d.l. of this blog’s earlier incarnation, this time a kind of overview of and paean to the great guitar auteur Mr. Les Paul. Have fun. See you tomorrow.