Writing a blog is a great cure for insomnia. It’s currently 3.00am and I should be exhausted with all the energy spent trying to keep warm today. We had yet another power cut where I live. This one lasted for 6 hours. It’s getting really old. The head of the Connecticut Light & Power utility resigned over his incompetence after the last 8 day outtage. I’m seeing an electrician tomorrow who will install a permanently wired-in generator for the house, for when the next emergency kicks in. Trouble is, there’s a 2 month waiting list for them. All my neighbors have the same idea. I’m telling you, the infrastructure is breaking down in the USA. It’s happening right before our very eyes! The state of Connecticut, with one of the wealthiest per capita incomes, makes more submarines, guns, helicopters and other weapons of war but we can’t even bury our power lines as they do in Europe in order to protect its citizens from a little wind or rain. It’s sad. Put America back to work! Give the people a First World power supply instead of a Third World one! Rant over.

Anyway, I snapped this shot of a wonderful old Indian motorbike while I was up at our local town recycling center. I turned around and there it was. By the way, I liked it when they used to call this place the town dump. The good ol’ boys that hang out here, they still call it the dump. Sometimes when I’ve got things to dispose of, I meet the occasional neighbor and we catch up with the news. Where we live is a rural location so there are neighbors you might not have caught up with in a year. Kids who get to work out their community service hours, for drunk driving or other issues, also ‘work the trash’ and I got talking to one young guy who noticed the old music stand I was throwing away. He asked if I was a musician. I said, “yes, I hope so”, and he told me that he was a classical violinist. More on that later.

Back to the motorbike: From the 1940s, this bike was renovated by the venerable gentleman who rode in on her. Note the ‘death changer’ gear shift. You gotta be a warrior to ride this 1200 cc beauty, which harks back to what I like to think was a much more innocent time in America, before it mutated into the military/industrial complex it is today. We take for granted the way things are now, in the aftermath of 3 wars and us going out there to fix the world’s woes. It wasn’t always this way. I read a great article in Vanity Fair magazine this week about, the start of that process and how it heralded in the age of secrecy and partisan paranoia that we ‘enjoy’ today - the new America. It’s by George F. Kennan. Check it out.http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/01/Todd-Purdum-on-National-Security I apologize. For those who could care less, I can be a bit of a politics geek.

It’s not all doom and gloom here on the east coast. I’ve been listening to a lot of music just lately. We still have an actual terrestrial local rock radio station round here called WFUV, staffed by a lot of the old jocks like Pete Fornatale and Scott Muni who used to work for WNEW FM, New York’s finest station, back in the 70s. These guys carry on the FM tradition but with more of a nod towards Americana and Indie bands these days. Anyway, I was telling Bob Skeat that one of the coolest bass lines on a new song is to be found on Wilco’s, Dawned on Me. I also like Pumped Up Kicks by Foster the People for a killer chorus in a new song. I have no idea what it’s about but I cannot stop whistling this melody. In another vein, some months ago, Joe Crabtree had turned me on to Lewis Black when I was in England and I’ve become more familiar with his stuff lately. I love Stoned Part 1 by him. I’m addicted to Spotify and have been checking out all sorts of stuff there.

My days, in actuality, are also filled with running this small business (as it’s called, according to Wikipedia) Wishbone Ash. I do have down time but there’s always a good 6 or 8 hours of daily work keeping the band on the road. There have also been a lot of PR things going on which keeps us all busy. For something different, I’ve been doing a little road biking recently and also, a lot of yoga. I ride a Cannondale bike, which is a local company that has had global success. My local bike repairman tried to sell me a new $1500 drive train for my ride, saying the shifters on my handlebars were not repairable. So, I took it to the Bicycle Shop in Mount Kisco, NY and they said the oil in the shifters, had become all gunky and that all all the parts needed was a good cleaning with a solvent and blowing out with a compressed air gun. Estimated cost - around $50. I’m going there tomorrow for a proper bike fitting as well, since my bike is set up incorrectly, it seems. I have a feeling next spring will see me in the market for something more exotic on two wheels but in the meantime, I love my bike. I also love the new carbon graphite models that are out there. Mine has an aluminum frame. Cannondale actually has one that changes gears and operates the brakes by radio signal - no wires. It’s as light as a feather. There’s great technology in road bikes. http://www.cannondale.com/

Talking of boys and their toys, I’m about to sell one of my three prized Music Man Silhouette guitars. This one features a piezzo pick - up, like my Vs have. I love these guitars and you can hear how they sound if you check out the new Elegant Stealth CD. My solo on the song Can’t Go It Alone is pure Music Man. But I need to cull my collection a little. It’s getting out of hand. The metallic dove grey model that I‘m selling, has a vintage white pearloid scratch plate plus an awesome birdseye maple neck, rosewood fingerboard, locking Spurzel tuners and a very interesting addition called the Easy Mute trem which facilitates better muting of the bridge and leaves the trem arm always in the position you left it in http://www.easymute.freeserve.co.uk/easymute3.html It has two DiMarzio humbucking pick-ups plus a single coil in the middle enabling 5 distinctly different tones from full-on rich rock, to Strat like percussiveness. I’m also selling a Gibson Chet Atkins guitar like the one Dave Mathews and Sting used to use. It has cool pearl star inlays on the fret positions and a retro design.

Talking of technology and instruments; I heard a great piece on National Public Radio the other morning. As I was telling my new violinist friend at the dump, apparently this CAT machine operator at one of the local hospitals, was also a violinist and had taken his Stradivarius into work for some practice in between shifts. How he got to own one of these insane instruments is any one’s guess. Only recently, one went at auction for $16,000,000! Anyway, he’d laid his presumably much cheaper model, down next to the scanning machine, while helping a patient. Later the thought occurred to him; “why not scan the violin?” He did so and passed the info onto a friend who happened to built CADD machines. These things, Computer Aided Design and Drafting machines, are used to literally design machines to make other things. To cut a long story short, this machine that his friend developed was able to carve out an exact replica of the the Strad, even replicating the original wood density (info obtained from the CAT scanner). The result as heard on the radio, was as near-as-dammit the tone and timbre of a real Antonio Stradivarius violin. This blew my mind. Can you imagine being able to copy the sound of these classic instruments for a fraction of the cost in the future? Now that’s technology. We could have real clones of the Jimmy Hendrix Stratocaster, Stevie Ray Vaughan Strat or even the Andy Powell mid 60s classic V for real, right in your hands. All you’d have to do then, is learn to play it. Once this this was mastered, the thing would be guaranteed to deliver the exact tone of one these classic instruments.

Simple, eh?

~ A.P. PS. Interested in the Music Man guitar or the Gibson Chet Atkins model? Contact me by PM ( ashhq) from our forum page.

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