The Jagular rides! The first shot is from Pukkelpop festival in Belgium. I’ll post more details about the wiring in a bit.
Um. Thought I was posting these from my phone. Apparently I am posting them somewhere else? Anyway, the Jagular moves forward. Mary Kay Blonde and Two-Tone Sunburst.
The Jagular is born.
I have commissioned two new guitars which will be my new main guitar and back up. It is a customization/bastardization of the classic Jaguar, and I have thus named it the Jagular. It has the body and control plates of a Jaguar, but is modified to be full fender scale length (25.5 inches) instead of the Jaguar’s usually, and very short 24 inches. Since we play in D standard the majority of the time, the longer scale works better for my situation. The guitar also ditches the notoriously troublesome and unreliable Jag and brings in a standard tune-o-matic. The trem is also ditched, mostly for reliability issues and increased sustain. The wiring on the original Jaguar is, in my opinion, pretty dumb, so I am changing it up, though I am using all the switches to do different things which are cool and make sense. Our sound guy accused me of building these only because they have a lot of switches. He’s maybe partially right. Anyway, I’ll be posting photos of their progress, and more about how it’ll be wired up, etc.
The bodies and one of the necks are coming from the good people at www.warmoth.com If you wanna do a custom build of a guitar, they are the place to buy the parts from. Super quality stuff made up in Washington state. I’ve ordered three bodies from them before now, and they do custom pickguards, routing, anything you can think of.
The guys putting it all together, finishing the bodies and necks, making them look awesome and play even better, are my good friends at www.nashguitars.com I’ve been playing their stuff for a while now, and Teppei’s butterscotch tele is also a Nash.
The photo above is how the guitars arrived at Nash. More to come.
Hey everyone. Here are the photos of the winner of the contest we had a while back. His name is Chuck Meeker and that’s his wife Tiffani. Nash guitars made a special Dustin Kensrue model which is a replica of the guitar they built me that I play at every show. You can see both guitars in there, and in the third pic is Patrick, our friend and the shop manager at Nash. They updated their website recently so go check it out. Nashguitars.com If you like Teppei’s butterscotch Tele, that’s a Nash too.
DK
When your elephant is stressed out…
(I know this is lame. I would not have posted if it were not my cat. I do like how serious he looks at the end.)
DK
My wife’s friend asked me to play Dance Me To The End Of Love at her wedding, and like most Leonard Cohen songs, the lyrics are on another level. Crafting vivid images with the verbal equivalent of found art, juxtaposing the sacred and the profane, the cryptic and the common, his words float through a mysterious twilight without ever falling into the sea of drivel that swallows so many who flirt this heavily with the abstract. Also, like many Cohen songs, it’s been covered quite a bit, and the covers are oftentimes better than the original (Buckley’s Hallelujah being the most obvious example.) Madeleine Peyroux does a great jazzy take on the song in question, which I’ve had for a while, but the bride-to-be just turned me on to the great version above by the Civil Wars.
DK
So, if you’re like me, at least once while listening to Whiskeytown’s “Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart,” about 2 minutes in you’ve said to yourself, “Hey, I didn’t know that Tom Petty and Elvis Costello had a baby and raised it on Springsteen and…wait….that’s……not possible. Then who is that singing?” Anyway, it took me a long time to finally decide to actually figure it out, but I did, and now I will pass that gem of information along to you. His is name is Alejandro Escovedo. I had never heard of him but I came to understand that he has quite the musical history. Most importantly though, his music is great, and beautiful and transparent in the best way. I picked up his record “Gravity” which is great, and I’m by no means an expert on his music, I recommend you check him out and I look forward to getting into more of of his stuff soon.
The clip above is of him playing an encore at a show in Paris, and as a bonus, the song happens to be my very favorite Velvet Underground jam as well. Enjoy!
DK
Problems (already?)
Problem #1
I don’t really understand blogging. No, really. I follow one blog, literally. In the past I read two. This is part of why it took me this long to start my own. I simply don’t know what to do with it. Tommy Boy describing sales comes to mind. Anyway, I think you are just supposed to write random stuff? So, some things that may or may not follow could be: * Other people’s lyrics that I like * Random illogical habits I have * Inefficiencies I encounter in life and am quietly enraged by * ???
Problem #2
I don’t spend much time of “the interwebs.” This cuts down considerably on fodder for blogging.
Problem #3
I am literally almost incapable of small talk. Truthfully, most of the things I would naturally want to write about fall outside the confines of polite conversation (meaning they are about the bigger questions in life.) And since this blog is linked to 3 other individuals who don’t usually share my views on those bigger questions, I will do my best to respect that and find other things to talk about. Here, at least. Which leads us in a vicious cycle back to problem #1. :)
So the disclaimer is over. Blog on my brethren. Blog on.
