Dana_V

We've made the mistake of letting him sit in a few times over the years. In 2015 he decided to add "singing" to his oeuvre and wanted to make his big debut with us. I said okay, but you have to pick a song and come to a rehearsal first to see if it's going to work. He chose Charlie Musselwhite's "The Blues Overtook Me" - a straightforward medium-tempo shuffle 12-bar in G. He showed up to the rehearsal and announced, "I've practiced this song 97 times!" Now, our drummer, Bill, is quite the character himself. Sixty-seven years old, diabetic, been smoking cigarettes since he was a kid and "fully experienced" the 1960s. Deep gravely voice, white hair, white Wilford Brimley-style mustache. Zero filter between brain and mouth. He can be pretty intimidating. (But I've known him 24 years and love him like a brother. Plus he can play a shuffle like nobody's business.) Anyway, TZ arrives and we start into the song. He used up all the words of the first verse (notice I didn't say "sang") before we even got to the first chord change. Bill stopped the song and addressed TZ: "Man, what are you DOIN'? YOU NEED TO CALM THE F*CK DOWN!" It scared him so bad we didn't hear from him for two years.

I noticed you've had some interaction on FB with a certain local "harmonica stylist" with the initials TZ. Oh man. Whatever you do, don't open that door.

New ukulele day, slightly delayed. I thought y'all might like to see this. My mom gave my daughter Allie and me one of those DIY ukulele kits for Christmas. It took a little while, but we finished it on February 21st - which also happened to be Allie's 15th birthday. (She started teaching herself to play ukulele a couple of years ago and has gotten pretty good at it.) I did the assembly and she did the staining and paint work. Rather than use the strings supplied with the kit, I put on a set of Ernie Ball ball-end ukulele strings. The "frets" are integrated into the molded plastic fretboard, and as you can see, some of the gold paint has already started to come off. The Lemons & Lavender ukulele : She painted caricatures of herself (with her current short hairstyle) and me on the back. Lavender on the sides. To give it a bit of size perspective - and give this post some actual Hamer content - here's the uke with my '81 Special. The girl, the uke, the birthday cake. I'm no professional cake decorator, but I did my best to emulate the lemons and lavender theme. And yes, it was a lemon-flavored cake.

Seventeen pages and counting. Wow.

That look when your wig has fallen down in front of your eyes but you can't reach up and adjust it yet.

@MCChris, isn't that your favorite closing?

Beautiful. Also: It seems that you and I have similar tastes in fretboard inlays. If yours is 0095, it means that my 0093 can't be too far away from completion.

I too was introduced to Rush by way of All the World’s a Stage: the local FM station (97.1 KAYD, “FM-97”) would play the live version of “Working Man” on a regular basis. (This was in the days when FM radio had no issue playing 15-minute songs in regular rotation.) I bought the album and was off and running as a Rush fan. I only got to see them six times; I wish it could have been more. 10/25/1977 - Beaumont City Auditorium, Beaumont, TX 03/04/1979 - Fair Park Coliseum, Beaumont, TX 04/05/1982 - Lake Charles Civic Center, Lake Charles, LA 01/15/1986 (or maybe it was 01/16/1986) - The Summit, Houston, TX 06/11/2011 - Frank Erwin Center, Austin, TX 04/23/2013 - Frank Erwin Center, Austin, TX -- Neil’s second book, Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, came out in 2002. After his daughter died in a car crash and his wife died from cancer (“The doctors said it was cancer, but I knew it was of a broken heart”) in a span of about 10 months, the only way he could think of to deal with it was to get on his motorcycle and ride. He covered roughly 55,000 miles of North and Central America, trying to heal what he referred to as his “little baby soul.” Ghost Rider is a chronicle of that journey. Several years ago when I first got a Kindle, I downloaded it, kind of skimmed through it and thought it was an interesting travelogue. But I recently read it again from a paperback edition. As I’ve mentioned before, my wife of thirty years died in 2014. So this time I read it with a whole new perspective. Obviously, Neil Peart’s life and mine are (were) very different. I lost my wife; he lost his wife AND daughter. He was a successful, world-famous musician living his dream life and I’m…not. And I couldn’t exactly get on a R1100GS and check out from the world; I had a nine-year-old daughter to tend to and an 18-year-old son just out of high school trying to figure out what to do with his life. Not to mention I had to get up and go to work every day. But many of the things he wrote about really struck a chord – besides, loss is loss, regardless of your life situation. So I felt a bit of a kinship to him. “If the first is the year of sorrow, then the second is the year of emptiness.” How very true. As I read, I found myself wishing I could reach out to Neil and have a conversation. Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen, but there are many things I would have liked to have talked to him about – and none of them pertained to music or Rush. I was a couple of chapters away from finishing the book when the news broke that he had died. So even if I HAD found some way to communicate with him (which I never had any delusions of doing anyway), it definitely wasn’t going to happen now. So goodbye, Neil, from your longtime fan and brother in loss.

It kind of looks like somebody's not-quite-finished woodshop project.

I always loved Styx. My first rock concert was Foghat with Styx and Head East in 1976; Tommy Shaw had just joined the band and Equinox was their latest album. In December of that year I saw them again, this time headlining in support of Crystal Ball. The band was firing on all cylinders and it was awesome. That was in the funky old Beaumont City Auditorium, which was a great place for concerts -- Rush, AC/DC (with Bon Scott), Frank Marino, Triumph, etc. -- but it has since been transformed into the hoity-toity Julie Rogers Theatre. 🙄 I ended up seeing Styx quite a few times, including several times at The Summit in Houston, which was also a great place for concerts (as well as home to the Houston Rockets). Now it's the home of Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church). One of those times was when they opened for KISS. But Styx always delivered. Yes, they added the corny "guy pushing a broom" bit on the Paradise Theater tour, but that only occupied a small portion of the show. June, 1983. The Texxas World Music Festival, aka Texxas Jam, came to the Houston Astrodome. Uriah Heep - Unfortunately, the mix was pretty bad so they didn't sound very good. Ted Nugent - High energy, loud, everything you expected from Ted back then. Triumph - None of the lighting and pyro effects they were known for, but they still sounded great. Sammy Hagar - This guy had more energy than any human I've ever seen. He wore a headset mic and was constantly running around, climbing the lighting trusses, giving it 100% the entire time. He made the whole thing seem like it was one enormous house party. For the encore, Ted Nugent and Rik Emmett came out and played Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll" with Sammy and his band. Amazing. And then... Styx - Kilroy was in full effect. After that super-high-energy set from Hagar, does anyone really want to sit through ten minutes of bad dinner theater before the band even plays? Not to mention that, from way up in the rafters where we were sitting, you couldn't really hear it. Of course, part of that was due to an Astrodome full of (mostly) drunk people shouting their disapproval. Needless to say, it wasn't going over well. I don't remember how long we lasted into that debacle. We had been there all day, everybody was hot, tired and hungry, plus we still had a two-hour drive back home once we completed the long journey back to the car. So at some point my friends and I looked at each other and said, "You wanna go?" So we left. It's the only time I've ever bailed on a concert before it was over. Sometimes I think we should have stayed. Maybe if we had stuck it out until the end it would've gotten better.

I'm taking my 15-year-old daughter to see KISS in October. Her passion is singing, and her sense of pitch and timing is excellent. In fact, I recently discovered she has the ability to sing notes out of thin air and nail the pitch every time (I wish I could do that). So as much as DLR's caterwauling is going to hurt my ears, it's going to be ten times worse for her. I should probably start apologizing now.

Man, that four-and-a-half minute intro is some serious cheese, isn't it? Still, I wish I could have seen Angel back then. I was a big fan of Angel in the 70s, especially the first three albums. After that the lyrics started getting a little too "boy band-ish" for me, but I bought the albums anyway. On Earth as It Is in Heaven (produced by Eddie Kramer) is probably my favorite - the snare drum sounds HUGE. I finally got to see them in 1983 and it was a bit of a disappointment. They sounded okay, if I remember correctly, but it was on a multi-band bill on a small stage in the daytime -- no all-white costumes, no special effects, no lighting. Angel also appeared in the movie Foxes (1980), starring Jodie Foster, Scott Baio, Sally Kellerman, Randy Quaid, and Cherie Currie (!). I saw it at the drive-in theater when it came out. (Yes, I'm that old.) @The Shark - Same here! I saw Rex open for Ted Nugent (with Foreigner as the middle act) in Houston in 1977. The whole thing was a great show. At some point - I'm not sure of the date - Rex did a headlining show at a smaller venue and the opening act was a three-piece band called Liberation. I've never been able to track down any information about Liberation, but I remember two things: they did a cool cover of Elton John's "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" and they had to schlep their own gear. Rex was cool. Only two albums, but they rocked. After that Rex Smith reinvented himself as a teen idol, had a big hit with the ultra-cheesy "You Take My Breath Away," (not to be confused wit the Queen song of the same name), replaced Andy Gibb on Solid Gold and went into acting. But back to Angel for a minute. My girlfriend at the time (later wife, now deceased), was a fan along with me (we saw the aforementioned Foxes together). I remember when I showed her my newly purchased Live Without a Net album; she opened the gatefold, saw a picture of Felix Robinson and literally gasped for breath: "He's so fine!" Which, considering how many other girls likely had similar reactions, probably accounts for a good portion of Angel's success.

Was it something like this?

It didn't work on my phone, but it worked on my laptop.

Ordered.