Thursday, January 1, 2009

Hello 2009/A Day In The Life....of the ABPT/more....




Well Happy New Year and all that.....we made it to another 'new year' whatever the imaginary gregorian/julian illusion may mean.

I started off as I have for, god, 25 years or so playing "New Year's Day" by U2...just to start the year on a severely silly note. But -- still a killer track...what the Edge is doing there --and those Voxy tones... a part of my DNA. Love it. Fuck all you U2-haters, LOL! They're doing something right...same exact lineup since August 1976, wow.

Anyway --Been home for almost 3 weeks, great to be standing still ! Re-designing my studio-space, working on guitar tones. I am back to the drawing board. After you work with Al Di Meola, Adrian Belew, Ike Willis and Derek Trucks... it's very hard to EVER be satisfied with you suck-ass tone. But -- I'm real happy with a very basic setup - Mesa Boogie Lonestar right into a Marshall 4x12...heaven. More on that later. Still searching for 'that tone'. Actually rehearsing a bit with the southern edition of DELICIOUS, and we played a very fun gig last saturday in town... stay tuned..

WHAT a year --- man oh man...a zillion flights it seemed ...and at least 15 countries. Fantastic time, dunno if I can top that in 2009, let's see..

SO -- I still had a bit of the OZ/BELEW trip to talk about so here we go:

A day in the Life - ABPT
Sydney -- a couple days before the last show....we had the morning off..everyone had the option to do a city-walkabout.
10:00am I did what i NEVER do... stroll around a downtown area and go shopping!! Wow... it's global-recession-bargain time!!

At some place called Hi Fi something or other they were doing a major DVD/CD blowout... for about $6.65 USD each I grabbed:
Jeff Buckley Live in chicago
AC/DC Live at Donnington
DEVO Live/De-evolution
Satriani Live In San Fran

and on CD for about $9.00 USD the new AC/DC Black Ice....(I'm glad I got this since back home you can ONLY get it at WalMart!) I don;t totally boycott them on principle, but try to avoid going in there..

So I was stocked up on music, and also grabbed some clothes, sneakers, great Global Economic Meltdown Prices..wherever you go!!

1:00 pm The Middle Eastern food is awesome here, as is the Indian, Thai and more. Quick cheap lunch at a food court, which generally are amazing in their choices and quality/cost of food. Vegan Heaven.
Back to the hotel in time for......

3:45 pm - Lobby Call for the 30-40 min ride to Cronulla, New South Wales
(Ah the Brits. They LOVED to attach English-City & Town Names to EVERY fucking place they rolled into and violently raped and pillaged...the world is littered with Queenstowns, New Londons, Georgetowns, Victorias, Perths, Liverpools, Manchesters, Kingstons, Lake Victorias, Yorks, Queens-this and-that...and here - NEW South Wales. You stick the NEW on there and all is well. Man they were some brutal fuckers. But - hey -- great schools.)


Anyway -- here is the band-in-the-van on the way down.....


The club is a SMALL one..dinner type theater (again)...this one with that pinnacle of stage-design genius -- the triangle-stage-in-a-corner. Great. Who ever decided to put the stage in a corner- SMACK !!! But -- we squeezed them on there.... all is cool. Julie is running only a 4x10 tonight instead of the usual 8x10, and Adrian has a pair of classic cabs -- older, mono 1960 Marshall Tweed 4x12s.

For monitors - we have merely...TWO mixes. This will be a little challenge, ideally this band uses FOUR mixes... but again , Adrian, being a very tolerant and flexible soul, allowed me to put his VG-99 guitar and Boomerang Loops in the front wedges, with his vocals. In this set, he never sings while he's playing the virtual-guitar stuff, so it works out cool..
5:30 pm Here's the trio soundchecking..as you can se it's a seated place, kind of mellow dinner theater vibe..

Soon they're done and off to dinner - this place feeds us , but not till after 730. So the band split to find some Japanese. I'm running a bit behind them as usual since I have to tweak a couple things, tape some pedals down and do some laptop-work. Cool little town, I think i'll split now and just walk the street a bit...and check out the new AC/DC......which of course, is GREAT 'cos it's...just like the older AC/DC. Actually, some nice new touches here and there, but it's Gibsons into Marshalls all the way. Nice.


cool..found another GREAT little indian place. Like the English, the Aussies love their curries...and so little "curry shops" are EVERYWHERE....

I was enjoying a very excellent combo plate, a Dhal, a spinach curry, mixed vggies, a pakora.. always so easy to find vegan indian... when a distinctive bald man hurrying don the sidewalk looked in, saw me, stopped and turned on his heel and greeted me with a smile,

He had arrived at the club early and they told him I headed out to eat... - it was the legendary CHRIS HASKETT.....Chris has released some amazing solo CDs out over the last decade or so, and is the longtime guitarist for, amongst other bands, the Rollins Band.

In my opinion, what Chris laid down in the late 80s and early 90s was part of the bedrock of post-punk hard-rock guitar sounds....his crushing "PRS into Mesa-Boogie" sound changed my life...we would go see EVERY Rollins Band show anywhere within a couple hours..in NY, NJ, Philly, whatever!
The intensity of Rollins' stripped down marine drill-sergeant vocal attack.....and Chris' Zen like calm as he created the most vicious squall of guitar madness, was something that hasn't been duplicated. Underpinning all of it -who could forget the thunderous bass of Andrew Weiss, (and later Melvin Gibbs), and the machine-gun-deep groove drumming of Sim "Sugar" Cain.

Again --Thanks to youtube, you can crank up the glory that was (and maybe will be again..) the Rollins Band. They reunited briefly in 2007?? 2006 to tour with the great X (Exene Cervenka and all original members), and who knows what the future will bring..but they are well documented.

If you scroll down to my Eindhoven NL entry you'll see we had a special guest show up to see the show: Theo Van Rock -- Rollins longtime sound man. It's all connected -- Adrian Belew appears on a track with Rollins on the recent William Shatner album.

And at Adrian's house - his studio alarm system is..a Rollins!!! Every time I go thru this door , I can't HELP but picture Henry Rollins crouched in the bushes, waiting for an intruder, so he can bellow " WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE, MAAAAAAANNN!!!! YOU ARE TRESPASSING!! YOU MUST THINK YOU'RE GONNA LIVE FOR-EVER!!!!!!!!!!?"


So Chris came in and we caught up nicely as I chowed, he had eaten already. Finishing my awesome curries, we were just about to leave and, looking out the door he exclaimed "Hey is that Adrian!?!?!" I whipped around and yes, It was Ade racing by, mysteriously.... We gathered our stuff and headed in his direction...he had disappeared, like the Mad Hatter. A mystery indeed. Turned out he had left his satchel in a Japanese restaurant and was rushing back over to retrieve it, which thankfully he did. Chris and I caught up with him in the square, after some intros we headed back to the club. Two guitarists who played with Bowie!! Cool.!
7:45 pm The place was starting to get a nice little crowd in there, happy fine-beer lovin' Aussies..drinkin'. chatting and eating. Ah this is the life. Soon it was time to start. I went to get the band from "the green room" which in this case was the beauty salon next door!! Hilarious but it worked...the hilarity continued at the set-break with Chris and Adrian promoting one of the waxing products in the place..

10:30 pm Really great show -- with only a couple left in the year you could feel it -the band had a sense of "let's go for it and shut this puppy down for 2008"..or at least that's how I perceived it...Adrian especially just played some really blistering stuff... really got out there on the improv solos.....

Post show the band did the traditional hang n' sign with some great fans. Here they are just as it was being set up:

People were fantastica and welcoming - and in general were amazed that we came to little, "remote" Cronulla, New South Wales, Australia. Folks, check your maps...Head a bit south from all this and ...you're in Antarctica!!

I'm fond of looking at the globe "upside down'. It's COMPLETELY ARBITRARY that we view the map of the world the way we do. Actually -- it's clearly the bias of the first global-map makers, perhaps the Chinese and then Europeans, perhaps the Vikings. Either would OF COURSE put their homeland at "the top" and the European explorers/map makers to follow had no argument with that . We have the POLES which are indeed a clear geometric way to describe the planet's motion - around an axis. But the concept of UP/DOWN or TOP/BOTTOM is meaningless in space - and aliens approaching the solar system would indeed react to the PLANE it spins on- with the SUN as the center/axis. They could approach from EITHER direction that we consider 'solar north' or 'solar south' but in actual fact the whole notion of 'top of the earth' or 'down under' is not rooted in ANYTHING , it' s simply cultural and imaginary.

Anyway look at how fucking close we were to the continent of Antarctica ( A Belew track, by the way) . For the hell of it here's the 'traditional' view. BTW all these pics are courtesy of the wonderful iPhone - which not only runs google earth amazingly but lets you do screen-shots of anything.

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