Guitar Nerds Anonymous

So my Jag has completely shat its pants after only a couple of days... Choked high E when bending at the ninth fret, sitar-ing/buzzing on the bottom string all the way up the neck, it's a fucking mess... It's been very warm in the house (+33ºc, insulation doesn't get fitted 'til the new year... Ugh...) but that's a bit nuts, no?

I could swear I was hearing the truss rod move/squeak when I was doing a big bend but that must be unpossible... Sound wasn't coming from the nut, bridge or frets but seemed to be coming from inside the neck... Spooky Jag...

Need that pick. ^^

Just needs a set up dude. Can't be unpossible to get it working with a bit fettling. Does sound like you need to go up a string gauge though. Or slack of the truss rod a quarter turn (or two).

In indie-folk wanker news I broke up with my band last night. Fucking bass player tried to quit. The bastard I've been avoiding firing (cos he's my best mate) declined to commit to any more gigs after tonight. Tonight was going to be the last gig anyway, I just hadn't told anyone. So now I have to tell everyone and he gets to think it was his idea! Gah.

Anyway. Huge sense of relief after i'd made the calls and for the first time in ages I'm actually looking forward to playing the gig. Gonna get wasted and play five encores that nobody asked for.

Boom.

How about this for a bit of MS DOS magic:

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We must have been around 16. Bussed our friends in from the suburbs and filled the place. Check out the Borderline's phone number 071... Fuck i'm old.

Also we found the set-list. It was written in biro on the back of a Burger King bag.

High times.

Is that you with the ciggie? Fab...

Jag just got a setup, it's moved an awful lot... It did the same thing with the Mustang bridge on it which suggests to me that my guy got the prognosis wrong... I'll put the Mustang bridge back on if I can, the B minor behind the bridge thing is fucking ace...

PS I've got older flyers than that, you're a baby... 😘

Yep. Struggling with a zippo by the looks of things. Pic is badly distorted so I look even more badly dressed that I undoubtedly was.

What time y'all on tonight dooks?

9:45 dude. Be great to see you!

11pm as it turns out. Sorry I had to run dude. Made the last train. Just arrived back in brexit-on-sea. Thanks for coming.

So the last Elvers gig with the full band line-up was a swinging affair in a tiny rammed bar on a cold Saturday night in December. We bowed-out with The Beast From The East, then covers of the Pogues' Fairytale of New York and our perennial last-orders encore, I'll Be Your Baby Tonight. It all felt rather fitting and I'm relieved and sad in equal measure in the wake of it.

The decision to retire the band had been in my mind for a while now but only really got decided this week after I realised other people were kind of on the same page. There is no drama, it's just that circumstances of geography and busy home and work lives meant that several of us (myself included) couldn't give the band the time it deserved any more. I didn't want to put pressure on my dear dear friends or to limp on playing occasional gigs when we weren't match-fit and not really being able to work on new material so I decided to call it a day.

in addition, I've been feeling a fairly profound fatigue at the apparently futile task of attempting to sell an independent indie-folk band online for the last few years. I haven't got the time or inclination to spend hours on self-promotion and I can only get excited about releasing our latest labour of love to have it immediately disappear into the void without comment so many times before I start to question the sanity of continuing the pattern. I need a break, a change in perspective and a fresh start.

I will continue writing, recording and releasing music under the Elvers banner (I still have many unrecorded songs to complete and an album all but ready to go), but as far as the band as a bookable, gigging entity is concerned, that's it for now. Elvers has left the building.

Playing music with the beautiful people in this band has been one of the most satisfying and ridiculously fun things I've ever done. I got to hang out with three of my best friends in the world, mess around in studios, venues, front rooms and pubs and make them play my stupid songs for the last five years. It's going to leave a hole in my life and i'm going to miss everyone.

It's additionally bittersweet because I think we did have something going on there for a while. My not-entirely-serious death-and-booze themed hokum coupled with Lucy's sweet harmonies, and Rich and Stew's thumping upright bass and accordion was exactly the kind of Rain Dogs era Waits meets Hank Williams with a touch of Townes Van Zandt and Phil Spektor mess I was after when I dreamed up this band. When we were on song it felt fresh and interesting to me. Yes we were mining a seam of well worn folk and country standards but I think we were writing interesting original music in the same vein that was more than pastiche and that deserved to be heard. At our best we were raw and raucous enough to give it an edge that a lot of our more purist or poppy peers didn't have. I wanted to retain enough musicality to be able to nail those four part harmonies live and provide lyrics with a bit of wit and heart. We tried anyway.

We finished some recordings I'm genuinely proud of and Rich made us some fantastic videos (which I'm still in awe of and everlastingly thankful for). I've never been prouder of the music i've done with Elvers. In all our time together, I never had a doubt that the moment we struck up The Last Great Auk, whether in a small bar, on a big stage or in bandstand in a park in a freezing rainstorm; that a few people would start dancing, heads would turn and feet would start tapping.

I'll miss that too. Fare thee well dudes.

A.
xx
Image may contain: 5 people, people smiling, people playing musical instruments, people on stage and indoor

Elvers is dead...long live Elvers! Lots of great memories. Im sure your will come back stronger fella.

"Playing music with the beautiful people in this band has been one of the most satisfying and ridiculously fun things I've ever done." This bit is exactly why I want to get my backside in gear and join/start a band.

not enough drummers #onhere

i just miss having a drummer to abuse.

Hah, I’d go the other way and add live drums to electronic music! The physical energy it adds to a performance is hard to get anywhere else... Especially when one or more people are just pressing buttons.

The crossover stuff I like is basically big riffs and big drums but the riffs are synths instead of guitars. It’s not often done, I suspect because logistically it’s a pain in the arse when starting out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLIjZf6bf8w

Saw these guys last year and they were pretty good. You need a pretty mad drummer to pull it off well. Is it average electronica made better by the fact that the drums are live? Would programmed drums make the music better? Open questions, but they're a lot of fun to watch live.

increasingly though I find myself almost totally disinterested in the music of the 1960s - it is far too old-fashioned and twee and nice and unchallenging for my tastes in 2017

Wut? This is a staggering statement...

Good for you, Al, onwards and upwards... #Titanic

Easiest example is Soulwax post-2005, particularly the live stuff they never recorded (or at least released). What they’re doing now is a bit more kraut-rocky / relaxed, even with three drum kits on the stage!

The Who, The Creation, The Yardbirds, Elevators, all the crazy 60s US psych-punk and UK freakbeat... Not even gonna get onto Da Stooches, gotta disagree with you as I think their first LP is a masterpiece of the late c20th... MC5, even tho' Wayne Kramer is a thieving cunt... I could go on and on and on...

I personally find the 60s an endlessly inspiring place, the 70s were great but IMHO that initial creative flame of '65-'66 was put out by drugs, denim loons and blues rock...

Gotta say man, that tune Three Miles Down was a proper thing among my pals - we'd listen to it all the time. You guys had more of an impact on my life than most of the bands I toured with through your imagination, execution, and sheer quality of songs. And if you landed with us, you would've landed with other people. That's not nothing dude.

EDIT @Fatberg lol replied to the wrong person

I'm with @Butternut-Squash on this! I know it's unfair because the 60s were such an explosion of creativity, from Dick Dale to Hendrix, but I think as a decade it suffers from the same thing as The Beatles: fatigue by association with the baby boomers.

Also if you like polished recording techniques in rock music, that didn't really start to happen until the 70s. For me, rock records become listenable in about 1973. Prior to that the recording makes me feel like I'm indulging in nostalgia.

Weirdly, I do not feel like that when I listen to old blues 78s or swing stuff from the 40s, or even the old Eddie Cochran stuff from the 50s. Just something about the 60s sound tweaks my bum wrong.

I think it depends what particular seam of 60s music you're mining... I'm into the crazy, deranged guitar stuff, less Hendrix and more Eddie Phillips/Pete Townsend... People that really smashed the pop song apart and created new sounds... All those records sound super fresh to me, more so than a lot of 70s (proto) punk stuff you mention just because it's lighter, subtler yet heavier than a flabby, cranked 70s Marshall/Les Paul combo...

The guitar breaks on early Small Faces, Who and Creation 45s sizzle my brain, that early Brit feedback stuff is amazing...

Anyway, horses for courses! 🙂

Music didn't really get any good until the 1980s.

/coat

Yeah I totally hear you man, it's an instinctive thing isn't it? Like I listened to the Brown Acid compilations on Spotify the other day, and recognised that whole dark psyche late 60s thing and how objectively great it was. But I will literally never listen to it again, becuase I didn't enjoy how it made me feel. But whack on some Ventures and I feel great. It's just what lands in our brains.

Think it was FH Bradley who said that metaphysics is 'the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct'. I feel the same way about discussing music. It's hard to explain why one genre or time period hits you and another doesn't. It's all just bad reasons.