Horseback Riding in Hollywood

We had a great time on Sunday. The stable is at the north end of a street that dead-ends into the Hollywood Hills. You drive right past the original offices of the Hollywoodland Realty company that put the original Hollywood(land) sign up, and the stable is only a few hundred yards from the sign itself, and most of the way up the mountain. You ride west through a gate, and you're in Griffith Park. After going up a while to the top, you wind down the other side, winding up in Burbank, at the 134 and Forest Lawn Drive. There's the Los Angeles Equestrian Center there, next door to a Mexican Restaurant, so they tied up the horses, and we had lunch. After lunch, it was back on the horses, and another two-hour ride back to the stable. We rode out at 11, and got back at 4.

And, yes, I'm really sore. The worst was my bottom, what with the horse insisting on trotting a lot of the time, so I was bouncing on that seat -- and I don't have much padding between the leather and my bones. Especially on the way home, he pretty much insisted on trotting, so I got pretty good at detecting the little half-step that indicated he was about to shift into trot-mode, and pulling him back down into a walk. Too late, though, I guess. My bottom is better now, but my back is still pretty stiff.

We did have a near-tragedy -- about 5 minutes from getting back to the stable, our 'expert' rider dad somehow managed to get his horse's back feet off the edge of the trail, a 45 degree slope. The horse was digging in from a reared-up, Hi-ho Silver position, and Roger fell off. The horse scrambled back to the trail, but kicked him two or three places in the process. Fortunately, it was just his calf, and a small ding to the forehead. The rangers got him out of there (somehow -- we kept going on to the stable), and the paramedics took him to the hospital. They did X-rays and CT scanned his head, and he's OK. Not a good thing for his daughter to have to watch, though. Fortunately, by the time he was loaded into the ambulance, he was past some of the pain and joking around, so his daughter was able to see he was OK. That ol' Roger always has to be the center of attention. I told him it was pretty nice of him to throw himself under the horse to cushion his fall.

Anyway, naturally, on Monday, on their long walk to school, Geneva started the campaign to get a horse. Of course, Daleen, having owned a horse herself already, won't hear a word of it. Even Geneva had to admit that 'maybe I shouldn't have gone on that ride.' She is 'working' down at the Camp Cookie stable for their Girl Scout project, so that helps. Unfortunately, they're supposed to be cleaning and repairing the stable, not playing with the horses, but it's hard to get Geneva to remember that...

Jimi Hendrix's guitars

It's reasonably well-documented that Jimi played a right-handed Strat, strung upside down so it would be "normal" to him -- bass strings at the top. The only "hard" mods would be to reverse the nut, and put the strap button on the "wrong" horn.

This puts the pickups in a strange "shape" for the strings they refer to, and the tremolo bar under Jimi's elbow, which you can see him working in performances. There's also some people who think that the long gap from nut to tuner on the bass strings in this configuration (rather than the treble strings) makes some difference to the sound.

Still, people labor under the belief that the nut-to-tuner gap, and the odd pickup angles (especially the closest-to-saddle pickup, which is strongly angled -- presumably to compensate for something, but in the Jimi-arrangement is now doubly-wrongly compensating) contributed to Jimi's sound, and they want it, too. So Fender makes (made?) the "Voodoo" model -- a not-exactly mirror image white Strat, so right-handed players can upside-down string a left-handed guitar, becoming, I suppose, the Bizzaro-Jimi. Actually, the neck and pickups are backwards, but the "horns", controls and tremolo bar are in the conventional spots. I guess it's more of a right-handed body (with "wrongly" placed pickups) and a left-handed neck. This avoids Jimi's problem of the deeper cutaway being on the wrong side, too.

Thoughts about an audition CD

Warren wants to put "Take Me to the River" first thing on the CD. I'd'a put it last, or not on there at all -- partly because I don't think it's Representative, and partly because I don't think I do it well. I guess we're agreed that for the audition CD, being Representative is optional, but I'm still pretty embarrassed by doing the song in the first place. (It remains a mystery why I worked it up at all. I guess I like the song too much, and hoped for the best.) Part of it is that I don't think of myself as a "rocker" (singing *or* playing), part is that it's (supposed to be) so drum and bass intensive, and we have neither (which is why I tried to add that MIDI part once), and part is that I'm singing it an octave down.

I guess every song I play has a little story to go with it. "Let It Be" is a favorite lately because I think I sing it well, and I feel like it's one song that I'm not really "imitating the original" so much. I don't sound like Paul the way I sound like James, and the guitar part is clearly not Paul's piano, so I guess I like to fantasize that it's (at least a little bit) a re-interpretation, rather than an imitation, which makes me feel cool. Unlike, say, "Fire and Rain" where I'm playing as exactly like James as I can, though I've tried to back down on the sounding-like-James vocally, and sing it a bit more like me instead.

The story on "Five O'Clock World" is that I heard it done by Hal Ketchum, and am imitating his version. I like the yodeling in it, mostly because it's so "out there" -- even more scary to do in public than normal singing. I like doing it, early and often -- and because of the "edge", it's what I chose to do at The Gypsy Den. But then it came to my attention that every "young and hip" listener associates it *only* with the Drew Carey show -- and now I'm mostly embarrassed to do it, 'cuz of the lame cultural reference. When older people are in the house, I think it sounds as I intended it, but with a younger audience, my sincere reading juxtaposed with Drew Carey's ironic comedic take = embarrassing. "Who's the geek up there singing that Joke Song like it was Mozart?"

And if you can bear another story, "A Whole New World" is probably just a mistake. There's a great, soft country version on the "Best of Country Sing the Best of Disney" album, by Collin Raye, a reasonably famous country star. (A) I'm not pulling off the country feel he (and his band) does, and (B) despite it being the Big Song from a relatively recent Disney hit, none of the little kids actually seem to recognize it.

Venue Troubles

We're gonna try to keep Tully's open as an option, or even back again as a residency (barring other Better Offers). I wish Dave had put the hours back to 10:00, not just 9, but you can't have everything.

It's clear that Moxie is Not Gonna Work Out, at least not in the short run. This last weekend was encouraging -- it was way up from the all-time low of Exactly Nobody the weekend before. I'd'a said that two more Saturdays of "near nobody" would have fulfilled our obligation to Jill. Admittedly, apparently everywhere was Really Slow through the holidays, and the grocery strike is still ongoing, so many of the "chances" that Moxie had to "show us the audience" were unfairly stacked against poor Jill and her little cardboard sign.

I don't want to get off on a rant, but my problems with Tully's are (a) short hours and (b) lack of support. Even if they back down on the open resentment, the fact that Manager Dave won't even put a stinkin' sign in the window bugs me. Moxie at least put up The Sign and some of my little posters, and Del Lago put up signs *and* handed us some cash. Dave won't do either -- and for the first oh, three months, that was understandable. But after a year of free Saturdays, you'd think he'd have thrown us a bone. "Live music Saturdays" written across the bottom of the whiteboard standing outside would have been a start.

Still, it's better'n nothin'. Even if the management and staff treat us like a scourge, the customers tend to be mostly nice.