Al Franken Provides Comic Relief at the Grateful Dead’s 1980 Halloween Concert: A Tribute to Our Favorite Deadhead Senator

in Comedy, Music | September 1st, 2017

Our illus­tri­ous Sen­a­tor from Min­neso­ta Al Franken has long been a Dead­head, or at least an ardent fan. He and com­e­dy part­ner Tom Davis were the first writ­ers hired by Sat­ur­day Night Live in 1975 and occa­sion­al­ly also per­formed rou­tines on the show. They were also Grate­ful Dead fans respon­si­ble for get­ting the band booked on SNL.

So by the time 1980 and the eight-night res­i­den­cy of the Grate­ful Dead at Radio City Music Hall rolled around, Franken and Davis were asked to host the final night, Hal­loween, for a show that was simul­cast on radio and closed cir­cuit tele­vi­sion to 14 movie the­aters around the coun­try. Their job? To help enter­tain view­ers and fill the two 40-minute breaks in the Dead­’s show.

For Radio City Music Hall, the event saved its finan­cial skin. Accord­ing to Rolling Stone, by the late ‘70s, “with New York City in fis­cal freefall, Radio City’s future was sud­den­ly shaky; movie atten­dance dropped, and plans to con­vert it into an office build­ing or park­ing lot loomed.”

The solu­tion was to book pop and rock acts. The first was Lin­da Ron­stadt. The sec­ond was the Dead, and soon Dead­heads descend­ed on Rock­e­feller cen­ter, buy­ing up 36,000 tick­ets.

Franken and Davis pre-taped many of the seg­ments, and the Dead loved mock­ing them­selves. There’s a Jer­ry Lewis Telethon par­o­dy for “Jerry’s Kids,” where Franken urges dona­tions for acid casu­al­ties; Bob Weir’s lux­u­ri­ous hair is admired; drugs and penis jokes abound; and at one point Davis “mis­tak­en­ly” drinks acid-dosed urine and trips out. (In real­i­ty, Davis actu­al­ly had dropped acid for the live por­tion.)

Radio City’s lawyers sued after the con­certs for dam­ag­ing its rep­u­ta­tion, but lat­er set­tled. A com­pi­la­tion video of the Hal­loween show and the pre­vi­ous night’s con­cert was released in 1981 as Dead Ahead, the source of these clips.

Tom Davis died in 2012 from throat and neck can­cer; and Al Franken rep­re­sents the cit­i­zens of Min­neso­ta, but did briefly take over SiriusXM’s Grate­ful Dead chan­nel in May of 2017 to host a full day of music and inter­views with Bob Weir, Bill Kreutz­mann and Mick­ey Hart, the sur­viv­ing mem­bers of the Dead (always an iron­ic turn of phrase).

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sen­a­tor Al Franken Does a Pitch Per­fect Imi­ta­tion of Mick Jag­ger (1982)

Al Franken Effort­less­ly Draws the Map of Amer­i­ca

11,215 Free Grate­ful Dead Con­cert Record­ings in the Inter­net Archive

Bob Dylan and The Grate­ful Dead Rehearse Togeth­er in Sum­mer 1987. Lis­ten to 74 Tracks.

The Grate­ful Dead Play at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids, in the Shad­ow of the Sphinx (1978)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How to Listen to Music: A Free Course from Yale University

in Music, Online Courses, Yale | August 30th, 2017

Taught by Yale pro­fes­sor Craig Wright, this course, Lis­ten­ing to Music, oper­ates on the assump­tion that lis­ten­ing to music is “not sim­ply a pas­sive activ­i­ty one can use to relax, but rather, an active and reward­ing process.” When we under­stand the basic ele­ments of West­ern music (e.g., rhythm, melody, and form), we can appre­ci­ate music in entire­ly new ways. That includes every­thing from clas­si­cal music, rock and tech­no, to Gre­go­ri­an chant and the blues.

You can watch the 23 lec­tures above, on YouTube, or Yale’s web­site, where you’ll also find a syl­labus and infor­ma­tion on each class ses­sion. The main text used in the course is Lis­ten­ing to Music, writ­ten by the pro­fes­sor him­self.

Lis­ten­ing to Music will be added to the Music sec­tion of our ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

It’s also worth not­ing that Prof. Wright has cre­at­ed an inter­ac­tive MOOC called Intro­duc­tion to Clas­si­cal Music. You might want to check it out.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Eve­lyn Glen­nie (a Musi­cian Who Hap­pens to Be Deaf) Shows How We Can Lis­ten to Music with Our Entire Bod­ies

Down­load 400,000 Free Clas­si­cal Musi­cal Scores & 46,000 Free Clas­si­cal Record­ings from the Inter­na­tion­al Music Score Library Project

Play­ing an Instru­ment Is a Great Work­out For Your Brain: New Ani­ma­tion Explains Why

1200 Years of Women Com­posers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

Bob Dylan Hates Me: An Animation

in Animation, Music | August 29th, 2017

Film­mak­er Caveh Zahe­di met his idol twice. And lived to ani­mate the sto­ry. Enjoy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bob Dylan Clas­sic, “For­ev­er Young,” Ani­mat­ed for Chil­dren

I Met the Wal­rus: An Ani­mat­ed Film Revis­it­ing a Teenager’s 1969 Inter­view with John Lennon

Watch Kids’ Price­less Reac­tions to Hear­ing the Time­less Music of The Bea­t­les

Hear Bob Dylan’s New­ly-Released Nobel Lec­ture: A Med­i­ta­tion on Music, Lit­er­a­ture & Lyrics

 

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Read 1,000 Editions of The Village Voice: A Digital Archive of the Iconic New York City Paper

in Art, Film, Magazines, Music | August 25th, 2017

After The Vil­lage Voice announced this week that it was fold­ing its print oper­a­tion, a cou­ple peo­ple com­pared the ven­er­a­ble NYC rag’s demise to the end of Gawk­er, the snarky online tabloid tak­en down by Hulk Hogan and his shad­owy financier Peter Thiel. For too many rea­sons to list, this com­par­i­son seems to my mind hard­ly apt. There’s a ges­ture toward the Voice’s pro­fane unruli­ness, but the alter­na­tive week­ly, found­ed in 1955, tran­scend­ed the blog age’s sopho­moric nihilism. The her­met­ic con­tain­er of its newsprint sealed out froth­ing com­ment sec­tions; no links fer­ried read­ers through rivers of per­son­al­ized algo­rithms.

The Voice pub­lished hard jour­nal­ism that many, includ­ing Voice writ­ers them­selves, have rue­ful­ly revis­it­ed of late. Its music and cul­ture writ­ers like Nat Hentoff, Lester Bangs, Sasha Frere-Jones, Robert Christ­gau and so many oth­ers are some of the smartest in the busi­ness. Its colum­nists, edi­tors, and reviewers—Andrew Sar­ris, J. Hober­man, Robert Siet­se­ma, Tom Rob­bins, Greg Tate, Michael Mus­to, Thu­lani Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates—equally so.

In its over six­ty-year run, Voice writ­ers sat in the front rows for the birth for hard bop, free jazz, punk, no wave, and hip-hop, and all man­ner of down­town exper­i­men­tal­ism in-between and after.

Amongst the many remem­brances from cur­rent and for­mer Voice staff in a recent Esquire oral his­to­ry, one from edi­tor and writer Camille Dodero stands out: “The alt-weekly’s pur­pose was, in the­o­ry, speak­ing truth to pow­er and the abil­i­ty to be irrev­er­ent, and print the word ‘fuck’ while doing so.’” Mis­sion accom­plished many times over, as you can see your­self in Google’s Vil­lage Voice archive, fea­tur­ing 1,000 scanned issues going all the back to 1955, when Nor­man Mail­er found­ed the paper with Ed Fanch­er, Dan Wolf, and John Wilcock. There are “blind spots” in Google’s archive of the Voice, not­ed John Cook at the erst­while Gawk­er. In 2009, his “search­es didn’t turn up any cov­er­age of Nor­man Mailer’s 1969 cam­paign or the Stonewall riots… and there’s not much on Rudy Giuliani’s may­oral bid.” Many years lat­er, months and years in the Google archive remain blank, “no edi­tions avail­able.”

The Voice has had its own blind spots. Writer Wal­ter Troy Spencer referred to Stonewall, for exam­ple, as “The Great Fag­got Rebel­lion” and used a phrase that has per­haps become the most weari­some in Amer­i­can Eng­lish: “there was most­ly ugli­ness on both sides.” This anti-gay prej­u­dice was a reg­u­lar fea­ture of the paper’s first few years, but by 1982, just as the AIDS cri­sis began to fil­ter into pub­lic con­scious­ness, the Voice was the sec­ond orga­ni­za­tion in the US to offer extend­ed ben­e­fits to domes­tic part­ners. It became a promi­nent voice for New York’s LGBTQ cul­ture and pol­i­tics, through all the buy­outs, cut­backs, and unbeat­able com­pe­ti­tion that brought it to its cur­rent pass.

The paper also became a voice for the most inter­est­ing things hap­pen­ing in the city at any giv­en time, such as the goings on at a Bow­ery dive called CBGB in 1975. Char­ac­ter stud­ies have long been a Voice sta­ple. Lester Bangs’ write-up of Iggy Pop two years lat­er cut to the heart of the mat­ter: “It’s as if some­one writhing in tor­ment has made that writhing into a kind of poet­ry.” Back in ’75, Andrew Sar­ris wrote a rather jaw-drop­ping pro­file of Hervé  Vil­lechaize (in which he begins a sen­tence, “The prob­lem of midgets….”).  …. the more I look through Voice back issues, the more I think it might have been a Gawk­er of its time, but as one­time colum­nist Har­ry Siegel tells Esquire, “what made it unique depends a lot on the age of who you’re ask­ing. It was a very dif­fer­ent paper in dif­fer­ent decades. It was valu­able enough for a long time that peo­ple paid mon­ey to read it.”

Indeed its first issue cost 5 cents, though by the non­de­script cov­er, above, you wouldn’t guess it would amuse or tit­il­late in the ways the Vil­lage Voice became well-known for—in its columns, pho­tos, car­toons, and lib­er­tine adver­tis­ing and clas­si­fieds. But most peo­ple these days remem­ber it as “free every Wednes­day,” to prof­fer dance, film, the­ater, music, restau­rants, to line sub­way cars and bird­cages, and to open up the city to its read­ers. The Voice is dead, long live the Voice.

Enter the dig­i­tal archive of the Voice here.

Writ­ings from the Voice have been col­lect­ed in these antholo­gies: The Vil­lage Voice Anthol­o­gy (1956–1980) and The Vil­lage Voice Read­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Eros Mag­a­zine: The Con­tro­ver­sial 1960s Mag­a­zine on the Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion

Down­load 36 Dadaist Mag­a­zines from the The Dig­i­tal Dada Archive (Plus Oth­er Avant-Garde Books, Leaflets & Ephemera)

Enter a Huge Archive of Amaz­ing Sto­ries, the World’s First Sci­ence Fic­tion Mag­a­zine, Launched in 1926

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 36 ) |

The Web Site “Centuries of Sound” is Making a Mixtape for Every Year of Recorded Sound from 1860 to Present

in History, Music | August 24th, 2017

The vibra­tions of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Ele­vat­ed Rail­road in Man­hat­tan, a recita­tion of “Mary Had a Lit­tle Lamb,” the announce­ments issu­ing forth from an inven­tor’s attempt at a talk­ing clock — hard­ly a mix with which to get the par­ty start­ed, but one that pro­vides the clos­est expe­ri­ence we can get to trav­el­ing in a son­ic time machine. With Cen­turies of Sound, James Erring­ton has assem­bled those record­ings and a few oth­ers into its 1878–1885 mix, an ear­ly chap­ter in his project of cre­at­ing one lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence for each year in the his­to­ry of record­ed sound.

“Things get a lit­tle more lis­ten­able in 1887 with a record­ing of ‘Twin­kle Twin­kle Lit­tle Star,’ ” writes The A.V. Club’s Matt Ger­ar­di. “It’s also with this third mix that we start to get a sense for Cen­turies Of Sound’s edit­ing style, as speech­es start to be lay­ered over musi­cal per­for­mances, cre­at­ing a lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence that’s as plea­sur­able as it is edu­ca­tion­al.”

In so doing, “Erring­ton calls atten­tion to the issue of rep­re­sen­ta­tion, as one of his pri­ma­ry goals is to paint a glob­al, mul­ti-cul­tur­al pic­ture of record­ing his­to­ry,” dig­ging past all the “march­ing bands, sen­ti­men­tal bal­lads, nov­el­ty instru­men­tals and noth­ing much else” in the his­tor­i­cal archives while putting out the call for expert help sourc­ing and eval­u­at­ing “Rem­beti­ka, ear­ly micro­ton­al record­ings, French polit­i­cal speech­es, Tagore songs or any­thing else.”

Putting up anoth­er year’s mix each month, Cen­turies of Sound has so far made it up to 1893, the year of the World’s Columbian Expo­si­tion in Chica­go which “set the tone for the next twen­ty-five years of archi­tec­ture, arts, cul­ture and the elec­tri­fi­ca­tion of the world,” and also the first age of “ ‘hits’ – music pro­duced with an eye to sell­ing, even if only as a sou­venir or a fun nov­el­ty.” With a decade remain­ing until Cen­turies of Sound catch­es up with the present moment, Erring­ton has put togeth­er a taste of what its son­ic dose of the almost-present will sound like with a 2016 pre­view mix fea­tur­ing the likes of the final album by A Tribe Called Quest and Lazarus, the musi­cal by David Bowie, both of whom took their final bows last year. We’re def­i­nite­ly a long way from the time of “Mary Had a Lit­tle Lamb.” But how will it all sound to the ears of 2027?

via The A.V. Club

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

Great New Archive Lets You Hear the Sounds of New York City Dur­ing the Roar­ing 20s

Map­ping the Sounds of Greek Byzan­tine Church­es: How Researchers Are Cre­at­ing “Muse­ums of Lost Sound”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” Acted Out Literally as a Short Crime Film

in Film, Music | August 23rd, 2017

Queen’s “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody”–you can play it on a 1910 fair­ground organ; you can get Siri to sing the song on your iPhone and use it to help explain string the­o­ry; and you can even turn the song into a vir­tu­al real­i­ty expe­ri­ence. There’s noth­ing you can’t do with “Bohemi­an Rhapsody”–down to and includ­ing mak­ing it the basis of a short crime film. “Fred­die” is played by Jeff Schine above; and Deb­o­rah Ramaglia plays “Mama.” You know the script.

via Digg

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

65,000 Fans Break Into a Sin­ga­long of Queen’s “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody” at a Green Day Con­cert in London’s Hyde Park

1910 Fair­ground Organ Plays Queen’s “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody,” and It Works Like a Charm

Inside the Rhap­sody: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on the Mak­ing of Queen’s Clas­sic Song, ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’ (2002)

Bohemi­an Grav­i­ty: String The­o­ry Explored With an A Cap­pel­la Ver­sion of Bohemi­an Rhap­sody

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hear What Music Sounds Like When It’s Created by Synthesizers Made with Artificial Intelligence

in Music, Technology | August 23rd, 2017

When syn­the­siz­ers like the Yama­ha DX7 became con­sumer prod­ucts, the pos­si­bil­i­ties of music changed for­ev­er, mak­ing avail­able a wealth of new, often total­ly unfa­mil­iar sounds even to musi­cians who’d nev­er before had a rea­son to think past the elec­tric gui­tar. But if the peo­ple at Project Magen­ta keep doing what they’re doing, they could soon bring about a wave of even more rev­o­lu­tion­ary music-mak­ing devices. That “team of Google researchers who are teach­ing machines to cre­ate not only their own music but also to make so many oth­er forms of art,” writes the New York Times’ Cade Metz, work toward not just the day “when a machine can instant­ly build a new Bea­t­les song,” but the devel­op­ment of tools that allow artists “to cre­ate in entire­ly new ways.”

Using neur­al net­works, “com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal sys­tems allow machines to learn spe­cif­ic behav­ior by ana­lyz­ing vast amounts of data” (the kind that gen­er­at­ed all those dis­turb­ing “Deep­Dream” images a while back), Magen­ta’s researchers “are cross­breed­ing sounds from very dif­fer­ent instru­ments — say, a bas­soon and a clavi­chord — cre­at­ing instru­ments capa­ble of pro­duc­ing sounds no one has ever heard.”

You can give one of the results of these exper­i­ments a test dri­ve your­self with NSynth, described by its cre­ators as “a research project that trained a neur­al net­work on over 300,000 instru­ment sounds.” Think of Nsynth as a syn­the­siz­er pow­ered by AI.

Fire it up, and you can mash up and play your own son­ic hybrids of gui­tar and sitar, pic­co­lo and pan flute, ham­mer dul­cimer and dog. In the video at the top of the post you can hear “the first tan­gi­ble prod­uct of Google’s Magen­ta pro­gram,” a short melody cre­at­ed by an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sys­tem designed to cre­ate music based on infer­ences drawn from all the music it has “heard.” Below that, we have anoth­er piece of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-gen­er­at­ed music, this one a poly­phon­ic piece trained on Bach chorales and per­formed with the sounds of NSynth.

If you’d like to see how the cre­ation of nev­er-before-heard instru­ments works in a bit more depth, have a look at the demon­stra­tion just above of the NSynth inter­face for Able­ton Live, one of the most DJ-beloved pieces of audio per­for­mance soft­ware around, just above. Hear­ing all this in action brings to mind the moral of a sto­ry Bri­an Eno has often told about the DX7, from which only he and a few oth­er pro­duc­ers got inno­v­a­tive results by actu­al­ly learn­ing how to pro­gram: as much as the prospect of AI-pow­ered music tech­nol­o­gy may astound, the music cre­at­ed with it will only sound as good as the skills and adven­tur­ous­ness of the musi­cians at the con­trols — for now.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Pro­gram Tries to Write a Bea­t­les Song: Lis­ten to “Daddy’s Car”

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Cre­ativ­i­ty Machine Learns to Play Beethoven in the Style of The Bea­t­les’ “Pen­ny Lane”

Watch Sun­spring, the Sci-Fi Film Writ­ten with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Star­ring Thomas Mid­dled­itch (Sil­i­con Val­ley)

Two Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Chat­bots Talk to Each Oth­er & Get Into a Deep Philo­soph­i­cal Con­ver­sa­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Repairing Willie Nelson’s Trigger: A Good Look at How a Luthier Gets America’s Most Iconic Guitar on the Road Again

in Music | August 22nd, 2017

Many gui­tarists are of two minds about trib­ute mod­els. In some cas­es, they seem like shame­less cash grabs, par­tic­u­lar­ly when the artist is no longer with us and can’t con­sent to the process. Fender’s “Jimi Hen­drix Stra­to­cast­er” (reg­is­tered trade­mark) is in no way, after all, Jimi Hendrix’s Stra­to­cast­er. His white Strat was a right-hand­ed gui­tar he mod­i­fied him­self, turn­ing it upside down to play as a lefty. Born of neces­si­ty, it was nonethe­less a bril­liant mechan­i­cal inno­va­tion that defined his sound. The mass-mar­ket ver­sion flips every­thing over on a left-hand­ed gui­tar for the more numer­ous righty cus­tomers, under­min­ing the pur­pose of the design, mass-pro­duc­ing Hendrix’s hand­made alter­ations, and turn­ing a one-of-a-kind his­tor­i­cal arti­fact into a com­mod­i­ty.

Fel­low lefty Kurt Cobain’s inge­nious Jag-Stang—a mashup of Fender’s Mus­tang and Jaguar guitars—seems more legit, on the oth­er hand, since Fend­er made pro­to­types for Cobain from a design he him­self sent to the com­pa­ny (or rather from two Polaroids he taped togeth­er). There’s a pro­pri­etary rela­tion­ship here between artist and gui­tar mak­er, a pri­or arrange­ment. We don’t see that rela­tion­ship between anoth­er famous play­er and his guitar’s famous mak­er. Like Hen­drix and Cobain and their Fend­ers, Willie Nel­son has inspired gen­er­a­tions of play­ers to pick up Mar­tin acoustics. But I very much doubt that Mar­tin would ever pro­duce a repli­ca based on Trig­ger, Nelson’s stal­wart clas­si­cal ax, even if such a thing were pos­si­ble.

That’s for the best. Trig­ger is and should remain an entire­ly unique object. It has an aura of its own, much of it ema­nat­ing from a huge hole in the mid­dle of the gui­tar. Like its own­er, Trig­ger is weath­ered and worn, and instant­ly rec­og­niz­able. It has been with Nel­son since he restart­ed his career in Austin after his first bout of Nashville fame, and it rep­re­sents Nelson’s trans­for­ma­tion from tra­di­tion­al croon­er into the out­law trou­ba­dour who emerged in the ear­ly sev­en­ties to change the course of coun­try music. (Read the sto­ry of the man and his gui­tar here.) To real­ly appre­ci­ate Trig­ger’s ragged mys­ter­ies, you don’t need to hear from Mar­tin gui­tars, but from one of the instrument’s elite hostlers, so to speak. Respect­ed luthi­er Mark Erlewine takes care of Trig­ger when it’s at home in Austin and can explain, as he does in the video above, every one of the guitar’s pecu­liar­i­ties.

“There are a num­ber of things wrong with it,” says Erlewine, “but they’re just minor repairs to keep it going.” As for that hole and the craters sur­round­ing it, he seems uncon­cerned. Though it looks like it might cave in at any moment, Erlewine has kept it struc­tural­ly sound. “Willie is not con­cerned about the looks of this gui­tar so much as the playa­bil­i­ty and func­tion­al­i­ty of it.” How did Trig­ger come to take on its dis­tinc­tive wounds? Not in the way you might expect. Rather than a stage acci­dent or tour mishap, the way these things can hap­pen, Nelson’s gui­tar became dam­aged through the sheer pas­sion of his fin­ger­style play­ing. Over the years his fin­ger­nails would “often chip into the wood and pull out wood as he plays.”

In per­fect con­di­tion when he bought it, Trig­ger has record­ed in its beat­en-up top the motor mem­o­ries of “over 10,000 shows and record­ing ses­sions” in the deep impres­sions of only its own­er’s fin­gers and per­son­al­i­ty. There is no way to dupli­cate this phe­nom­e­non for mass con­sump­tion. Stick with the video, from gui­tar tool and parts giant Stew­art-Mac­Don­ald, and see how Erlewine keeps Trig­ger healthy, “alive,” and “shored up over the years.”

via Uncrate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Willie Nel­son and His Famous Gui­tar: The Tale of Trig­ger: Watch the Short Film Nar­rat­ed by Woody Har­rel­son

Willie Nelson–Young, Clean-Shaven & Wear­ing a Suit–Sings Ear­ly Hits at the Grand Ole Opry (1962)

Mark Knopfler Gives a Short Mas­ter­class on His Favorite Gui­tars & Gui­tar Sounds

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast