Woonsocket’s own Duke Robillard plays Blues for T-Bone. The eighties, in Germany. There was a rash of guitars heroes just then. Extended solos might have been our biggest export at the time, after excelsior and gum arabic.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all my friends out there on the Intertunnel. We are friends, you know; I wouldn’t let strangers hang around my cottage like you do.
(Update: Thanks, Kathleen, for donating to the boys music fund again. Merry Christmas! Up-Update: Wow; many thanks to longtime Interfriend Ruth Anne! Up, up, and away update: Bilejones comes through. Many thanks!)
Then again, if I made it, it wouldn’t have worked, and I’d never have heard the end of it.
Woodworkers constantly construct their own tools. Jigs, mostly, to make the same thing over and over.
Matthias’ homemade bandsaw
Previously on SC: Ad Hoc? I Invented It. Six Homemade Tools
I’d be hard-pressed to come up with anyone as musically influential as Aaron Thibeaux Walker.
No, really. If you’ve ever been in a juke joint, or a road house, or a cathouse, or a supper club, or any other borderline disreputable place where liquor and music is served, he’s the patron saint of whatever you saw on the crummy stage in the corner. He’s the first guitar hero. Gave birth to the birth of rock.
He always looked slick, which I like. People on the stage should look different than the audience. They should act like they belong there. He sang, and then he sang through his guitar. That’s the key to his style. It was all melody. And he sang about mundane things that everyday people could relate to. Tuesday’s just as bad.
Big band music had to go somewhere. T-Bone Walker took it somewhere else, near where we all live. I very rarely miss playing music. I did it for money. But every once in a while, I think of the tiny stage in the Met Cafe in Providence, and cheap beer and the pool table that listed to port a bit, and I think of T-Bone Walker, and how much fun it was to be sad together on Friday night.
My older brother used to play with a very talented performer back in the day in Providence, RI. The fellow could do everything. Balloon animals, magic, juggling, mad piano skills, sing. He taught himself to play the musical saw for some reason. He would only play songs that could incorporate the saw properly — I Saw Her Standing There; The First Time I Ever I Saw Your Face — that sort of thing. Ave Maria would have been right out.
I Saw Her Again, Last Night, though…
Good night Jose Rose, wherever you are.
(Thanks to Charles Schneider for sending that one along)
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