Author: Kim du Toit

Musician Thoughts

Music

All the way from past Down Under (i.e. New Zealand), Reader Tony H. writes:

Was reading your post about the travails of the guitar industry.
I bet if you looked at the way the piano industry “evolved” from a time in the 50s & 60s where every second house in my street had a piano you’d see some interesting comparisons. As a kid we’d go up and down the street to people’s houses, go inside and they would play Christmas carols and we’d sing along. No parents along for the ride, mind you.
How many actual pianos do you reckon got sold world wide last year? Thousands? Tens of thousands? So if you were one of those British or German piano makers you were on a hiding to nowhere.
Part of the problem is longevity. Once you get up to pro level gear, it basically doesn’t wear out.
I’ve got a 30 year old Fender Strat. Played 100s of shows with it. I use a 1970s Fender amp. OK, I’m a semi pro person, so I bought myself a Gibson Les Paul 12 years ago. I’ve got two 80’s Marshall amps that I use for practice and social playing.
None of this gear is ever going to wear out to a point where repair is not an economic proposition. So unless I break something or it gets stolen, me as a daily user of my equipment represent zero revenue to any of these suppliers.
OK, yes, I go through strings at a rate, but that’s like buying petrol for your car.
If I did write off one of my guitars, in truth I’m much more likely to buy a vintage example than a new one – not even a price decision.
So how are Fender or Gibson ever going to get any money out of me? Self tuning guitar? Nah. Hi tech like Line 6 with built in effects etc? Nah, I like the sound of my old analogue tubes and nicely aged bits of wood.
Clearly I’m not alone, the largest sector in the Gibson catalogue is “reissues”.
Both Gibson and Fender have gone down market to chase volume. There are Epiphones and Squier guitars at every price point.
As a person that really gets their brand proposition, actively uses their products and is in the fortunate position of being able to pony up a few thousand on a new instrument if I wanted to, they have got zero dollars off me in the last ten years and are highly unlikely to get anything off me in the next 10 years either.
OK, maybe a modern amp as lugging around a 100 watt head and a 4 X 12 quad box is starting to tell, and these days I never get to crank it.
So, zero growth potential from me.
Also, anecdotally, the value proposition for Fender and Gibson has been steadily eroded by products from other makers. Yes, I fully get the “wank value” of owning a Les Paul, but objectively there are dozens of alternatives at much cheaper prices and the quality gap is narrowing all the time.
Whats left for them? Joining Harley Davidson in acquiring 100% of a diminishing market? We all know how that works out.
Cheers & keep up the good work.

All true, and I know for a fact that if I were still playing, it would be on my old Rickenbacker 4001S through… well, not my old Roland RB-120, because it died the day before my last gig in S Africa, all those years ago. [cue spooky music]

It was one of the best-sounding bass amps ever made, by the way, and it was one of the very few which could handle the high output from my Rick (which I always played at full volume from the guitar controls).

So much did I love that guitar that if by some miracle I could play bass again (arthritis, don’t ask), I’d be playing that same old Rick… but instead of trying to resurrect the old Roland (great though it was), I’d probably get one of the new amps. Well, I say “new”, but in fact it would be a new version of my old Roland. (You may all return your shocked faces to Sarah Hoyt now.) They stopped making the RB-120 back in the early 1980s, if that helps. Here’s the Cube 120XL:

Note to Reader Tony: forget that valve stuff for gigging; this is the business, with all the different amp effects built in. (I actually owned the smaller 30-watt version of this amp a little while ago, and I loved it.)

See? I can change if I have to. Especially as this amp weighs about a tenth of my older double stacks, and my back still gives me an occasional twinge to remind me how much I abused it back then.

Anyway, here’s a pic of the old band setup at the OK Corral Club, just outside Pretoria, taken in May 1977:

Yeah, that’s me (age 22) on bass at bottom right. I can’t remember what amp I was playing through back then, but it was either a Fender Bassman 120 or a Marshall 100-watt rig (can’t see it clearly in the pic).

Note also the various Gibsons and the Fender Strat. Yes, we supported them way back then too. (Marty’s Les Paul was a ’63 and Kevin’s Strat was a ’65. I don’t remember the year of the Flying V, but I think it was a new one, i.e. 1975-ish.)

Where was I?

Oh yeah. Unlike Reader Tony, I wouldn’t go back to gigging; I’d only play old standards (Gershwin, Carmichael etc.) in a four-piece house band (piano, bass, drums and either a horn/clarinet player or a female torch singer), in an old-fashioned night club where people dressed up and danced cheek to cheek:

You may call me old-fashioned, if you wish. I wear the label with pride.

5 Worst Things About Hitler

Friday Feature, The Worst

Staying with the April 20 theme, and ranked from bad to horriblest:

  • killed his dog with poison
  • is responsible for Godwin’s Law
  • adopted a stupid political philosophy which still influences other statists like Nancy Pelosi and most Western European politicians
  • his even-more stupid anti-Semitism continues to influence assholes like Jeremy Corbyn, about one-third of all Internet commentary, and all of Islam
  • was, unsurprisingly, a strict vegetarian.

Your observations and suggestions in Comments.

Adding The Years

Two-Minute Hate

I hardly ever read the insufferable, whiny Liz Jones (former editor of some girls’ magazine, now columnist for the Daily Mail and a lifelong Train Smash Woman), but this article’s headline caught my eye, and I found myself nodding in agreement.

Shouty headlines on Friday morning proclaimed: ‘Couple of glasses a night shortens life by two years! Much more than four bottles a week can lop off five years!’
By that count, I should have died four years ago.

I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve really needed a drink (as opposed to just wanting one), but I’m with Liz this time.

I have always wondered about the veracity of these scare stories, thinking, well, what if your wine glasses are really small?

As Loyal Readers know well, I don’t believe any of these shitty studies and / or scare stories anymore, because all you have to do is wait a couple months, and another study will come out and completely contradict the earlier one. Most of the time, they’ve all been written by scolds and busybodies who want to tell us how to live our lives — and by the way, when did every fucking thing become a matter of public health?

And Miz Jones surely has a point with this thought:

And I cannot help wondering why everyone wants to prolong a life that will inevitably be joyless, as if this were our only ambition.
There’s nothing to look forward to at the end of the day. No point sitting on a terrace with a beautiful view as, with no stem in your hand, all that’s left to do is fiddle with your phone. No reason to crave the interval during a play; I tend to slope off home at half-time, the prospect of Act Two too tedious without bubbles.
There’s no point winning an award or getting married or getting out of bed on Christmas morning. I’m generally asleep by nine, as there’s nothing to do. Nothing to dull the loss of a parent or child. Nothing to hold.

Here’s the thing: speaking for myself, I don’t need any of those reasons to have a drink, not a single one. But I can quite understand why someone else would want or need a drink on those occasions — whether out of joy, sorrow, or just wanting to relax.

As I said, it’s a rare occasion indeed when I agree with Liz Jones; but on this occasion, despite her irritating demeanor, I find myself in full agreement with her sentiment towards these tools: just leave me the hell alone and quit trying to scare me into living my life the way you want me to.

Scary stories are supposed to frighten children into better behavior. And by trying that tactic on adults, it reveals exactly what these “public health” Nazis think we are.

Fuck them all. Time for a healthy breakfast:

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Babes And Sucklings? Fuck ‘Em

Business, Two-Minute Hate

One of the most irritating and destructive Biblical statements is that innocence breeds strength — “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings…” etc. No. What you get out of the mouths of babes and sucklings is meaningless, uninformed babble at best, and sociopathic speech at worst.

As Loyal Readers know, I don’t have a FaecesBook account, so I don’t really have a personal dog in the current fight about how Zuckerberg’s little toy has been turned into an open-top mine of personal data for others to play with. (Click on that link at yer own risk: I nearly had a coronary when I read it.)

All I have to say is: this is the kind of thing you get when teenagers create multi-billion dollar companies without adult supervision:

They don’t have a fucking clue what they’re getting into, or the eventual consequences of their actions. (Or they do, and they’re amoral little fuckers like Mark Zuckerberg.)

And speaking of kids with guns: the day I support the idea that callow adolescents (like these children) get to dictate public policy and Constitutional amendments, is the day y’all need to ship me off to Senility Central. You have my full permission, given in advance.