April 2007

April 17, 2007
My ass is killing me.

And I don't mean in the good "new guy on Cell Block C has a purdy-purdy mouth, no arms, wears pink assless chaps and has curried the amorous favors of some real hard-pipin' motherfuckers" kinda way. Wait. I mean. That is good, right? At a minimum, it's hot. No?

No, I mean my ass is killing me. And has for the better part of a year. A. Year.

Some time in mid-06, I was playing with the little girl in a park when I decided to swing on a suspended platform. It was meant for kids to step across (with feet), not for an oldman to swing on (with ass). It was also tethered to the ground with a chain - the chain grossly limiting the motion with which you could swing on the platform. I leaned hard, swung with all my considerable weight, and when the platform reached the end of its leash, my tailbone was flush against the top of what I mistook for a seat.

When I yelped like schoolgirl, the little girl laughed, and then I laughed, and then I hobbled off the thing which I tried to fashion a swing by force of will. My will (and tailbone) lost, soundly.

As it turns out, these things can take a long time to heal. Something on the order of three Highlander lifetimes, it seems. This makes being a shutin somewhat less appealing, as my ass gets numb and all achy-breaky when I plant it too long in one location. This will make seeing Tarantino's new flick especially challenging. Brings a whole new and uncomfortable meaning to Grindhouse.

April 16, 2007
There is a link on CNN.com that reads, "Having baby at 12, 18K dead a day; $34 to stop it."

I have no fucking idea what that means. And I never will - I'm fairly sure if I click on that and read the resulting slop, I'll have to claw mine own eyes out.

Nice bit of teaser writing there. Corky.

April 10, 2007
I'm beginning to suspect it was a drum machine and not Rick Allen who laid down the funkybeats on Pyromania.

Keep in mind, this was before he signed up for Jenny Craig's extreme and somewhat controversial Lose Up to the Weight of One Appendage in the Time it Takes to Roll a Convertible Corvette program; that is, during the recording of Pyromania he had both arms, I just don't think he made much use of them.

I think I noticed it first on "Photograph" - my ears really pricked up on the fills. I suspect there are rhythmic patterns that a joker spinning knobs leans way-heavy on (the same way I abuse f-bombs, parentheticals, commas, and italics) that most flesh, blood, and wife-abusing drummers don't. Specifically, fills that kick in on the "and-a" of 4 smack of Hal to me:

1-and-|2-and-|3-and-|4-AND-A

I hear a drum fill that starts with sixteenth notes on the up beat of 4, and I'm thinking T-1000 is pounding the skins.

Makes sense, really - Mutt Lange was manning the board and any guy that meticulously layers eleventy-hundred quintillion vocal tracks of wankers singing "Ah-fuh-fuh-fuh-Foolin" isn't going to tolerate anything but Robby the Robot-style metronomic precision on the drumps.

I wonder if Rick even knows he didn't play on the album. He was probably out having a blood-puking contest with Steve Clarke while they were replacing his two's and four's with the WOPR's godgroove.

And anyhow, plenty of rock star supernovas in the 80's (and certainly other decades) didn't play a note on their magnum opi. One of the bass teachers I met at BIT (Yes. Yes, that's the Bass Institute of Technology. I am not even kidding.) was the dude who provided the bottom end for Girls, Girls, Girls - probably while Nikki Sixx was passed out from snorting a heady mix of termites and Keith Richards' dad with Ozzy.