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.

Darren Danger and Musical Gear

Lyndy took this picture of me this evening hiding behind some of my musical gear. 

Stacked on the left are my Pearl Export drums, with the snare drum at bottom center.  Behind the snare are a couple of guitar cases. 

The guitar on the left, a 1987 Gibson Les Paul, is leaning against a small Fender Sidekick 15 Reverb practice amplifier.  The middle guitar is a 2003 Fender Jazz Bass.  On the right is my 1989 Fender Stratocaster.  These two guitars are leaning against my 1998 Fender Hot Rod Deluxe guitar amplifier.

I am leaning on a Yamaha EMX 88S club mixer/amplifier.  It is sitting on top of one of it's two speakers.

On top of the EMX is a lamp that I bought at an auction in the early 1990's, and a bronze sculpture of a guitar player that my Mom gave me for Christmas this past December. In the back right, Darren Danger himself is a 1963 model.