On This Date...

Sorry for the long layoff.  I misplaced my computer.

Several interesting music-oriented things happened on this date in history.  Let's check some of them out:

1.  Chuck Berry's birthday.  Chuck Berry was born today in 1926, so that makes him 85 years old for those of you looking around for your calculator.  He was born in St. Louis, MO.  A lot of historians put Chuck at ground zero for the birth of rock and roll.  His mixture of country music (as it sounded in the early 1950s) and T-Bone Walker-style blues guitar licks created the classic 1950s rock and roll sound.  His biggest hits came in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  Sadly, he has been pretty much a nostalgia act since the 70s.  His last true studio album came out in 1979.  Chuck often toured by himself, and arranged to be paid in cash and for a local band in each town to back him in his concerts.  The primary benefit of this is that he got most of the money and didn't have to deal with a band touring with him.  The downside was varying quality to his concerts and that he eventually did a few months in prison for tax evasion.  He still occasionally plays live and still lives outside St. Louis.

Chuck Berry in 2007

2.  Gary Richrath's birthday.  Who, you ask?  Gary was the original and long time lead guitarist for the band REO Speedwagon.  In the early 1980s REO was one of the biggest bands out there.  By then, however, I had already quit listening to them.  Most of their huge 1980s hits were power ballads, a genre that didn't interest me.  If you back the clock up a few years, though, REO were rockers. Not heavy metal, but more of a fast boogie-woogie party rock and roll with a great guitar sound.  I first took notice in 1977 with the song Riding the Storm Out.  It was off their new live album "You Get What You Play For".  I bought that album and wore it out, mostly focusing on Gary Richrath's guitar playing.  Unfortunately they followed that up with the album with a cheap pun in the title- "You Can Tune a Piano But You Can't Tuna Fish" which ushered in the song "Time For Me To Fly".  This was a big power ballad hit, and unfortunately distorted everything they ever recorded from that point on.  They lost me.  They lost Gary Richrath, too, in 1989.  He quit the band because he wanted to get back to playing rock songs, while lead singer Kevin Cronin preferred the overwrought emotional stadium rock songs.  Gary was born on this date in 1949, and he's now 61 years old.

Gary on the "You Get What You Play For" album cover

3. Paul McCartney's first performance with the Quarrymen:  Before the Beatles, there was the Quarrymen.  This was a musical group made up of John Lennon and several other kids from the neighborhood.  They were called the  Quarrymen after Quarry Bank High School where Lennon attended school.  Paul first saw the Quarrymen perform at a churchyard picnic in July, 1957.  He later joined the group, and played his first show with them on October 18, 1957-exactly 54 years ago today.  By 1960 most of the Quarrymen had quit the group, George Harrison had joined, and the Quarrymen chose a new name- The Beatles.

John Lennon and the Quarrymen on the day Paul McCartney and Lennon first met

4. Video Killed the Radio Star-  Today in 1979, this song, by the Buggles, was number one in the U.K.  The Buggles were Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes  They were basically a studio-only band and did not perform concerts.  They recorded and released the single "Video Killed the Radio Star" right at the end of the 70s, with lyrics that looked back nostalgically at radio and the worry that radio as a star-making source was losing it's power and being taken over by television.  With a hit on their hands, Horn and Downes quickly wrote and put out a Buggles album in February, 1980 called "The Age of Plastic."  It had a couple of other minor singles but no additional hits.  The duo next spent a year with the band Yes before releasing the second Buggles album in 1981.  This album went nowhere, and the Buggles came to an end.  On August 1st, 1981, "Video Killed the Radio Star" was the very first video played on the brand new MTV (back when they played videos).

The Video Killed the Radio Star single

5. Julie London- On this day in 2000 Julie London died at age 74.  Most people know her as nurse Dixie McCall on the tv show Emergency! from the mid-1970s.  What many don't know is that in the 1950s she was a very popular singer.  She was working as an elevator operator when she was discovered, and ended up recording 32 albums in her career.  She was Billboard magazine's most popular female vocalist in 1955, '56, and '57.  She was married for a while to Jack Webb of Dragnet fame.  Later, after divorcing Webb she met and married Bobby Troup, a bandleader who wrote the popular song "(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66."  In the 1970s Webb created the tv show Emergency! and cast both Julie London as Nurse Mccall and Bobby Troup as Dr. Joe Early.  They remained married until Troup's death in 1999.

Julie in her 1950s singing heyday.

With husband Bobby Troup in the Emergency! days

This concludes today's history lesson.  Now go and do something productive.



Graffiti Yellow 2001 Fender Stratocaster

2001 Graffiti Yellow Fender Stratocaster

I'm the proud new owner of a somewhat rare and special 2001 Stratocaster.  It comes in the not-so-common color of Graffiti Yellow.  Supposedly in the mid-80s Jeff Beck asked Fender to make him a guitar the same color as the hot rod in the movie American Graffiti.  As a result, Graffiti Yellow.  This color was used from 1987 until the early 1990's on some high end Strats called the Stratocaster Plus.  Graffiti Yellow Strats were made in very limited numbers, and eventually it was no longer offered as a standard color.  It still is not available to this day.

In 2001, the state of South Dakota had a special promotion in their state lottery in which approximately 100 Graffiti Yellow Strats were given away.   I'm not sure how you could win one.  Did you have to scratch on a ticket or what?  There is this video of a tv commercial that apparently ran in South Dakota at the time.  The commercial says 100 are to be given away, but on the back of mine there is a plate saying it is number 14 of 115.

There is evidence not all these guitars were given away in the lottery.  For example, there is this summer of 2006 newsletter (scroll down to page 2) from the South Dakota lottery referring to a man winning a "leftover" lottery stratocaster at a Sioux Falls Canaries minor league hockey game.  So 5 years after the lottery they were still handing them out. 

These lottery Stratocasters were all made in Graffiti Yellow and were manufactured at the Fender Custom shop in Corona, California. The Custom shop does not make any of the regular manufacturing run versions of the the Strat.  They make things such as expensive one-of-a kind highly decorated guitars, or special order guitars for famous musical artists.  They also tackle special jobs such as the 115 guitars needed for the lottery giveaway. 

Wasting no time trying it out!

I got mine through an EBay auction.  I was bidding on it while Lyndy and I were on vacation in Mexico.  I bid a couple times from the laptop in the hotel lobby, and I cast what was ultimately the winning bid on an iPod Touch from a ferry riding back to the mainland from Cozumel Island.  The ferry had free wi-fi access.  I got a little bit lucky because I was actually outbid, but the winning bidder ended up backing out of it, so it fell to the second highest bidder, which luckily was me.  It was shipped to me by UPS from Minneapolis, MN.  So in ten years it hadn't moved very far from South Dakota.

The guitar looks like it has barely been played at all.  Luckily, whoever won it in the lottery was not much of a guitar player.  I bought it from a pawn shop/estate type dealer in Minneapolis who sells a lot of used guitars.  It originally had white pickup covers and volume/tone knobs, but like I did with my blue Strat, I switched them to black.  So out of the 115 of these made, mine may well be the only one with the black trim look to it.

I only had it for a couple of days, long enough to spend literally less than 10 minutes strumming it (mainly to see if all the pickups worked, etc.) and the chance came to really break it in.  My band Lo Pan's Revenge played at one of the parties held for Evan and his high school graduation (see next blog entry).  I took the new yellow Strat to the show and ended up playing it for more than half the songs without really having spent any time getting used to it.  The result?  It played and sounded great!

The Graffiti Yellow Strat makes it's debut!

Evan's Graduation from Topeka West

Evan graduated from Topeka West!  His ceremony was yesterday.  Here he is with his robe right after the ceremony ended:



This is a view of the kids on the floor of the Expocentre during the ceremony:

Over the weekend, in addition to the ceremony, Evan attended three parties held in his honor.  He definitely had a lot of fun celebrating his completion of high school!

Drive Train

There is an organization with a  website out there called the Prelinger Archives, and they have thousands of old films available for viewing and downloading.  Most of these films are of the type you would have seen in school growing up, such as "It's Tough to be a Teen", or "What's Going On Down There?"  Others are films created by corporations either to be viewed by their employees, or as advertisements between movies at the theater.  Most of them were made from the 1940's through early 1970's.  All of it is in the public domain, so you can download these films for free and do whatever you want to do with them.

In 2006, as I periodically do, I was browsing through some of these old films and I got to watching a lot of automobile advertisement clips produced by the major auto manufacturers.  Feeling creative, I decided to make a music video using clips from these car ads. 

I sat down with my guitar and wrote some music that was supposed to give the feel of a carefree ride in a vintage car.  Using an electric guitar, bass, synthesizer, and drum machine it took two or three nights to record the song.  I consider this song to be by one of my musical alter egos- Optic.  That is the band name I use for recordings in which I play all the instruments myself. 

Next, I downloaded a bunch of the old car ad films, which averaged about 5-7 minutes long each,  and set to work editing it all into a video.  To edit the video, which took several days of work, I went through all the car films and chopped them up and created a bunch of short clips.  On some of them I altered colors or did other editing tricks like speeding them up to enhance the presentation.

  This is my first attempt to post a video to this webpage.  The video looks ok, but the sound of the recording is a little distorted to me.  Nevertheless, I present to you "Drive Train"

Drive Train, by Optic. Written, recorded and produced by Darren Danger in 2006.

A Bullish Situation

This pic is from July, 2009, and it is of the daily cattle drive in Ft. Worth, Texas.  Each morning, in the old stockyards section of Ft. Worth, several attending cowboys drive about 12 or 15 longhorns a few blocks down the street to a corral, and in the afternoon they drive them back again.  Crowds of people gather along both sides of the street to watch.

 Ft. Worth was an important location in the days of the huge cattle drives of the Old West.  Thousands of cattle were driven into Ft. Worth along the Chisholm Trail.  The stockyards that held these cattle still stand, but most are now converted to shops.  The daily cattle drive for tourists is all just for show now.  It was pretty impressive standing just a few feet from those huge steers.  I can hardly imagine what it would have been like to stand there and watch hundreds go by.

Video Games- More Important than Ever

As a person who has spent about a billion hours playing videogames, I love this cartoon.

Osage County Courthouses- Lyndon KS

These photographs on a fine fall day are from October 17, 2009.  Lyndy, Evan and I found ourselves in Lyndon, Kansas, county seat of Osage County.  This shot shows the current courthouse, which opened in 1922.  This courthouse replaced the previous building, which is still standing next door.

This courthouse opened in 1887, replacing an even earlier one which had been built in 1875.  This is a beautiful building, and very well preserved.

This is a close up of some of the decorations on the very top of the building.  If you look closely at the top of the previous picture you can see what I zoomed in on.  This kind of ornamentation is long gone in architecture.