We took a short trip to Bremerhaven over the weekend. If you are ever there, there are 2 things you need to see: the Deutsches Auswandererhaus (German Emigration Center), and the Zoo am Meer.

Click for some awesome pictures…..

When I was 15 I was looking to buy a new electric guitar. Until then I had been playing my first, a Peavey Patriot. I was torn between 2 models played by my 2 favorite players: a Fender Stratocaster (Jimi Hendrix) or a Les Paul (Jimmy Page). The father of a classmate of mine was a guitar player from Chicago. He was an early mentor of sorts and taught me a bunch of things about chords, scales and 12 bar blues.

When he heard I was looking for a new guitar, he told me I look like a Les Paul kind of guy, whatever that meant. So I ended up buying a black Les Paul Studio. The main reason I chose it was that, compared to a strat, it stayed in tune. I have been playing that guitar for about 18 years and it shows. It has plenty of nicks and dings, spots where the paint has worn off, spots on the back where various belt buckles have torn it up, a knob is missing, the pickup switch is stuck, the brass plated bridge is worn down to the steel underneath, and it has been refretted twice. It has played blues, jazz, rock & roll, heavy metal, punk, space rock, shoegaze, German schlager, country and more. I have 4 other guitars, but it is my go to guitar. It gets the job done. It can rock your soul and blow your fucking brains out. It is a music machine. And in my younger years, I would like to think, it helped get me laid on more than one occasion.

In 2000, my early mentor, Bob Bonner, was in New York City on business and called us up and invited my father and I down to the city to go see Les Paul at the Iridium Club. It was a great show. You could see that Les’s hands were suffering from arthritis, but he still killed. He had a great band and they were in the pocket, holding it down. He was telling dirty jokes and flirting with his cute female bass player (I like how you handle that bass. Let’s see if you can handle something else after the show. Hey-oh!). At the time he must have been 83, 84. Still working.

After the show, Bob slipped the doorman a Benjamin and we went backstage and hung out with Les for a few minutes. I didn’t really know what to say but he ended up telling me the story about how he saw Jimi Hendrix auditioning in some club somewhere…

…But when I walked in and heard this guy wailing – he had that guitar wide open – I decided to stick around for a while. It was the afternoon; the place was pretty empty, so the bartender was watering down the drinks. I never got Jimi’s name. I asked the bartender didn’t know. Then I realized my son’s still in the car! I go out there and tell him that we’re going to swing back after we finish dropping off records. When we got back to the Allegro, Jimi was gone. I said to the bartender, “Where is that guy? … Did he get the gig?”

“Are you kidding?” the bartender said. “He was too loud. We threw him out.” Luckily the guy had snapped a picture, probably because I was interested. I have the photo on the wall. It took me years to come across him again.

I have an autograph and a picture of us together from that amazing evening. I’m trying to find it. It’s in a box somewhere either here or at my folks. If I find it, I’ll scan it and add it here.

As a recording engineer, I am thankful for his numerous contributions to my trade. Multitrack recording and overdubbing are good starting points. Tape delay, flanging, reverb, humbucker pickups, phasing, the first 8 track tape machine. He did that. Sure, somebody else would have probably done it eventually, but he did it first. He did all of that. He was the Tom Edison of Rock & Roll.

If you turn on the radio right now and listen for 5 minutes, you are going to hear something that he invented.

He is one of the people that made the 20th century what it was. He made it sound the way it did.

Berlin…

Lübeck…

Travemünde…

Leer…

Aurich…

Groningen…

We just got back today and tomorrow it’s back to work.

I’m outta here for the weekend. Jens and I are going to Berlin to let the sow out one last time before he becomes a daddy. We’re gonna see the sexy Peaches concert and possibly some drum & bass at Maria am Ostbahnhof (I know, drum & bass, but it is so rare here in my neck of the woods, I get it when I can). We may also check out the Stasi museum.

That’s it till next time…

Thriller was the first album I ever owned. I think I got it for Christmas in 1983 if I remember correctly. I loved that record. I wore the grooves out. I’m not embarrassed to say, that I even had a glove made of silver lamé and could do the moonwalk (well, maybe a little embarrassed). When the John Landis directed video for Thriller came out, it scared the hell out my siblings and I. My sister had a poster of MJ on her bedroom door. After we watched the video, we were scared shitless and couldn’t fall asleep until one of our parents took the poster down. “He’s a zombie! He’s gonna get us!”

When I was working as an assistant engineer in Chicago, one of the engineer/producers that made my life hell, but nonetheless taught me a lot, assisted Bruce Swedien on some of the Thriller sessions (That makes me 2 degrees away from Thriller. I might put that on my résumé). This same person also worked on the Superbowl Shuffle, so make of that what you will.

Anyway, Thriller was the only Michael Jackson album I ever had. I think after that I got 1984 from Van Halen and didn’t look back. I listened to Thriller again sometime last year when the 25th anniversary edition was released. “Thriller”, “Billy Jean” and “Beat It” really stand out, of course. The rest is good as well. The collaboration between MJ and Paul McCartney always reminds me of the bad blood that developed between them shortly thereafter.

Unfortunately, as we all know, his life turned into a tragic freak show of David Lynchian proportions after that. I suppose with his upbringing and celebrity situation, it shouldn’t be too surprising, but holy fucking shit, what a god damned freak show!

With all his problems and, ahem, dalliances, he was still a musical pioneer who contributed a lot to modern pop music. Was he a genius? Sure. Not really my kind of genius (again, the freak show), but a genius nonetheless.

There is an interesting article over at edge.org (yeah, I never heard of it either), by Lera Boroditsky, about language and how it shapes the way we think. it touches on a lot of things that I somehow noticed when learning German but couldn’t really articulate.

What it means for a language to have grammatical gender is that words belonging to different genders get treated differently grammatically and words belonging to the same grammatical gender get treated the same grammatically. Languages can require speakers to change pronouns, adjective and verb endings, possessives, numerals, and so on, depending on the noun’s gender. For example, to say something like “my chair was old” in Russian (moy stul bil’ stariy), you’d need to make every word in the sentence agree in gender with “chair” (stul), which is masculine in Russian. So you’d use the masculine form of “my,” “was,” and “old.” These are the same forms you’d use in speaking of a biological male, as in “my grandfather was old.” If, instead of speaking of a chair, you were speaking of a bed (krovat’), which is feminine in Russian, or about your grandmother, you would use the feminine form of “my,” “was,” and “old.”

When I first learned German, I assumed the word for cheese (Käse) was feminine, mainly because, like many other feminine nouns, the word ends with an E. I also falsely assumed that there was some sort of logical derivative order: Cheese comes from milk (Milch, also feminine), which comes from female mammals. Well there you have it! Plus, cheese is yummy and soft (mostly) and chewy. It all fit neatly together in the language compartment of my little brain.

Then I found out after years of saying die Käse, that I should have been saying der Käse and I had been forming my articles and pronouns incorrectly. I explained my logic to the person who set me straight and she said, “Nein, Käse ist männlich, weil er stinkt!” (Cheese is masculine because it stinks)

It is fairly safe to say that summer is on. The weather has been consistently warm for a few days and there is lots of grilling in effect. We’ve had people over a few times to grill. We do it on the street, commando style. There is probably a law against it, but nobody has complained yet. This weekend is probably going to involve some grilling as well. Germans are all about grilling. At the weather website, wetter.de, there is even a, what I call, the Grill-o-meter. Check it out! It’s 3-4 Würstchen grilling conditions everywhere except for down south in the mountains. Don’t think for a minute that will stop them though.

Also last week was Stadtfest. It was a bit rainy but it didn’t stop the Lüneburgers from wilding in the streets all through the night. I took a few pictures but only really got into it on Sunday when it was almost over.

On Friday night I did get a chance to see a band playing here called Miyagi. I was impressed with their show. It was much better than the CD I bought afterwards. The CD isn’t bad by any means, it just doesn’t rock as much as they did live.

Ein Chefarzt führt die Frau eines reichen Stifters durch den neuen Gebäudeflügel des Krankenhauses. Als die beiden in ein Zimmer hereinschauen, sehen sie einen männlichen Patient, der im Bett liegt und masturbiert. Der Chefarzt beruhigt die schockierte Frau und erklärt, dass der Patient an einer sehr ernsten Krankheit leidet. “Seine Hoden produzieren zu viel Sperma. Falls der Patient nicht mindestens 5 mal am Tag masturbiert und den Druck entlastet, können seine Hoden eventuell platzen. Wenn das passiert, kann der Patient womöglich verbluten.” “O! Wie furchtbar! Der arme Mann”, sagt die Frau. Sie gehen ein paar Zimmer weiter und sehen einen zweiten Patient, der an der Bettkante sitzt und stöhnt, während eine Krankenschwester vor ihm kniet und ihn oral befriedigt. Völlig verdutzt fragt die Frau, “Herr Doktor, bitte erklären Sie mir, wie so etwas hier in Ihrem Krankenhaus überhaupt vorkommen kann!” “Na, ja, eigentlich leidet dieser Patient an der gleichen Krankheit wie der erster Patient”, erwidert der Chefarzt, “allerdings ist er privatversichert.“

Thanks, I’ll be here all week!