Thu 14 Jun 2007 1:26 PM
In the spirit of honoring commitments, however sketchily that responsbility gets here discharged, here’s a couple of, to my sensibility, cool items:
These Luthiers. By the 1970s, guitar manufacturing got standardized around the Gibson and Fender models everyone recognizes now. In the ’60s, there’s lots of kool experimental shit. These folks I’ve linked to do neat things with Teisco Del Rays, and lots of other weird guitars from that era (plus they make up names like “jizz-caster” for their weird put-togethers). If you didn’t know Ibanez ever made an actually cool guitar, and that surprises you, this is really a good site to peruse. Bear up, Bison!
Here’s a favorite snuff film of mine (jfk!). I think this is the Dick Cavett Show, from ’70s sometihng–they had such a thing! Woody Allen interviews Billy Graham. It’s really something, even if you’re sincere and not an ironist about things like that.
June 18th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
As cool as the stock may be on the website a visit to Subway does require a strong sense of self… Fat Dog may have interesting ideas on hot rod wiring but he’s a walking reason for looser gun control laws… I’m not just talking about his physical repulsiveness, either, but his long hair to the ground sense of arrogance, long-winded pompousness and dismissive fuck-headed attitude…
Makes me wonder, tho… I’m pretty sure that my folks, when buying my bass for my fifteenth birthday, said they found some hole in the wall shop in Berkeley where the the guys who owned the place rebuilt shit from scrap, hence the JB Player…
June 19th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Eh, you have to account that guitar guys are always colossal douches, but the JB Player, if that’s where it came from, is per se a pretty serious critique of that place.
June 19th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
Not just the JB Player but the Marlboro as well… While the amp did go up in smoke I suppose you can always blame the quality of the bass on my attempts at playing… Still have the fucker, tho, with the same gauge string on the E and the A and bread ties in the guts for wiring… I think if I even tried to plug it in the fucker would take the neighborhood out…
June 20th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
I’ve purchased two guitars (Jizzcasters) and two amps from Fat Dawg. He talks a lot, but his heart is in the right place. He walked away from Danelectro when they started using child labor, gives you a free Impeach Bush instrument cable with every purchase, and lets shady old blues guys hang around his shop all day.
A few of his technicians, however, are among the rudest people I’ve ever met in my life. On the plus side, they offer excellent (but slow) customer service and (in my experience) do very good work.
You can customize, they’ll buy back at 75% of your purchase price, and you get all kinds of time to try things out in the store.
I look at him and his crusty cronies as a delightful anachronism that serve to balance the Guy Smiley, no-nothing bullshit help you tend to find at chain stores.
Enjoy him while you can, as the dark waters of gentrification are swirling around that place.