11/09 Lunch Report - A Couple Potatoes

[Danley]

Lunch
I'm working from home today- I see a couple leftover potatoes in the oven. That will be it!



G&L Topic
One topic that caught my eye in the CLF post, are the renovations G&L is doing to create a lobby/hangout space of some sort. That got me curious- whether the location would be open to the public (and in my ideal case contain a bar.) I've driven by the factory (in a very not-stalker-ish-way) a few times but with no tours and no piece of it open to the public (such as are or were offered at the Fender factory) it's a very Willy Wonka-ish experience to stand outside and wonder what's going on.

It would be really cool if they opened some sort of small museum/visitor space, even if only available by appointment. The G&L factory itself isn't in the most tourist-y spot of SoCal or Orange County, but is in good relative proximity to Disneyland, beaches, vacation activities etc. Would you ever consider traveling to visit the factory if tours etc. were on offer? Would you make it part of a vacation agenda at least?



Music Topic
I'm not a huge '80s metal fan, but like perhaps a lot of guitarists I somewhat fetish-ize the ability to Shred. That said, there isn't a lot of pure guitar instrumental music that is capable to hold my interest - I can't get heavily into Satriani, Steve Van etc. Perhaps Vinnie Moore's 'The Mind's Eye' is my favorite pure shred album to that end- mostly because it doesn't really stop rocking the whole way through, and never really gets too spacey/new agey which can tend to lose my attention.

As far as shredding myself, I have only a couple licks/solos I can really say I can successfully perform within the 'shred' genre. About a year ago when I started taking the guitar as a more serious hobby I gave myself the goal of learning the below solo (starting at ~2:39) - For about a month I could mostly pull it off at full speed, but it comes out a bit slower right now because most of my practice regimen is lower intensity.

So do you listen to shred? Do you prefer 'guitar music,' or music where the guitar serves to drive a song? (BTW - the below is from the soundtrack to a game called BlazBlue, which has some pretty awesome music overall) :

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa5c1qR18pg[/video]



Non-G&L Topic - Creepy Happenings
It's a bit late, but since I unfortunately missed a lot of Halloween this year - wondering if anyone has any good ghost stories from personal experience? Here's mine: Some details are altered because I don't want anything to be Google-able (the *major* detail omitted is probably less realistic sounding than what I replaced it with.) I lived in a house on four acres in the desert during college; with roommates, then alone. It was a quarter mile to the nearest neighbor. We'd have parties and there was an inevitable occurence on the front patio: Someone would point across the street and say, "Something really bad happened in that house over there, and I don't know what. I can just feel it." It really disturbed some people to the point where we'd hang out in the back yard (lucky there was a pool for that.)

Ours was an old house (by California standards) built in the seventies and odd things happened- people getting locked out etc. But the creepiest place to me wasn't out front, but out back. There was an old shed full of mason jars and dynamite that had a single chair in the middle when we bought it. A chain hung from the ceiling beam at about head level if you stood in the chair... But oh, no one cared about that- because whatever closet-monster was across the street was a lot creepier somehow. Another neighbor started throwing parties where people got shot at several times and somehow that also was not as scary as whatever nothingness existed across the street. Perhaps you can detect I never got eerie feelings from 'across the street' myself.

Then one day by chance, I found the purpose of the house when my cousin (unfortunately) OD'd. She was sent there, as it was a halfway house for addicts. Not terrible in and of itself, but after visiting my cousin once at the place I decided to do some research on it to make sure it wasn't some crazy cult rehab or something. What I found out was quite a bit more unusual. Before it was a half-way house, that same building was a funeral home. It closed,after they discovered that one of the bodies was not deceased on arrival; and it was the mortician's mother. They never found her body- but her head was still there when the police found it, embalmed.

[sam]

Hey Danley,

Thanks for the lunch report. I'm in a conference all weekend so who knows what lunch will be.

G&L Topic - I had the fortunate pleasure of touring the G&L Factory a number of years ago and still think of some of the stuff there. Leo's office is hallowed ground. I was in the area on a trip and requested a tour, thank you again Darth Vader! There is the Fender museum in Fullerton where you can get a taste of Leo's stuff but no real G&L stuff. I like your idea of a G&L museum space in a room at the front of the building.

I have toured the Koaloha and Kamaka ukulele factories and these were either pre scheduled tours or appointment tour. I even bought a second Koaloha on their tour, signed by all the builders.

All tours were great experiences and recommend to all who can. Would like to tour the Martin factory someday.

Music Topic - I am not a true "shredder" but like shred players a lot. Going to Generation Axe (Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen, Zakk Wylde, Nuno Bettencourt and Tosin Abasi) next month. Bought tix for my son but he had a school event come up so will be looking for another shred fan. Saw G3 in Denver 2004, there is a video of this show if any interest, Vai, Satriani and Malmsteen excellent show.

Non-G&L Topic - Creepy Happenings - Can't say I recall many creepy happenings. Hope to keep this trend!

TGIF!

[FZTNT]

And I'm supposed to eat lunch after that?

If I were in the area I would go to see the fine folks at G&L even if it was just a museum experience.

I was never into traditional shredders other than Steve Vai or anyone else who played with Zappa including the master himself. He did have some shredding on some songs. Just listen to the album "Overnight Sensation" And you will see some examples. If you can find the live version, and I think that's all there is, of a song called "Stevie's Spanking" from the "you can't do that on stage" series he completely blows away Steve Vai in both tone and speed. But then again, he was the band leader and no-one gets to play or sound better than the band leader.

As for creepy things...I grew up in the UK from age 6 to 13 and we had seven his in the family so we always had to live in big houses. We lived in an old Victorian mansion that was creepy by itself. It had an old coal burning furnace/boiler that needed to get stoked with coal in the morning and night. You had to go out through the laundry room off the kitchen and through a dark brick courtyard comprised of two sides of the house, the furnace room itself and a huge wooden gate. it was probably 15 feet by 15 feet and two stories on three sides and three on the other. No lights. The furnace room had a single lightbulb hanging from a rather tall ceiling with a pull string. We each had our day to stoke the furnace day and night. My mother used to take great pleasure in waiting for me to go out there at night and then hide in the laundry room and on my way back in from a mostly terrifying experience for a 10 or 11 year old and jump out and scare the <censored word> out of me. she did it just infrequently enough that she got me almost every time. But wait...there's more.

As I mentioned, this was a very old house. There as a fireplace in almost every room including the bedrooms on the 2nd and 3rd floors. It's funny, there was a sink in every bedroom for cleaning up and brushing your teeth and such. Any way, most of the fire places were boarded up and unusable anymore. But, for some reason there were crawl spaces around the perimeter of the house that could bee accused by removing the boards from the back of the fireplaces and you could crawl around to other rooms and pop out of the fireplace in another room. I don't think my parents even knew they were there for the first couple years we lived there. So, we used to have great fun scaring the hell out of each other when least expected. Especially when one of us had a friend stay overnight, some of them never came back. It was pretty cool.

In 1979, Warner Brothers used the house as Agatha Christies house in the movie "Agatha" and made it look really creepy.

I can't lay my hands of photos from back then, but here are some more recent photos after some additions but it's still essentially the same place. Imagine having this to play around in as a kid!



Tom

[john o]

friday lunch: small bowl of lobster bisque during a lunch meeting

G&L tour: i was visiting my friend in Newport beach last year. he is a guitarist/bassist. i talked him into driving us over to Fullerton. we saw a guy standing outside of one of the doors @G&L smoking a ciggie. we struck up a conversation, then his foreman came out and after introductions he offered us an impromptu tour of the whole factory which was...amazing. this was total luck. i asked about Leo's office, was locked and "no key available." we really enjoyed seeing all of the different rooms, guitars and basses in various stages of production, the paint room, the neck curing room, the Plek machine, old Leo-era sanders, drill presses and other engineering oddities, and a rack of new instruments waiting to be placed in cases. they also pulled out that red SC-3 they had found with a split headstock, pre-repair. i am trying to talk my friend into a new G&L bass. he is interested!

shredders: i do listen to Vai and Satriani, but i don't consider them shredders in the truest sense. I have followed Nuno Bettencourt closely since the early 90's, and am amazed at his talents. Saw him with Extreme a couple times. I like Dave Mustaine on Megadeth's "Cryptic Writings" LP.
Tom, I read somewhere that young Dweezil played on Stevie's Spanking. Not sure who the shredder was though.

ghosts, alien abductions, etc: i haven't had a close encounter, yet, and hope not to anytime soon.
My friend and his wife did, though. They were in New Orleans maybe 10 years ago, were walking in the afternoon, wandered out of the French Quarter, ended up not being sure of where they were. Suddenly a guy fell in step with them and said, "Hey, you guys seem a little lost. You don't want to be in this area. Come with me and I will get you back to where you need to go." He walked with them for a bit, some small talk, then said, "all right, you should be ok from here on" and pointed in the direction they should follow. They turned to thank him and he simply wasn't there anymore. ? Angel. Definitely a happy ending. I love walking around in New Orleans. One of my favorite places. But I think the ghostbusters would have picked up alot of paranormal activity on their spook-meters in NOLA, for sure!

[Danley]

I had the fortunate pleasure of touring the G&L Factory a number of years ago and still think of some of the stuff there. Leo's office is hallowed ground. I was in the area on a trip and requested a tour, thank you again Darth Vader! There is the Fender museum in Fullerton where you can get a taste of Leo's stuff but no real G&L stuff. I like your idea of a G&L museum space in a room at the front of the building.

That's awesome - I've been to the Fullerton Fender museum, at the time I went it was about a dozen modern art guitars, and maybe two or three older instruments- IIRC one of the first Broadcasters/two pickup Esquires was supposed to be there too, but was on loan somewhere else. I haven't gotten to the Taylor factory tour yet - I think that's the next one I want to hit up that's somewhat near me.

But, for some reason there were crawl spaces around the perimeter of the house that could bee accused by removing the boards from the back of the fireplaces and you could crawl around to other rooms and pop out of the fireplace in another room. I don't think my parents even knew they were there for the first couple years we lived there. So, we used to have great fun scaring the hell out of each other when least expected. Especially when one of us had a friend stay overnight, some of them never came back. It was pretty cool.

Spending too much time on Netflix, we just finished 'Haunting of Hill House' which is a great show- and the secret passage/dumwaiter thing comes to mind as something particularly terrifying. I could have been one of the kids too scared to ever visit you again. If I lived in that sort of house as a kid I could have mental issues to this day- my imagination would cook up things far more frightening than television or for that matter reality ever would. Now there's very little that actually keeps me awake. At any rate, that's an amazing looking house. Not many locations in the US so idiosyncratic as any random structure in the UK.

One other thing I forgot about that house in the desert - I once found photo negatives in a pile of junk in the garage left over from previous owners. They included very old shots of people in caskets (maybe I was the one living in the funeral home, come to think of it.) Got very freaked out and stopped rummaging.

G&L tour: i was visiting my friend in Newport beach last year. he is a guitarist/bassist. i talked him into driving us over to Fullerton. we saw a guy standing outside of one of the doors @G&L smoking a ciggie. we struck up a conversation, then his foreman came out and after introductions he offered us an impromptu tour of the whole factory which was...amazing. this was total luck.

I want to get this lucky but would probably be chased away and mistaken for a delinquent

They turned to thank him and he simply wasn't there anymore. ? Angel. Definitely a happy ending. I love walking around in New Orleans. One of my favorite places. But I think the ghostbusters would have picked up alot of paranormal activity on their spook-meters in NOLA, for sure!

Again I am watching Netflix too much; NOLA reminds me of the American Horror Story season with the little witch school (probably my favorite season thanks to Emma Roberts.) Never been to NOLA myself but would love to visit someday. I'm actually not a huge horror fan, but my wife is- she freaks out over that stuff and I'm just kind of ehh until Emma Roberts walks on the screen- though it is a good show aside from that too.

In a strange coincidence I was married in the building used as the set for the insane asylum in one of the early seasons. My wife and I watched the show but didn't realize the Santa Ana Courthouse was what we had been seeing the whole time- They added a third story digitally and edited out the palm trees to portray New England I guess it's not alarming living in SoCal to see places in movies/TV etc. - In fact the restaurant & 'small town' set for one of the more recent seasons was filmed in Old Orange, a couple miles from me and I recognized the place immediately as not being Michigan, despite the sprinkling of fake snow

[Elwood]

Thanks for the spooky LR,

I'd love to walk through the G&L factory, and if the day capped off with
refreshments and too many G&L's on a friendly little stage ...well that'd be just fine

How about free guitar lessons for the young'uns once a week at the G&L lounge...
...start 'em off right, eh ?

I keep working on patterns and scales to keep up the dexterity...I make enough progress to keep it fun,
but if I slack off for a few days...there's a little re-learning curve for the muscles.
I hear bananas help to keep the fingers from cramping. An old school Hammond player (IIRC, brother of Benorce Blackmon, guitarist for Bill Withers) told me rubbing peanut oil into the fingers helps too.

Creepinesses:

I'm reminded of a friend who got free rent of the upper apartment in a funeral home(The one by the Fremont bridge for anyone familiar with Seattle).
All he had to do was to take any messages during the night. Occasionally we'd swing by...once he gave us the full tour...I was good with once.
There was a burger joint across the street ('318 burgers')... really good burgers. We joked that the funeral home chimney proximity gave them a certain something

As a kid the local haunted house was at the old Morgue...they even had slabs and labware still in some rooms...a really effective haunted house.

Booo !!