Sippican Cottage
Donate

Minor Seventh Heaven — 1959 Fender Factory Tour

February 28, 2012 11 Comments

Aw, yeah. That’s Leo Fender hisself in the office at the beginning of the video. A little later on, you can see Freddie Tavares playing one of the finished guitars. Freddie was a lead designer of the Stratocaster, which is the guitar you mainly see being built in the video. Freddie was a well-regarded steel guitar player, born in Hawaii. How cool is Freddie Tavares? He played the big glissando that opens every Looney Tunes cartoon. That makes Freddie Tavares cooler than everyone you ever met, and everyone they ever met.

I’ve owned a Fender Telecaster. I still own an old Stratocaster. If you bought one of the Stratocasters you see being made in the video and stuck it in your closet, it would be worth about twenty grand right now, according to the place I bought my Strat back in the day, Gruhn’s in Nashville. Stevie Ray Vaughan thought the old beater Strat he played the most was a 1959, but it was probably a couple years newer than that. The 1959 written on the back of his pickups might have thrown him off. Maybe those lovely ladies you see winding pickup coils were winding his right then, and they went in a bin for a while.

I used to work in a factory not far from the Fender factory in Fullerton, back in the early eighties. It looked just like that. Concrete block and a metal roof. It’s hot as hell out that way in the summer, and the doors would hang open a lot, just like you see. I was a welder, and would have much preferred to be bandsawing a poplar guitar body. I had to wear a long-sleeved shirt buttoned up to the neck. Amusingly, I was the only anglo guy working with all messcans, and we had a Hawaiian floor boss, so it looked like I’d have fit right in at Fender. The video can’t capture one aspect of it. I bet that place was loud. And not from guitar music, either.

I’d be able to walk right up to any work station in that Fender plant and start working without training. Part of me –a substantial part — wishes I could. 

I Imagine She Smelled The Same The Day After As The Day Before

February 26, 2012 16 Comments

1901. The year Victoria died. The year my house was built. It’s a Victorian, natch. I think it’s fascinating that you can watch a video of her funeral.

You know, there really isn’t all that much history, if you’re talking only of civilization. Twelve thousand years ago, there was a wall of ice thick enough to cover the highest mountain in Maine sitting where I am now.  There’s still a wall of ice outside my door, but it’s on the porch roof and we don’t trouble one another.

My father was a WW II veteran, and his father was a WW I veteran, and the last veterans of the Civil War were wandering around, albeit rather slowly, less than a decade before I was born. Four years after Victoria shuffled off, you could have gone to Hiram Cronk’s funeral in New York. He was a veteran of the War of 1812.

George Washington had barely reached room temperature when Hiram was born in 1800. About a hundred years before ol’ borrowed-teeth George, Galileo was annoying everyone with his heliocentrism and halitosis. It’s easy, and interesting, to hopscotch backwards through the calendars like that until you find yourself up against the wall of ice.

Get busy being interesting — just plain old might do — and maybe someone will have claimed to have known you and Kevin Bacon in a blogpost in a century or so.

Powerless

February 25, 2012 6 Comments

We’ve lost our power three times in the last day or so; once so the power company could replace the pole that has the drop to our house on it, twice because it snowed eight inches last night and made the utility world go flibbertygibbet for a spell.

I had to sit shiver all night over the stove. When the power goes out, the fan doesn’t run and it overheats. It smells like a tire fire barbeque a bit when it gets too hot. You have to close all its dampers and watch it. I had to open a window at two AM to get some fresh air, and made a fire in the living room fireplace to exhaust the place, and get a little warmth. The former occupants of the house never took care of the fireplace, and actively broke it here and there, too, for practice, I guess. I had to watch the fireplace even harder than the woodstove, lest it pull a Miss Havisham on me and let a log roll out. The power was restored before dawn, and then shortly after winked out, and I had to go through the whole rigamarole again.

I fell asleep around eight this morning while sitting somewhat askew on the couch. My little son came downstairs and stood as quietly as an eight-year-old can stand, which is similar to how quietly an organ grinder with a rhino instead of a monkey might keep silent, and when I opened one eye, he said, ” Wow, dad, you’re finally awake.”

Yes, son. Finally.

The Squeatles!

February 24, 2012 4 Comments



Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze still sings for his supper every night.

Month: February 2012

Picture of sippicancottage

sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

Find Stuff:
Archives
Recent Comments
Recent Posts
Tags