revision99

I went out last week and bought a new guitar amplifier.

The last one I bought was in the 70’s. I bought it used, it was old even then, and I still have it. It’s a Fender Twin Reverb, pre-CBS blackface, a true classic. It runs on vacuum tubes - no transistors. It was built in May of 1964, in the days before printed circuit boards and integrated circuits (”chips”), at the Fender factory in Fullerton, just about ten miles from where I live now, and where I lived then.

I’ve lived in a lot of places in between, and the Twin has come with me everywhere. I put a new set of tubes in it about twenty years ago, and I had the two twelve-inch speakers reconed in 2003 (yes, they are the original Jensens). Mostly, though, I just plugged in and played, and it has never falied me. My Levi’s have worn out, I’ve blown several engines, replaced a dozen televisions and suffered through countless hard drive crashes, but the Twin just soldiers on, no matter what I throw at it, or what I throw it in.

It’s been thrown in the backs of trucks, the holds of airplanes and even into a couple of ferry boats. Mostly, though, it goes in the trunk of my car, and therein lies the problem. The damn thing weighs too much. The tube design requires a big heavy transformer, the hard wiring is done on a steel chassis, the speakers have huge magnets and heavy frames and the cabinet itself is, to put it mildly, built to last. It weighs 69 pounds, and you practically have to hold it at arm’s length to wrestle it into the trunk of my car. To some, this might not seem like such a big deal. To you I say go move your own amps. I have to move this one, and by the time I get where I’m going with it, I am out of breath, my arms hurt, my back is sore and I don’t feel like playing happy songs.

At least that’s what I told myself as part of my campaign to convince myself that I needed a new amp. I am cheap, you see, and that cheap voice in my head kept saying “You are no longer a working, traveling musician. You don’t need a lightweight amp.” To which the Little Boy Who Wanted a New Toy would respond “If I had something a little easier to move around, maybe I could get out to some gigs, restart some old relationships and make a little money - enough, perhaps, to pay for a new amp. So it would be a wash. So shut up.”

This debate went on for a couple of months. Remember, it was way back in the previous millenium that I bought my beloved Twin Reverb, so I was not about to take lightly the prospect of getting a new one. In the end, the side of me that really wanted a new amp struck a deal with the cheap side: “We’ll just go look. We won’t buy anything unless it’s really cheap, really light and sounds bitchin.”

So off we went, one of us thinking “Heh, heh, we’re just looking,” the other fondling the wad of cash in my pocket.

And we were both horrified at what we found. Talk about sticker shock. Workhorse amps like my Twin were now selling for a thousand dollars. If we wanted something affordable, there were a whole bunch of solid state amps, cold, elctronic boxes with little or no personality and complicated control panels that made no sense to me. Some of these amps actually had buttons on them that you could press to make the amp simulate an old Fender Twin Reverb. (Note: The simulation might have fooled someone who hadn’t been actually plugged into the real thing for decades, but to me it sounded exactly like, well, a simulation.) There had to be other choices.

And there were. There were “vintage” amplifiers, new amps made to look and sound old by small boutique companies, hand-wired to fifty-year-old specifications, all tube, covered in tweed Tolex and purposely “distressed” so they looked like the real thing. They had style, they were small and lightweight, and if you wanted to play edgy, chunky blues-rock, they sounded great.

And they were priced like diamonds. I played one, a perfect little gem, a five-watt amp with a 10-inch speaker, and it was $995! If you’re not sure about this, be advised that most rock bands would drown out a five-watt amplifier with the first power chord. Considering this and the fact that the engineering was done more than fifty years ago by Western Electric and Leo Fender and must be public domain by now, I’d say that $199 per watt is just a bit much. “Don’t they get it?” I thought. “Musicians are poor.” Amps from this company that were powerful enough to cut through a real band start at around $1500, and you can easily spend twice that. The cheap side of me waited in the car while I tried these babies out in the store.

In the end, even the Little Boy could not pull the trigger on that kind of money, no matter how much he wanted a new toy. Those “reissue” type amps looked great and sounded fine, but every time I thought about the price tag I found myself unable to shake the feeling that someone was trying to make a sucker out of me.

I shopped and pondered for another couple of weeks. I decided I had to have a tube amp, despite the added cost and weight, so my choices were somewhat limited, as the majority of guitar amps on the market today are solid state. But here’s the thing about solid state: A solid state amp, used correctly, will amplify an electric guitar. As long as you don’t overdrive any stage of the circuitry, it will reproduce more or less faithfully the signal you put in it, and it will do this coolly and efficiently, and without any coloration. If you step over the line, though, and give it too much level at any stage, it will freak out and distort, and transistor distortion is not a pretty thing.

But a vacuum tube is like a living thing. It gets warm when you turn it on (don’t we all?), and it responds emotionally to the signals you give it. The pickups of your guitar convert your fingering and picking and hammering and sliding and bending of the strings into electrical impulses that are a picture of these gyrations, and the tubes in your amplifier receive this information and work with it in intuitive ways. The tubes talk back to the guitar. The attacks, sustains and vibratos become a conversation between the guitar and the amplifier, and the amp becomes a part of the instrument. If you push it hard, it will distort, but smoothly and musically, thickening the sound, adding harmonics and overtones that are as unique as your playing style.

So yeah, it had to be tubes.

I was on a budget, so I had to try out amps that I might not have considered in the past: makers like Peavey and Carvin and Crate. Some of them sounded pretty good, but buying one of these would feel a little like buying a Hyundai. I rented a Sonata a few months ago, and it actually seemed like a pretty good car, but I can remember when - not too long ago - Hyundais were falling apart before you could get them home. Eventually I went back and tried one of the first amps I tested. It was more money than I had planned to spend, but not as much as the breathtaking price tags on the custom-made “retro” vintage-look units. Looking at those made me wake up and adjust my thinking to 21st century reality, which is everything costs more than you expect except DVD players, which now come free if you buy a movie on DVD.

I took my guitar and a thing I use called The Pod (another story) into a store and asked them if I could play this amp that I was considering. I messed around with it for about 45 minutes (thank you, Guitar Center!). I still had my pocketful of cash. The amp sounded way cool. Really clean on the clean side, gritty and bluesy on the dirty side, responsive and LOUD. I put all my stuff away, and asked the nice kid who was helping me if he would consider an offer that was somewaht below the asking price. I made my offer, we went back and forth for ten minutes, I got to the end of the line (actually the very edge of my budget) and the kid was saying, in effect, that he’d dig a hole and bury the amp before he’d sell it to me for that, so I thanked him politely and headed for the door. They held me up at the door for a moment, because I had a guitar with me and they had to make sure it wasn’t one of theirs, and while we were doing that the manager caught up with me and agreed to my deal, somehow twisting it around to make it seem as if it had been his plan all along. I didn’t care how he framed it. I got my amplifier. And this is what I got:

A Fender Hot Rod Deluxe. After all that shopping and thinking, I went back and got a smaller, modern version of the amp I’ve been using for much of my playing career. All tube design (so not that modern, I guess), one 12-inch speaker, half the power of the Twin, 45 pounds. I’ve only had to lift it into the trunk of my car once so far, and that was while it was still in the shipping box, but I have high hopes that I’ll be able to toss it in there at least as many times as I did the old one, without sustaining injuries, so that should give me something to do with my spare time for quite a while to come.

So, to review:

• All tube
• Sounds bitchin
• Weighs less
• Looks cool
• Got my deal
• Louder than a thousand banshees

All I need now is a band. Call me.

I’m all puffed up and pleased with myself because finally,

…after about a year of thinking about it, I have made the revision99 Archives list into a dropdown menu. You can see it in the sidebar, under the heading “Archives.”

I’ve been thinking “Jeez, that list is so long, no one will ever see what’s at the bottom of the sidebar. I have to think of a way to shorten it.” In the end, which was just two days ago, I didn’t excatly “think of a way.” Instead, I looked at the page source of someone else’s Wordpress blog (someone who was using just such a dropdown menu) and found the code that makes this happen. Then I copied it and stuck it in my own sidebar template.

Cool, huh? Forgive me. I am easily excited. Go ahead. Click on it. Read something from my past. All my best writing is there. All my commenters are there, too.

Here’s a landmark event in the history of the world.

Tomorrow morning, October 17, 2006, President Bush will sign his Torture Bill, known officially as “S-3930,” the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Under this law,

• it will be legal for the U.S. government to use “alternative interrogation methods” to extract information from prisoners.
• This information will then be considered legal evidence for use in a trial.
• The President will have unrestricted discretion to label anyone an “enemy combatant.”
• Once you are labeled an enemy combatant, you will not have recourse to any court should you wish to challenge the reason for your arrest and detention, which…
• …could go on forever, and you might never be told why, or…
• …be allowed to see the evidence against you (unless it’s your own confession, given as a result of being forced to stand in a “stress position” for forty hours with no sleep, or perhaps being waterboarded).

So that’s bound to make us safer, eh?

I was going to link to some pages describing and depicting the alternative interrogation techniques permitted by this law, but it was just too fucking sick and disgusting. Look it up yourself if you want to. I am ashamed that this gang of brutal assholes in our government is pretending to represent me to the world.

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In other news, Trader Joe’s has had to pull all bags of their delicious Banana Crisps because of some mislabeling snafu. So, while airplanes are still allowed to fly right into New York City and crash into skyscrapers, we are protected from mislabeled snack foods.

There’s some confusion…

… regarding what defensive action was taken by the U.S. military on September 11, 2001 when four airliners were hijacked all at the same time. There might have been some fighters in the air over New York after one of the airliners hit the World Trade Center, but nobody got shot down, or even challenged. Nothing much happened by way of air defense after the second plane hit the second tower, either, or when the other two airliners were pretty much known to be up to no good.

And now, five years later, apparently you can still hop in a light plane, fly right into New York City and crash into a skyscraper.

So here’s my question: Exactly what has the government been doing for the past five years to “make us safer” from terrorists? I mean aside from pissing off the entire Islamic world, alienating most of our allies and allowing two members of the “axis of evil” to get atomic bombs.

I guess if I were a terrorist, I’d be loading up my Cessna with explosives and getting ready to meet the 72 virgins in Manhattan.

Just thought you’d like to know that John Lithgow is a national treasure and his new show, Twenty Good Years, (NBC Wednesdays) is very funny.

I’ve been a fan of Lithgow since he played the crossdressing (or was it transgendered? — somebody help me out here) pro linebacker in The World According to Garp. He’s often been a terrific, creepy bad guy in movies, but to my mind he really hit his stride as the clueless-yet-arrogant leader of the band of alien invaders in Third Rock From the Sun, sent to Earth to study the locals, and perhaps getting a little too chummy with them.

The new show looks great: a touching premise (that may have some legs), funny, intelligent writing and Lithgow and Jeffrey Tambor as the odd couple at the heart of it.

In other news, 30 Rock, the Tina Fey vehicle produced by Lorne Greene, sucks ostrich eggs. It’s the lead-in to Twenty Good Years, and it is a study in what not to do if you want to put on a show. Black stereotypes, gay stereotypes, evil corporate executive stereotypes, diva stereotypes, cat-throwing and burping jokes. I almost said burping gags, but the word “gag” is too close to home. If you missed the premiere, lucky you. If you saw it, bet you won’t be watching next week.

I’ll meet you for coffee, and we can be home in time to catch Twenty Good Years.

I’m too busy to rant today.

If you need to be ranted at, you might want to check Ian Masters’ article at The Huffington Post. Just a taste:

…I’m told by sources involved that our Special Forces are already in Iran preparing for a pre-emptive strike, not against nuclear targets, but against the mullahs and their Revolutionary Guards. Trick or treat? Regime decapitation from invisible B2’s, with smart bombs sent by dumb leaders, surgically guided by lasers on the ground to smite evil in an October surprise. Another quick victory followed by a slow defeat from our wartime president who wins elections but loses wars.

The moral is - don’t take the Republican meltdown for granted. If they were honorable they’d concede this midterm election and go off somewhere to do penance and think about what they’ve done, and how they need to change to atone for their malfeasance. But all they really care about is holding on to power, and they could do anything to make that happen, up to and including vote fraud, voter intimidation, fake terror attacks, fake “intelligence” reports from North Korea and actually sending troops to Iran.

National revulsion at the antics of Mark Foley and the Republican leadership notwithstanding, in Karl Rove’s office it ain’t over yet, so stay focused, talk it up, register, vote and get your friends to do so.

This goes for you, too, Blue Girl.

Boy, am I disheartened.

The Republicans are committing so many outrages lately that I feel like moving to a shack in the high desert, with nothing but a short-wave radio and an old guitar. Come to think of it, I might not take the radio.

I don’t want to talk about the outrages. If you are breathing oxygen you know about them, at least in general terms. And there are so many good writers expressing their outrage so much more eloquently than I can, I won’t add to the static.

Yes, enough about the outrages. What about me?

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how this administration isn’t merely incompetent, greedy, corrupt, immoral, dishonest and drunk with power. None of these are good leadership qualities, but we as a nation have suffered through a lot of bad elected officials, and they have often got us going off in the wrong direction. It’s been painful, but somehow we seem to get past these lapses in group good judgement, correct our course, throw the bums out and get on with things. For a recent example of this take a look at President Nixon.

But I’m trying to resist joining the growing chorus of voices saying that this President, abetted by this Congress, is not just enjoying the spoils of victory, but is selling out the very ideals that the nation was founded on, turning the country into a great big ignorant international bully, codifying a doctrine of preemptive war and torture when it suits them, abrogating treaties, mocking friend and foe alike, while trampling on cherished civil rights at home and claiming all our wealth as their own.

I’m trying to resist saying those things and thinking those things because I don’t want this to be the scary end-times of our democracy, the days that history will view as the beginning of the end. I don’t know what the world would look like if The United States were to abandon its dedication to life, liberty, justice, equality and of course the pursuit of happiness.

Over two centuries the country has grown into an enormous and powerful giant and I’ve been quick to criticize the giant when it is cruel, when it is stupid, when it is unfair, when it is selfish, when it is repressive. Because the United States is simply the most powerful nation the world has ever known, and its behavior affects everyone living on the planet, and even the very planet itself, and because I grew up believing that this country was committed to using its great power to light the way to peace and freedom for the rest of the world.

I don’t know what the world will look like in fifty years, but you don’t have to look very far back in history to see that we could be headed for a new world order, one in which an armed and aggressive United States patrols and plunders the continents in a state of permanent war, dominating everyone, feared and hated by everyone; while at home we’d live in fear, not of terrorists but of our own government; and hundreds of millions of powerless worker drones would labor endlessly to enrich the high-born and well-connected few.

I’m hoping the world doesn’t look like that. I’m hoping that the American people will correct course, throw the bums out and get on with things. If we do, and if a new generation of leaders can rebuild U.S. credibility, and once the bills are finally paid for our current excesses, a kid might be able to stand up in U.S. History class without fear and ask “What the hell were they thinking?”

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Oh, and it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright:
You can’t be forever blessed.
Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day
And I’m trying to get some rest.
That’s all I’m trying… to get some rest.

– from American Tune, by Paul Simon (The blue button plays the song)