The Last Bass Outpost

Set to land Tuesday. Now I need to order a "Gibson" TRC and some black reflector knobs.

Upbadging?

Now that is interesting, those guys were really great and quirky, I like the theatrics of the singer and his voice. What a find!

Steve Harley would have no doubt been chuffed too. He never meant a dime in the US and then there is all of the sudden this US band covering (very well) one of his freak arrangements of a Harrison song for which he caught an incredible amount of flak when it was released in the UK. It was deemed a lèse-majesty and the NME riled that "Harley has massacred all the song's inherent charm with his awful version". (To me it was what a good rearrangement should do, I love both the original and his version of it.) Harley had been a rock journalist himself before he formed Cockney Rebel - there were frequent barbs against him by his former ilk and he gave as good as he got.

Terry Roth was a great frontman and entertainer - HEAVILY influenced by Bowie. Sadly, we lost him last year. And yeah, quirky is a pretty good descriptor. Their original material ran the gamut from pop to jazz/swing to cabaret to rock - and somehow it all worked, even for guys like me who were usually listening to Kiss, Foghat or Nugent. The band went though a few phases and lineups, with its most successful being the one in the video, and the "revised" version when Tico replaced Tony on drums. Great players all.
I'm sure the British press would have loved this one...

Hey, we're just catching up to the rest of the cool kids around here. I don't envy the youth when it comes to what they're looking at for buying a house now. Fifty isn't really such a huge number. Just fifty thousand bucks gets you that new Jimmy Page double neck. What a deal! 

They're also making a lot more money (generally speaking) as they come into the house-buying years too. Plus, they're generally not amenable to fixer-uppers, which is something many of us just accepted as a matter of course. Every generation has its challenges - personally, I'd rather deal with this than the Depression, WWII or Vietnam.

Since it was a slow work day I decided to summarize the issue at hand

Shouldn't the original Embassy bass be in there somewhere?

The control cavity would always be a dead giveaway.

A cavity search usually turns up a multitude of things...

Well, in that case that SG is now exactly where it belongs, namely in a collection of 20th century cultural artifacts. In essence, a bunch of rock'n'roll Stradivaris. A good home. You don't really want guitars like that to be continued to be played until they need a refin, a refret or new pups - they need to be preserved in the state they were used to write rock history.

I agree with his assessment of the Dylan Strat btw. Dylan was no Chuck Berry or Jimi Hendrix in a musical sense, but he brought the power of social commentary into rock music.

The Fool SG has already been repaired extensively during Rundgren's ownership - retouching, clear-coating, replacement of portions of the neck, headstock and some electronics - so it's not exactly pristine. Somebody actually built him a replica, which he said played and sounded better than the original.

Dylan's Strat is is of great importance primarily because he used it onstage at Newport, which was his first-ever performance on electric guitar. That set was seen as a turning point in popular music - where acoustic folk and electric rock were inexorably linked. Dylan's hard-core fans were horrified by his embrace of the electric.

I'm not sure what either classic rock or underrated means anymore, but I don't think any of the ones they mentioned were given short shrift by anyone but critics and journalists. However, I'd like to add some others...
Three Dog Night - The classic lineup was not to be trifled with, musically, vocally, or in terms of gold records yet they are all but ignored in these types of discussions.
Grand Funk Railroad - Loved by fans, hated by critics. Mark Farner is a f'ing legend.
Uriah Heep - Calling them "the poor man's Deep Purple" does them such a disservice. The live album is a tour de force and should be required listening for all bassists.
J. Geils Band - Overshadowed by their 80s product, but an incomparable live rock band.
Foghat - Nobody boogied better. Should have been American.

Some people like to make up shit about themselves. In grammar school, there was a kid to used to tell us that he had the Mach 5 in his garage and that Gigantor was stored in his attic (supposedly the roof of his house slid open so G could get out). If they aren't called out for it early on, the lies get bigger, and after a time they can't go back out the way they came - so they expand and embellish until it becomes a pseudo-reality. I'd be interested in knowing if she engaged in this kind of stuff as a kid.

I have a hard time getting all twisted up about the business of "stolen land". There is significant evidence in studies that there are no truly "indigenous" people in the US anyway - that everyone's presence here is a result of migrations that can go back 30,000 years - from Eurasia (via the Bering Land Bridge) or South America on the west coast and the Nordic countries on the east. I also don't place a lot of stock in the theory that people spontaneously leapt into existence from hot springs (that's probably as likely as the Gigantor story). At the time America was colonized/settled, territory or land was acquired by, well, taking it. Sometimes you had to fight to maintain what you already had because there was no means of proving that it belonged to you. This was common among Indian tribes as well - somebody showed up, said "I'm taking this" and the battle was joined. There were no land deeds, no mortgage bankers and no Century 21 offices in the center of town. No lawyers, either - cough, cough. That is not an excuse or mean that it was right - that's just the way it was. We can't view yesterday's transgressions through the prism of today's standards.