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Broken ukulele…

I finally got me a uke’ – long after the fad has peaked, I might add – off of Freecycle. The neck was coming away from the body. Rather than just trying to glue it back in place, I decided to take it off altogether, and totally renovate and restore the instrument, making it much more personal in the process.

Uke’ stripped

Getting the neck off was far from easy. Indeed, I did a wee bit of damage to the portion of the neck that overhangs the body. But naught that can’t be fixed. I stripped off the glossy red lacquer finish, right down to bare wood. My plan was to use some veneers I’ve had kicking around for years on the top and the headstock.

& the neck…

Sanding the wood took ages. And I didn’t do that terrific a job of it. Being a bit impatient. But this is just a cheap instrument in the first place, that I got for nowt. So I see it as a nice opportunity to practice some of the methods and techniques I might need when I finally get around to building complete instruments.

Body

I figured that with the veneer on the top, and the back and sides stained with an antique pine finish I have a surplus of, it’d look a lot nicer. Having removed the bridge and headstock hardware and neck, stripped back to the bare wood, and sanded it, it was time to apply the figured wood veneer. Sadly I have no idea what wood type it is! I’ll have to send a photo to the company I got the veneers from, and find out.

Gluing the veneer in place, with heavy art books!

Damn… turned out shite!

Uh-oh… I really screwed that up! The veneer would normally be applied to the top of a guitar before the sides and back were added. I had to add it to a fully constructed body. Obviously the top can give somewhat. And I think that is partly why the veneer is so buckled. Oh, and of course, veneers tend to change shape and move during gluing, as they absorb moisture. Maybe there are better glues for this sort of job!?

Headstock..

For the headstock I glued three layers; light, dark, light, to give a nice banding type look to the edges. And I used the same golden coloured figured veneer for the top layers as I’m using on the body. It was a lot easier to keep these layers flat, given they’re much smaller, and I could clamp around a solid block rather than a hollow box.

Back o’ the neck.

Before replacing the headstock fixtures I gave the whole lot, excepting the fretboard, several coats of clear gloss varnish. These have been painted on, and only very lightly sanded. So my protective coat is very rustic looking, compared with the sprayed finish the shop-sold instrument had. I am hoping that eventually I’ll be able to build up a more ‘piano’ sheen type finish.

Side neck

If you enlarge this image, you can hopefully see the striped edge-banding effect of the layered veneers on the headstock. Sanding has removed the fifth and seventh fret dots. I’ve been wondering about making Hofner style full-width markers for the front of the fretboard.

My solution for the wrinkled top veneer was to cut out a strip about as wide as the sound hole, running from the heel of the neck to the butt end of the instrument. This serves a double purpose: allowing me to – hopefully? – flatten the buckled veneer, and thereby avoid having to remove or replace it. And then allowing me to fill the resulting gap with a darker veneer, that will look like a continuation of the neck. Which, I’m hoping, might look pretty funky. We shall see!

Clamping the neck.

It certainly looked like gluing the neck, where the factory assembled joint had failed, was never going to be easy, especially given the shape of the heel, at the end of the neck. As it turned out, I was able to clamp it all up relatively straightforwardly. But will the resulting joint be strong enough to hold under string tension and playing conditions? Again, we shall see

Bridge back in place.

With the neck still gluing, I decided to hazard re-attaching the bridge. I’d been dumb enough not to mark its original position in any way. But in the end I was able work up a template from photos of the body as it was before, and that seems to have worked out fine.

Staining the body.

After several layers of hand painted gloss lacquer, I sprayed something like 15-20 layers of aerosol lacquer. I didn’t sandbetween every coat, but about every fourth or fifth coat. And then at the end it got a multiple stage sanding and polishing. Sadly, however, I’m far from attaining the piano gloss I’d hoped for. Instead I’ve got a silky sheen. Hey-ho. You live ‘n’ learn!

And, finally, the finished uke’, up on the wall on its own cute little mini wall mount.

Ta-dah… the finished new look mended/refurbished uke’.

During the run up to the election I was made aware of Jonathan Pie. First time I saw one of his videos I just thought he was an independent media type pundit who’d decided to present news as if the BBC were really as Left as some (on the Right) claim it is. [1]

But with the second one I began to suspect all was not quite as it appeared. And shortly thereafter I discovered he’s in fact the creation of a guy called Tom Walker; a fictional news reporter, ‘captured’ as if speaking his mind, off-air, in the moments just before or after a broadcast.

It’s a very clever and effective idea.

The first piece of Pie I consumed was A Decade of the Tories, above. I can’t recall exactly what I saw next. But the next one to hit with as much impact as Decade was Election Aftermath, below.

Although I find Pie’s intense and rather hectoring style a bit much, I’m essentially in near complete agreement with what he actually says. In a similar but more clearly satirical vein, I just saw this:

Again, very funny. But, underneath the humour, bone-chillingly depressing.

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[1] Oh, the irony! It’s true there are elements of leftism, especially in the kind of group-think PC area. But anyone who knows their political onions will know that many of the BBCs prime news and politics figures for some time now – from Paxo to Andrew Neil and Laura Kuensberg – are card-carrying Tories.

In this, my final post in this series, I want to address a subject that was in fact the catalyst for my doing the whole series in the first place. One inspiration, as already mentioned several times now, was Margaret Charlston’s series of lists of book covers. But another was an incredibly potent series of dreams I had, on the Friday night before I commenced the series of posts here.

These dreams were so vivid and compelling they eventually woke me up. My mind remained, as it had been in the dreams, a roiling, churning, tempestuous sea of fragmented images and thoughts for some considerable time – several hours – as I lay half-awake in bed. Usually, on awaking, the conscious mind asserts itself more quickly. But on this occasion I was revelling in the post-dreamscape state of mind, and wanted to prolong that transitional state as long as I could manage. Amidst all the chaotically jumbled images and feelings, as a more conscious mode gradually ate into inchoate, the phrase ‘free your mind and your ass will follow’, derived from Funkadelic, became a motif. Rather bizarrely, as is the way in the dream-world, as I slowly returned to a more normal fully awake state, this morphed into ‘comb your mind, and your ass will follow’!

Rather than evoking an Alan Partridge-esque side parting (cue hands-free note to self; get haircut!), this was, in my mind at least, derived in part from an image on the spine of a book – Destructive Emotions – in which Bhuddist style meditations are suggested as a means for transforming a wildly chaotic and distressed mind into an ordered and calm one. Also feeding into all this were a series of Hitchcock movies Teresa had been watching at the time, all of which had pronounced psychological themes of a rather heavy-handed nature (but no less entertaining for that), from Marnie and Vertigo to Spellbound. ‘That Freud stuff’s a lot of hooey!’ Peck opines, rather over emotionally, in the latter!

Suffice to say that in the end, all of this got me thinking that, having written Frued, Jung et al off, as at best whimsical and at worst merely themselves obsessional and deluded, I ought instead of dismissing them outright, to revisit their writings. So, I’ve come full circle; as with Walt Whitman, there are, in Jung, Freud, and doubtless many others, thinkers and writers whose thoughts I want to return to, and re-examine. I’d like to conclude by thanking Margaret for her series of book covers, which acted as the catalyst motivating me to make these posts.

My super-minimalist home set up.

Been getting pretty fed up of not having a kit at home I can just hop on to when the mood takes me. So I’ve come up with this very minimalist deployment, which I’ve squeezed into a corner of the lounge.

Gretsch Catalina Club jazz kick (18″), with riser, and snare, Zildjian A 13″ hats, K Custom dry ride, and an unknown crash/ride w rivets. Just enough gear to get a groove on!

A slightly wider view.

Trying to make it feel a little vibey. Also nice to have a guitar or three nearby. So far just got the Epi’ T270 up. Might also hang an acoustic nearby. Plus I’m currently renovating a ukulele I got off Freecycle. Reckon I can squeeze that in as well. Just below the Epi’, perhaps?

Having digressed massively from my initial inspiration – Margaret’s posts on books she’s loved – this post brings me back, in a round-about way, to literature.

Before it does, however… I’ve recently been enjoying listening to the old 1968 BBC Radio 4 adaptation of The Hobbit, with Paul Daneman as Bilbo, and the delightfully named Heron Carvic as Gandalf. I love Michael Hordern as Gandalf, in the later BBC R4 LOTR, preferring him and the series as a whole to Peter Jackson’s cinematic blockbuster vision (curmudgeonly Tolkien snob that I am I’m a bit miffed by the mainstream populisation the Jackson films have brought into being). Heron Carvic and Paul Daneman are, for me, much closer in vibe to my initial childhood imaginings. And the music in this earlier Tolkienian adaptation – some of Stephen Oliver’s stuff in the aforementioned BBC R4 LOTR is sublime – just totally hits the sweet spot for me.*

But back to the literature: one of the qualities so attractive to me in Tolkien, masterfully summed up on the back cover blurb of my original childhood edition of LOTR, is the marriage of ‘the epic and the homely’. And these qualities remain, despite the passage of much time, both generally historically, and for me personally since first readings, at the heart of what enchants me in Tolkien’s writings. And then there are, scattered liberally throughout his work, many little epithets replete with a homely wisdom, as when Gandalf admonishes Frodo thus: ‘All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us’. Or ‘Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. … do not be too eager to deal out death and judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends’.

On the debit side, there are also times when certain characters make pronouncements I find less attractive or understandable. Another example, from Gandalf again, is when he says to Saruman ‘He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom’. Whilst the first two of the above wizardy quotes do indeed seem wise, the third sounds like religious conservatism when it attacks science. That old unweaving the rainbow chestnut, methinks.  Still, as the winter nights draw in, it’s the perfect time to hunker down beside the fire, and bathe in that ancient storytelling magic at which Professor Tolkien so excelled.

The Hobbit is a great autumn/winter treat of a read. As is the LOTR. But the latter, being such an enormous epic, involves an investment of time – and having read it multiple times in my youth – I can’t manage right now. So I’m considering re-reading my ‘First Edition’ stykr reissue, of The Hobbit.

Tolkien’s heirs have worked on completing some of their father’s larger unfinished projects, and there are some, such as The Children of Hurin, which are really rather wonderful. I originally read a good number of these in their incomplete form in a book called Unfinished Tales. Christopher Tolkien in particular has done an amazing job of finishing some such works. So I quite fancy reading another of these, which I first encountered as Of Tour, and His Coming to Gondolin, subsequently completed and published now as The Fall of Gondolin. Another similar work has appeared telling the tale of Beren and Luthien. Rather sweetly, Tolkien and his wife have these names engraved on their headstone!

* It’s really rather quite odd stuff, composed by David Cain, and played by Andrew Munrow and the Early Music Consort. This music really does sound otherworldly. And that’s wherein the magic of it lies. Donald Swan’s Tolkien sanctioned ditties, by contrast, sound to me like horribly dated Victorian or Edwardian parlour music baubles.

Electric guitars have been a part of my life since my mid-teens. Obviously they’ve really been a part of my entire life, inasmuch as their sounds form a backdrop to most of our lives, etc. But I’m being more specific here, and talking about my own playing of the instrument. As a kid acoustic guitars – both steel and nylon strung – were very much part of the childhood environment. So early efforts to learn guitar, and occasional tinkering with instruments that were lying around were part of the fabric of young life. A penchant for mellower jazzy sounds lead to a love affair with the nylon strung ‘classical’ style guitar that persists to this day. But the electric was nearly always there as well, floating around.

Bizarrely, despite this long relationship, it’s only very recently that, thanks in part to Jack Stratton of Vulfpeck fame, my longstanding relation to the electric guitar finally clarified itself somewhat. In one of his excellent Holy Trinity videos Stratton describes his approach to or view of electric guitar, as in effect a pitched/harmonic tambourine. This immediately chimed massively with my own history with the instrument, wherein it’s always been primarily rhythmic and chordal. Whereas for some guitarists, including some I love deeply, Grant Green springing to mind, it’s all about melody lines and soloing, for me it’s always been primarily about rhythm parts and chords.

That’s finally beginning to change: over many years I’ve occasionally dabbled in constructing licks, and even brief solos, in my private recordings. But just recently I’ve actually started practising scales. Something I’ve sedulously avoided until now! I’ve also started to take a deeper interest in the instrument itself, such that I’ve just enjoyed setting up a recently acquired Squier Strat (pictured above), adjusting the truss-rod, bridge settings, etc.

Having long wanted to build my own guitars, I’ve slowly been gathering the necessary gear to do so. But the idea had always been to make acoustics. Seeing folk online, and others, inc. people like my step-father Malcolm, building electrics has me fantasising about that as well now! So far all my electric guitars (excepting basses) have been Strats, or Strat-derived. I have deep and growing hankerings for a Tele’, a Les Paul type, and some form of hollow-bodied jazz axe. I had long-term loan of a beautiful Heritage jazz style guitar from our pal Patrick. One like that, of the deeper bodied Gibson or Epihone variety as played by, say George Benson, as opposed to the thinner 335 style, is high on my wish list.

Hofner 191

A recent obsession with learning parts to Fela Kuti tracks, amongst other stuff – bass, guitar and drums, and more – has even got me fantasising about making a twin necked axe (like the Hofner 191 pictured above), for use with a loop pedal,  so I can record live grooves and then drum along to them; a rhythm section that never bores of modal grooving… That really appeals to me! And to conclude this post… I love how YouTube contributes to both the exploration of the history of these fabulous instruments, and also provides abundant resources for learning how to play them.

This post is partly a response to the fact that, with the UK election today, politics is very much in the air right now. Pier Paolo Pasolini was a very controversial, politically active and outspoken man.

This is an odd entry, in a way, as it represents an as yet mostly unexplored fascination. Whereas the former three posts of this series represent stuff I’ve looked into quite a bit, my interest in Pasolini is much less clear or understood (by me!). His name has floated around in my life for years. The first or most memorable encounter I can bring to mind is Tom Baker’s enthusiastic recollections, in his candid and often hilarious autobiography Who On Earth is Tom Baker?, of playing a part in Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales. As a result of this anecdote, and the effusive reverence Baker evinced for, I watched said Canterbury Tales. This would be about 15-20 years ago. My abiding memories of that viewing are two very earthy bodily function related scenes, one involving The Damned being shat out of a huge Devil’s arse, and the other seeing some guy peeing on folk from a balcony! And lots of sex (although no erotica).

Many years later, my occasional peripheral interest in extreme cinema lead me to a viewing of Pasolini’s controversial Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom. At the time I was trying to find out if there were any films out there that I would find genuinely shocking or disturbing (actually there are legion, but they shock and disturb me for their utter vacuity, but that’s an altogether different topic). Having been brought up in a very sheltered Christian home, I guess this is or was all part of trying to find one’s own identity and boundaries. Intriguingly I recently learned that Abel Ferrara, whose Driller Killer ‘video nasty’ was part of the same search for shocking cinema, has made a film starring Willem Defoe. Simply titled Pasolini, it’s about the Italian poet, leftist and film-director’s brutal and mysterious demise. I also find it intriguing that Pasolini looked rather like the older wrinkled and ravaged Chet Baker, who, in a bizarre coincidence, spent much time as a virtual exile in Italy, and also met an untimely end in somewhat mysterious circumstances.

After two posts on very longstanding inspirations, here’s a (slightly) more recent one. Having been introduced to Tower of Power, and On The Serious Side in particular, by Rod Norman – thanks Rod! – about 10-15 years ago, I had always wanted to do this piece with Capricorn, the jazz/funk/soul band I ran for some years. Alas, that never came to pass. One key reason for this was that I never even attempted to learn the drum part. It just seemed so impenetrably and densely funky, in an occult kind of way. Recent dabblings in the rhythms of Fela Kuti’s Tony Allen brought me back, however. And this time around, thanks to YouTube I’ve been able to understand what David Garibaldi was doing… finally! I’m currently teaching myself the drum parts.

This excellent video has helped me loads…

And it ain’t easy! Another number with similarly challenging drum parts, also one I’ve always wanted to play in a group, is Actual Proof, by Herbal Hancock, drums by Mike Clark. So I’m also working on that. I love how these rhythms depart from from the typical eighth-note matrix of most modern popular music, and combine intricate sixteenth note groupings. Highly syncopated, and yet – when executed properly – both laid back and incredibly groovy, they embody a type of drumming I love, admire and aspire to. They also provide a rhythmic foundation for the rest of the group to soar upon, with melodic and harmonic ideas as compelling as the fabulous beats. So props to cats like Dave Garibaldi,  Mike Clark, and more recently – never mind going stratospheric, simply shooting right out into space! – Chris Dave, whose group, incidentally, do a fab cover of Actual Proof.

 

Having recently watched and enjoyed an all-star tribute (something I usually avoid ’cause I usually don’t enjoy such things) to Joni Mitchell, filmed on the occasion of her 75th birthday, I went back to For The Roses, one of my favourite Joni albums (Off the cuff, I’d say my favourite trio of hers are her debut, Song To A Seagull, For The Roses, and then either Hejira or The Hissing of Summer Lawns*). On this recent revisitation, a chief and central motivation was the desire to learn how to play Barangrill, one of her Beat flavoured wanderlust masterpieces. For The Roses captures Joni at a fantastic moment, withdrawing from the limelight somewhat into the Canadian wilderness, at the same time her music becoming more open and expansive, hinting at things to come. It’s kind of on the cusp between her earlier somewhat more folksy singer/songwriter girl with guitar/piano stuff and the future more band based material, with its more overt jazz and rock aspects. Getting more specific, Barandgrill is a great example of Joni’s sublimely idiosyncratic guitar style, with her penchant for unusual open tunings, and a playing style – rather like Tom Waits – both remarkably simple and economic, and yet highly personal and difficult to really capture. I was really annoyed when I read a music journalist glibly write it off in a feature on Joni’s career. I note with great pleasure that Mark Murphy (Mark Murphy II) and more recently Robert Glasper share my love of this beautiful song.

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*  It’s impossible and pointless trying to pick her best; she has such a magnificent body of work!  That said, it can be fun trying. What about Ladies Of The Canyon? I’m thinking now in particular The Circle Game. Surely one of the most sublime songs ever written? Talking of magnificent bodies, that picture of her naked by the sea/ocean, on the inner sleeve… wow! Yoni Mitchell, I love you forever!

Inspired by Margaret Charlston’s recent week of posting book covers, I’m going to do a week of posting stuff that’s currently important or of interest to me. But whereas Margaret just posted the covers, I’m going to say a little about whatever it is I choose to post each day.

I can’t recall with any great certainty when I first heard of Walt Whitman. I suspect it might’ve been via a documentary on Jack Kerouac (Whatever Happened to Kerouac?). I was in my teens, that’s all I can recall with any degree of certainty. Consequently, during my studies for A-levels I bought a cheap American mass-media paperback version of Leaves of Grass at Heffers, in Cambridge. Truth be told, to this day I’ve read only portions of that book. There were two quotes I’d heard from Whitman that really spoke to me: the first and most potent was ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes’, from Song of Myself. This still resonates with me today, not as ‘pure poetry’ per se, but as pure truth. This idea is, in my view, a fundamental part of being human that’s at odds with the modern tendency to specialise. The other quote, this time as poetic as it is true, I first encountered as an album title via Weather Report; I Sing The Body Electric. I actually discovered this bit of Whitman before the ‘multitudes’ thing, and at the time I didn’t know it had been taken from Walt’s works. Rather like William Burrough’s ‘Soft Machine’, I like the way this phrase captures something seemingly eternal and organic in combination with other seemingly more modern ‘techy’ notions, making a whole of them. Thanks to Margaret’s posts I recalled how important Walt Whitman had been to me way back when. I’m resolved to revisit that old paperback and more fully immerse myself in his writings.