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The blanket in the bathtub is covering some of my beer and wine making experiments (lest something blows up).

Homemade liquor and banjos. Ahhhhh…I’m home!

Plus, if you ever discover the Brown Note, you’ll NEVER be constipated again!!!!

Forget the banjos, I’m jonesin on the towel warmer rad!

Sounds like some of them banjos might do wonders as far as relocating Mr. Fox…

Interestingly enough, a Japanese slang word for bathroom is “benjo”. I never knew why until today. Just sayin’.

I rather like banjo music, and the nice thing about it is what it shares with bagpipe music (which I also like): it’s hard to tell the diff between good playing and bad.

Oh, ouch. 🙂

I spent a weekend with a house full of banjo playin’ tweakers in Lakeport CA about 1985. It was like something out of a Hunter Thompson book. I’ll never forget that weekend, and I think my ears are still ringing. If you’ve never been in a small room with 4 or 5 banjos goin full-bore, you have no idea how loud those damn things are. I actually developed a taste for 30’s bluegrass from that weekend, none the less. Speed-metal has nothing on a good breakdown. Salty Dog is still a favorite.

I don’t do envy – well, I try not to. The exception is that I envy people who can play musical instruments. The peak of my ability was that in the early seventies I played “The Sash” on the mouthorgan. I listen well, though.

30s bluegrass? No such thing. The precursors, yes.

Plinking around on a stringed instrument is like messing around in boats. Even if you’re no good at it, it’s enjoyable. Just not to anybody else within a mile or so.

Bill Monroe didn’t form his first band until 39, but the definitive band started in 46, and that’s where the term “bluegrass” originates. I guess the deity known simply as “Earl” is the only one left now.

An oldie, but one of my favorites – Earl and Doc in the back yard…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUzVUNJKiDc

They weren’t much younger than that when they met for the first time, Earl and Doc. Amazingly.

I’m afraid neither is much longer for this world, and then they’ll all be gone. And that will be a sad, sad day. Cripes, even John Hartford is long gone now. Here’s one of my favorites from John, a song from the 1850s that was very popular during the Civil War. Don’t know what the hell happened to the original video version on youtube…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFr3-xiIuCg

RIP, John.

Heh. I used to go see John Hartford at the Exit Inn in Nashville. He’d set up a piece of plywood over a microphone and tapdance while he played.

John Hartford was the first long hair my dad ever approved of 🙂

Jews! EarthQuakes, hacked computers, missing secret files and Quashed Israeli Agents!

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10739639

My grandpa played banjo and sang in a bluegrass band from the late 50s to the 80s.

Banjo is the only instrument I can simultaneously grin like a fool and cry like a baby while listening to.

Precious memories.

I can have my dad in tears in seconds with Will That Circle Be Unbroken. It’s the undertaker part that gets him.

True story. My mother always thought that line was hilarious, “I told the undertaker, ‘Undertaker, please drive slow. That’s my mother you are hauling, and I hate to see her go.'” Hauling, like she was a load of manure or something.

Wouldn’t you know, when Mother died, I had to drive behind the undertaker carrying her body for 45 minutes on a rainy Friday morning. You can guess what was going through my head.

Snort! I learned those lines as “Undertaker, undertaker, undertaker, please drive slow/For that body you’re a-carrying, Lord I hate to see it go.” Not nearly as hilarious (and now I’m gonna be thinking “hauling” at every damned family funeral I go to in future, because that song always runs through my mind. Laughing and crying all at once, yes indeed!)

As long as we are sharing banjo videos, this is a sweet old favorite of mine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSFLZ-MzIhM

I tried to learn the banjo once, but being a Dobro player short circuited my effort. Dobro rolls are actually backwards banjo rolls, so when I tried to reverse my muscle memory synapses in my brain protested and my head hurt.
I gave the banjo to my son…..

One of the great advantages of bluegrass is that you don’t have to be really good at it. Sure its nice when you are, I mean if you’re Chubby Anthony or Earl Scruggs that’s terrific but you can get by with just minimal talent because of how simple and plain the music is.

And that’s its beauty because its everyman music, it is the folk music of the United States. You can sing terribly and still sing along.

One of the reasons I never solo is that I never had to. We used to play in huge groups.

A friend of mine, who has some musical, and artistic talent, sent me this youtube link….the secret to success, beyond talent, hard work, and desire, is start young..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3qbB4Kq3Y0&feature=player_embedded#at=45

“fake abolone”?
Like “aboloney”?
Or “abologna”?
We used to call it”mother-of-toilet seat” back in the day
Had an old Gibson LG-1 or suchlike, l
Original case in “stimulated bullagator”.

Funny thing about that, Skandi. I used to go to the Fiddler’s Jamboree in Smithville every year. I lost track of the number of mind-blowingly capable kids I heard there that I expected to hear from again…and didn’t (I had reason to remember, for I was a kid myself and I burned with envy).

I don’t know what it is. Maybe when you’re seven you play because your dad makes you, and then you defy him by quitting.

I may very well off by a few years…my library was any compilation cassettes I could find. All my friends were listening to hair– metal and I was listening to tinny tapes of banjo music…it all sounded like the 30s to me. I always associate the 40s with big bands, not bluegrass. Lost interest after a couple years but still have a crapload of Chester and Lester on my ipod.

It was kind of a semantic observation, Gromulin. Mike C. was alluding to Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, which was formed in the 40s. It’s where the term “bluegrass” comes from, and Monroe is often called “the father of bluegrass.”

But, obviously, much of the music we call bluegrass is old, old, old.

Bluegrass isn’t so much what you play, but how you play it. I love it…it’s the happiest shit to tap your toe to, yet the words are incredibly tragic. I suck tolerably well at upright bass, myself. Too bad the commute is so gnarly…I’d love to jam with you.