Share on Facebook

It’s Mr. Tardy. Red Quiet is not dead. Red Quiet is away for now playing with synthesizers, tape loops, and other electronical things.

In July 2007 Dr. Q, Chucky Bronson, and I spent many humid summer afternoons spinning the greatest hits of Dionne Warwick in the basement of an abandoned house in Cambridgeport. By August the song “Heartbreaker” had eclipsed everything else in our respective lives. It was an obsession. We worked tirelessly trying to master it. It got to the point where our live rendition was virtually indistinguishable from the recording. We even played the random scratches and pops of the record perfectly on cue with the aid of a spray bottle and hanging phone book.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc5vPwD1OL0&feature=fvw

One morning we realized we couldn’t take it any further. Thinking about my childhood and remembering how a puzzle could be made even more challenging by flipping all the pieces over I suggested we play the song in reverse. So we spun the record backwards and started all over again. The new backwards chorus became “beware of the gerbil with the fuse coming out of its ass.” Once finished a peculiar thing happened; we found we could not remember a single note of the forward version. Without hesitation Chucky B. shattered the record into smithereens. It was as though we had arrived into a new world, delivered from a silvery birthing machine made by angels smelling of Junior Mints.

Eat Local. Eat Junior Mints. I have to go #2 now.

Share on Facebook

yayayay

Share on Facebook

Friday October 2nd was just one of those days. I quit my job about a month ago, resolving to abandon the life of the worker bee and scrape together some sort of living—albeit impoverished—out of my own talents and inspiration. Which, in the end, means that I’m totally fucking broke.

So when I sat at a long light on Beacon street in Boston, with a cop car right on my ass, I sat there silently humming Bruce Springsteen’s State Trooper to myself. The light took forever, and when it turned, I started moving. In less than ten seconds I was pulled over against the curb.

I’m a disorganized person. I lose things. My room is a mess. I don’t use a calendar. I don’t balance my checkbook. I don’t pay parking tickets till I get the boot. I don’t know what it is, but it’s in my nature. I’ve been the same way since I was a little creep running around Fifth Avenue Elementary school. And the sick thing is that I recognize it. I recognize it but I’m still powerless to do anything about it. It’s caused me some fairly serious problems in my life, but I’ve also come to accept it in some strange way, which at least motivates me to make some sort of attempt at keeping it from completely fucking me up.

Well, this obviously wasn’t one of those times. The copper took my license and registration, and went back to his car to do his business. The reason for the stop is that my registration sticker was not on my rear plate. I had another one on my front plate. The rear one either fell off or was stolen. Which apparently happens, I’m told. The cop approached my car with his hand on his gun and a serious look on his face. I knew I was fucked.

“Step out of the car sir.”

Within the space of that statement I put it all together. An unpaid speeding ticket from the great state of New Hampshire last December caused a suspension of my driving privileges in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which, according to the officer, was two weeks before we met one another while he searched my pockets on Beacon street. I never got the notice, but didn’t really bother pleading my case with the officer. The reason I hadn’t gotten the notice is because I’m too fucking disorganized to update my mail forwarding when I move—and have moved twice in the space of that time.

I asked if I was being arrested, and he said that No, I wasn’t. We sat around talking for about thirty minutes, waiting for a tow truck to come and repossess my rig for the space of a few hours until I could have one of my friends come down with me and retrieve it.

He’s asking me questions. Mother’s name. Mother’s maiden name. Father’s name. Place of residence. Social Security Number. Phone Number. Landlord’s name and address. Finally he pops the question: Place of employment?

I steeled my lips and stared directly into his eyes. This is the moment of truth.

“Self-employed.”

He eyed me suspiciously: “What work do you do?”

“I’m a musician.”

And suddenly there I am, under the eyes of this officer something of a bum, some delusional freeloader probably under the influence of drugs, not to be trusted. But I had to say it, if only to prove to myself that I was able to take this new life of mine seriously, though it felt somewhat akin to saying I was an unemployed high-school dropout. An education worth $200,000 and three generations of uptight American upbringing had somehow amounted to this.

Flash forward to Monday. I took the 86 bus out to Sullivan Square, and hopped the T to State street. I climbed six flights of stairs and presented myself before the Court, and scheduled a hearing before the Clerk Magistrate to try to avoid a misdemeanor charge, which, after the cop softened after feeling bad for me (or more likely, my parents) was very possible provided I took the initiative to satisfy the State of New Hampshire, which I did immediately. As I left the courthouse into the open expanse of government center I wondered whether I should hang it all up and punch my ticket to law school. I rode back to Sullivan Square, tired, head in my hands.

I started walking to our rehearsal studio, out on the Charlestown docks. As I walked a wind whipped in off the water, and the sun set over the water with no particular great show of colors. There were no cars for a moment, just the wind and my feet pounding the pavement, the metronome to a slow, bluesy melody that began ruminating in my brain. Soon it overtook my tongue and I began humming out loud, patting syncopated beats on my thighs.

The pains of the past days faded as I realized that this life—be it happy or hard or dismal or sad or lonely or euphoric or lovely or any other of the myriad fleeting emotions we call consciousness—is only mere inspiration for the chase after that sound, that music that has been ringing through my head for the whole of my life. And, regardless of whether or not life is brutal or content at any given moment, if that lonely melody is all I have to show for it, I’ll sing it raw until the notes are cemented in my marrow.

A smile crept across my face: I’m a musician, I said aloud, for the first time believing myself. It has nothing to do with you. These notes my fingers find are only points of interest in the timeline of my life, and these intervals, be they up or down, are slowly forming the harmony that will make that life somewhat more livable.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want you to join me. Please come along.

Especially if you can loan me $250.

Share on Facebook

Always play to the bone of the teradactyl that you never expected to find in your own backyard.  Excavation of the truth.  Play it simple to the highest pulse.

Funny to think that there are probably a million (yes , a million) bands on the same wavelength as us right now, isn’t it?  We’ve all got bills to pay, futures to ignore, relatives to pay courtesy to, beers to drink and girlfriends (and boyfriends in some cases) to break up with or get dumped by.  In the morning, most of us will get up and go to our jobs which seem to suck us fucking dry to the point where we can’t find the melon in the melon patch that’s going to just barely keep us alive.  Well, maybe it’s not quite that dramatic, but our ancestors who came over here via boat or Bering straight or well-disciplined mountain lion or whatever…I can’t help but think that they’d look at the lot of us and end up scratching their heads in confusion to the point where they’d scab over.

Nevertheless, we plug on.  Why?  I can’t speak for anyone else (and anyone else who might be reading this right now is probably thinking “Thank fucking God!”), but I think it’s because the sounds that I’ve heard coming out of various speaker systems over my insignificant, honkified, suburban lifetime have given me a reason to live.  Whatever I can’t put my finger on, it lives in the sounds coming out of those speakers.

It’s the vans, the shitty PA systems, the woefully underpacked clubs, the piss damaged bathrooms, the bands that you play with who’s music makes you want to get sick out back (and who may very well think the same of you), the bands that you play with that produce that cheshire grin, that brief moment 3/4 of the way through a set when it all briefly falls together before it all falls apart again, the friends who come out on a Wednesday night for your 12:15am set at the Possum Lounge in SouthWest Bumblefuck, the money spent on recordings nobody outside of a few select people that you’d take a bullet for will ever hear, the sweat, the lost sleep, the downright horniness, the fleeting elation…

It’s all of that.  There’s no question, you take the shitstains with the blown angel’s kisses and the shitstains are far more abundant as any band who has slugged it out can tell you.  As the representative for me and no one else, it all comes back to that thing you can’t put your finger on.  What couldn’t be said in normal, everyday speech, what couldn’t be expressed in a stride down the sidewalk or a glance at a girl on the subway…it’s all there for you to simply soak up with your ears.  Though I think I often take it for granted (because I was probably dropped on my head as a kid more than me beloved ma wants to admit), I can’t convey how truly fucking grateful I am for it all.

Uncle Pauley is working on a machine that milks cows but attends to their emotional needs.

Dr. Q. is hard at work in his mad scientist lab up on his mountain lair.  It’s classified…but will blow your mind…eventually.

Jimtronicus is hard at work on constructing a motorcycle which he intends to ride to the moon.

Mr. B. is late to bed but still early to rise.  He will never die.

Godfather Bob….well, he’s the guru.  ’nuff said.

Scott Robot roams the streets in heaven-sent vigilantism.  If you do wrong, be best prepared for him to show up and do right.  It will be efficient, fierce and not pretty at all…for you.

Me?  I float on the wind.  Just lucky to fucking be here.

We will remain.  Beyond the breaking of the axels, until the stars all fade away.

Love,
Chucky Bronson

Share on Facebook

This is how an electric guitar works:

The guitar pickup—itself a magnet wrapped a thousand times over with copper wire—has a magnetic field, and when the strings are plucked, they cause vibrations in the magnetic flux, which creates an alternating current through the coil of wire. This in turn travels down the patch cable, through whatever pedals or effects there may be, and to the amplifier where it is amplified from a very weak instrument-level signal into the crushing sonic assault that turns your brain to jelly.

Think about that: Guitar notes originate from interference, vibrations—from change itself.

From Chuck Berry to Hendrix, Vanilla Fudge to Joy Division, Bauhaus to Oneida, rock music has been the catalyst for socio-politcal change. It’s unfair to say that Rock and Roll invented sex—just go to the zoo and look at the monkeys—but it certainly brought it to the forefront. The cerebral academic music with it’s precious counterpoint and harmony suddenly was replaced by tight pants, and, in my opinion I say GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE. But it goes further: Examine the artists you like and then examine why. There is a simple expectation we have for these artists to self-destruct. If they’re not destroying themselves in the process, they’re not rocking hard enough. And so with the advent of stars like Elvis, Jim Morrison, Hendrix—or even father back, someone  like Robert Johsnon with his Faustian bargain—we affirm our desire to annihilate this pathetic reality we call life with the ritual of rock and roll excess. Nick Drake drove off a cliff. Jeff Buckley drowned in a river. Elliot Smith stabbed himself in the heart. To listen to a Drake record is to drive off a cliff; and when the drums kick in on Everything Means Nothing to Me, I feel the steel between my ribs.

Distortion is the result of various forms of clipping—the word we use for lopping the head off of a perfectly good waveform when the input signal exceeds the voltage limit of the amplifier. Your average Overdrive pedal does just that: it feeds the amp a signal so hot that the tubes saturate and the resulting wave begins to approximate the shape of a square wave. But in this process the signal itself becomes harmonically richer, as overtones are amplified and added to the signal.

For example:

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

I don’t know where these waves came from, but there they are. The first is a perfectly healthy wave. An acoustic guitar played by Jullian Bream probably wouldn’t look so different. The second is a signal hard-clipped to all fuck.

But tell me, Doktor, what are you getting at?

It is that selfsame process of destroying that which is perfectly natural—be it the natural wave or the natural order—by turning the volume up to the point where it’s causing physical hearing damage, brain jelly and loss of breath where the rock and roll guitarist becomes the unification of messenger and message. The messenger is a messiah and the message is freedom. We are free to manipulate the natural world and bend it at our whim. That’s why we stand in the front row, in front of a combined 1000 watts of power running guitar, bass, vocals, a volume hovering between 125-130dB (enough to cause permanent hearing loss after 10 minutes of exposure). It is a participation in the modern ritual of saying we don’t care, we want to cram as much energy (voltage) into this life (amp) as we can, try to approximate something of a meaning (harmonic overtones) to existence, and run the car till the wheels fall off and it dies ragged in the gutter (death).

Share on Facebook

I fell asleep again in the exercise machine while doing my upsidedown back stretches. I woke up with a massive headache. No surprise there considering half of the blood in my body was probably in my head. My feet had long since fallen asleep. I was way beyond the pins and needles stage. I couldn’t even feel them. Anyways, strangely enough it wasn’t the headache that woke me up but the ventilation system kicking on.

While I was sleeping it sounded like strange music in my dream. I had dreamt that I was walking through the woods and came across a large, old tree that had split right down the middle of the trunk. I was noticing how the knots in the grain looked like faces. Slowly they moved, as if to say something. I stopped and concentrated on them harder because I was about to shit my pants with fear. Then one by one the faces in the wood started singing. It was eerie but incredibly beautiful. I’m not sure how to describe it. It was very smooth and melodic like classical but at the same time dark, using scales and intervals I’ve never heard before.

pAfter I awoke I still heard the music but as I slowly regained consciousness I was able to recognize the “music” as the sound of the ventilation system. I closed my eyes again and tried to hear it as the strange music. As I concentrated I could visualize the white noise and pick out different timbres within it. After a while I could isolate the different components of the sound. I’d focus on one until I memorized it then hum it out loud repeatedly. I did this with about four different parts and then stopped because I couldn’t keep track of all the parts beyond that. I cranked the wheel on the exercise machine and pulled myself to the upright position. When I stood up everything went purple and white and I almost threw up. Slowly I staggered over to my desk where I had a digital voice recorder. I quickly hit ‘record’ and hummed the parts, one at a time, into the recorder. After I finished I reviewed them and felt satisfied that I accurately captured them. I stopped and listened to the ambient sounds again and it was gone. I couldn’t hear the parts anymore. My brain had snapped out of it and would not allow me to hear it as anything other than machine noises.

That night I recorded all the parts into Pro Tools using the random and limited assortment of a xylophone, harmonica, acoustic guitar, and synthesizer. When I was satisfied with the parts and played them together for the first time I felt terrified, as if I had just accidentally killed a kitten. Then a few seconds later I calmed down a bit and all of my hairs stood on end. I had recorded the music from my dream. Not sure if it’s Red Quiet material though. We’ll see.

Share on Facebook

Show info powered by _JohnnyTwocomputers, the Right and Honourable Assistant to _DoktorQ

Share on Facebook

One of the effects of the meltdown of the global economy—one I haven’t heard mentioned in the business section of the New York Times—is that, well, we guitar players can’t spend all our money tricking out guitars, hot rodding amps or experimenting with boutique effects anymore. But while the pefect tone used to come at considerable expense, my personal lack of finances (or fiscal responsibility for that matter) has led me to actually learn how to work on my gear. With Big Baby Benson celebrating the arrival of a nephew in Minnesota, Jimmy up in New Hampshire, and C-Monkey at his perpetual birthday party in Newton, I was left to my own devices in our practice space. What better way to usher in the anniversary of this great nation by drankin beers, flipping shit on craigslist, and soldering electronics?

The first order of business: my amp has been seriously fucked up ever since we played that show on the beach for my brother’s graduation. I don’t know what it is—blown speaker… microphonic tubes… sand stuck in every crevice… still figuring it out. But one of my main problems with the DeVille is that the Eminence ‘Special Design’ speakers are kinda crappy. Plus, I was unsure if it’s my speakers that are the problem, or the tubes. In addition to that, as we’ve been recording for the past several weeks I’ve become addicted to the sound of closed-back cabinets.

I set out to find a 2×12, closed back cabinet loaded with Celestion Vintage 30’s, and I found just that. After approximately two weeks of checking craigslist intermittently, I found my baby: an Avatar 212H. Celestion Vintage 30s. Plus it’s Red—this is RED Quiet after all—and the grille was black, even more perfect. Avatar calls the black grille color “Oxblood,” which I think is seriously badass. For those unfamiliar with Avatar, they’re a company based in Idaho that builds guitar cabinets loaded predominantly with celestion speakers, but there are many other options as well. Their workmanship is revered accross many internet forums, notably at Harmony Central, which is where we musicians go to read user reviews of almost every musical device known to mankind, and several more that are still unknown.

So, here’s the deal. Homeboy on Craigslist, some kid out on Framingham, wants $275 for the cab. They ship new from Avatar for $399+shipping. Call it $500, when all is said and done. So I offer him $150. Remember, this is a buyer’s market. He counters with $200, I counter with $175. Bingo. After Friday’s close I zipped out to Framingham (a city that doesn’t exist, I found out) to meet my craigslist friend.

There are many types of guitar players. There are the acoustic Dave Matthews types with all the hair gel and love songs; there are the punks with their Epi SG’s rocking a 100W solid-state Peavey head into a Marshall 1960A; there are the Hendrix wannabes, with their white strats and wah pedals; there’s Morgan from the Darker Hues (who’s out of his fekkin mind). Last and least, there are douchebag guitar players you find on craigslist who spend thousands and thousands of dollars on a rig that will never leave their bedroom. This was that guy.

He lived in a condo in Framingham, which was pretty empty. He took me straight to his bedroom, wherein resided his METAL RIG. Sitting atop of my Avatar cab was pretty badass rack—if you’re into that sort of thing—which ran from a Furman Power Conditioner to one of those Korg rack tuners (same one Paul uses) into a Mesa Mark IV head, which is, in my opinion, the rolls royce of the Metal rig. So, all I want to do is hear him fire this thing up, hear that the cab works, and then GET THE F OUTTA FRAMINGHAM. With this meathead, though, this would be no easy task. On flips the amp, cables connected. He takes it off standby and I’m cringing in anticipation of heavy palm-mutes and pinch harmonics. But… no… sound. WTF. Then when he cranks it up you can hear something very faint and…. yeah, low battery.

At which point I look at his guitar: this twanker is playing a Paul Reed Smith with active pickups. The kid had basically the most expensive rig I’ve seen in the Boston scene. He’s digging through his closet looking for a 9-volt, and I start asking some questions.

—What band do you play in?

—None.

—Did you used to play in one?

—No.

—Never gigged?

—Never. Just play in my apartment.

—Lotta miles on these speakers?

He bought it in January. Just enough time to break them in for me.

Fast forward: I’m back in Boston, and back to the point of this post: What should I do with this gigantic, heavy wooden box filled with heavy, large magnets?

First order of business was to do my proper inspections. Off came the back, speakers check, connections check. Put it all back together, test it out.  The two speakers are wired in series giving the cabinet a total resistantce of 8 Ohms. My DeVille wants four. BUT, one of the main drawbacks—IMHO—of the Hot Rod DeVille is that it’s WAY TOO EASY to overdrive and clip-out the preamps before you get to power-tube-saturation-paradise, the place we all want to go. A cabinet with more resistance is going to lower the current and therefore the output. Scott Robot and I worked it out on a napkin at TT’s on Thursday night… we should expect a total loss of 3dB. Big fucking deal. Pedals plugged into pad input…. now I’m pushing volume to 5-6 when I used to be at 1.5. POWER. TUBE. SATURATION.

Now… In the beginning I was talking about DIY and not spending any money… here’s the flowchart.

I’m going to order two Jensen C12N’s from Jimmy’s brother up in New Hampshire. This is a reissue of the original speaker that made the Fender Twin the most coveted guitar amplifier in the history of rock and roll. 30-day money back guarantee. Try the Jensens, try the celestions. Compare and contrast. If I like the Jensens more I sell this cab on craigslist for about $200-250. Make a little money while I’m at it. If I find I don’t like the closed back cabinet—but like the speakers—Imma rip them out of the cabinet and put them in the DeVille. Then take the crappy Eminence speakers and put them in the Avatar Cab, put it on craigslist, and sell it for basically what I paid for it. Free speaker upgrade. Or… if I want to sell them both… I can simply remove the speakers, sell them on their own, and sell the cabinet on its own. Either way something is going to move.

Next order of business: Time make some tuneups in the stable. Bob, our producer, decided that the tone coming off my old crappy stratocaster was basically unusable as far as recording goes. In addition, I have an old Epi-SG with one GFS Mean-90 in the bridge wired straight to the lead. Doing a lot of nothing, basically. Then there’s Jimmy’s super-tele, which has a really nice feel but really shit pickups. Time for a little modification. A word on pickups. A guitar pickup is a magnet with a bunch of copper wire wrapped tightly around it. That’s all. If you’re spending a hundred bucks or more on ‘vintage’ boutique pickups you a retahd. Get on guitar fetish and buy some GFS pickups for about 20-30 bucks. Booya.

His super tele luckily had a humbucker in the bridge, and so it could easiliy accomidate a P-90 in the same socket without having to take the dreaded wood chisels to the body. Dope. For the neck puckup I ripped out a Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounder from that old strat, a leftover from the time in the old economy where I was paying out the ass to have Nitro Tone do my setups and mods. So I wired them both in, did some soldering, burned my hand only once, and there she was. It’s a feedback monster. Running through my beloved Catalinbread Ottava Magus it’ll singe more than your eyebrows.

The point is this: the Post-Bush economy, shitty as it is, is certainly a buyer’s market when it comes to gear. Of course, the reason it’s a buyer’s market is because everyone is seriously fucking broke. But, with a little clever googling, the ability to read a schematic wiring diagram, and some 7th grade soldering skills, it is quite possible not only to continue the chase after the ever-elusive sonic oasis, but to allow yourself time to experiment with sound in a way that would have never previously occured to you.

Share on Facebook

This Sunday we will join our friends GIBBY & the BUZZKILLS for their CD release party at the Middle East Upstairs, with two other bands: “twisted animation” and “the last second.” You should listen to the Buzzkills song “Detroit Soul.” It’s pretty slick. I made this flyer from an image I found on the net. It is apparently an x-ray of the lower intestine of a farmer. Two robbers broke into his home and stole his buffalo. Instead of tying him up to make sure he couldn’t chase them down, they shoved a pepsi bottle up his patookis. The world is a strange, strange place. Kind of reminds me of that time when…

Oh, and btw… thanks to everyone who came out to the Roller Derby extravaganza this weekend. Special thanks to Scotty Hues for running sound. That was awesome.

Share on Facebook