There’s no technical details, but Bob Weir tells the story of how he found his natural father – and a great Telecaster – here.
Bob also says at Guitar Player : “I was mesmerized. It was instant love. The guitar cut through all the traffic in that band really well. The Telecaster sound is all the information you need, and no more, and its slightly more asymmetrical overtone scale made me listen to each note a little differently. That was my main guitar for a number of years. I took what I learned about pickup configuration and scale length from the Telecaster, combined it with the mini-archtop design of my custom Modulus, and came up with the blue Modulus that is now my main guitar. Then, I had my man at Modulus duplicate the Telecaster, because I’m thinking about keeping the original safe at home. I didn’t find that guitar – it fell out of the sky and landed on my lap.”

Here’s a video of Bob playing the telecaster with Widespread Panic.

I’ve always been a fan of Roy Orbison – a great voice, great songs, great guitars and a way cool-looking guy too. I remember well something that I read. Roy used to say, about singing songs, “Each time like the first time”. I use that comment to this day when people are a little surprised and taken aback by how much feeling I try and put into every song I sing. (i’m not sure that I succeed every time, or even part of the time, but at least I try!)

Roy worked a lot with Bill Dees, (they wrote 67 songs together and several were hits – “It’s Over”, and “Oh, Pretty Woman”, of course) who happens to be a friend of my guitar playing buddy Jack Pribek. Jack and some others have just put up a website for Bill, who is still writing (with Jack) and singing too. There’s a free download of a song over there. Please check this out if you are at all interested in great music – the stories in Bill’s bio are fantastic tales of the early days of rock’n’roll.

Here’s Bad Bob Bates of local beat combo The Bandits sporting a snappy looking ‘tache in tribute, he says, to me. I’ll see him on Saturday (The Turbinia, Newton Aycliffe) and see what he has to say for himself.

These are interesting guitars – a little different to the norm – I like the custom model below as well as these stock models.

(Just found out they’re reviewed in the August issue of Guitarist magazine. Ah well, you (might have) saw it here first!)

This telecaster has been around for a while, so the computer spec isn’t cutting edge these days, but it has a built-in 1.25 ghz Hewlett Packard TC1100 laptop with an echo Indigo soundcard for maximum fidelity. It uses Intel’s Centrino mobile technology to access wireless networks. The Guitar is routed straight into the tablet PC for direct recording.

via

Hmm.

Now I like unusual guitars and I like small-bodied guitars – I’m just not sure I like this one.
here

Seen recently over at Riffs Online, a local website for musicians:
“Bassist & Drummer wanted for Damned tribute band. Influences include The Damned!”

I know a few people who have MS – my mother in law had it for 25 years until she died, my guitar playing buddy Jack Pribek has it (and posts very meaningfully about it here and in other posts at his place) and another guitar player I know here in the North East of England has it too.

Jack tells us of a Rock for MS event happening tomorrow night in West Hollywood (we’re all invited!), and points us to M.S. Friends, where there are great music related items for sale to support the organisation.
Amongst plectrums (picks in the US), t-shirts and posters, there are many excellent examples of rock photography, from the Frank Zappa shot by Ian Dickson to the Janis Joplin shot by Jim Marshall, via Hendrix, The Ramones, The Stones, and many many more. Although the photos are expensive, they are excellent slices of musical history and are for sale for a great cause.
I’m going to see if I can manage to get a Rock for MS pick (plectrum in the UK)

Tri played at The Otterington Shorthorn pub near Northallerton last night. A couple were celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary – they’d seen Phil play there before so booked us for the gig. We had a great night – lots of people in, they all seemed to enjoy our strange mixture of folk, rock, blues and more. We hope to be back later in the year.

There’s some more pictures over at Tri’s myspace page, and as soon as I can remember the login details for our proper webpage, I’ll put some there too.