I appreciate the encouragement! Drums are nice in that I don't have to wrestle much with the theory, scales, chords, or charts, which I'm sure would test my patience even more….just have to whack stuff with sticks! On the other hand, daily drum practice can be pretty damn boring, since a lot of it is just repeating…

For sure! And it probably didn't help that most of my SST stock was on cassette.

Cool stuff for you and the wife! Finding folks to play with is definitely a big part of my problem, as I'm an anxious bastard in the first place, let alone putting my (lack of) talent on display to someone I'm not comfortable with, and the only folks I know who play instruments have 20+ years more experience than I do.

He's pretty much the only reason I'm taking lessons in the first place, as I'm old and crusty and have no business learning an instrument past 40 years old, but I stumbled on the fact that he was teaching locally, and was like "Well, I pretty much have to do that, even if only once, for the purposes of name-dropping,…

"Aerosmith? What's that?"
"Know who Styx is?
"Of course!"
"Same thing"

The Coup?

Awesome. Not-so-entertaining-but-topical: I take drum lessons from a dude named Tim, who happens to be another awesome, humble dude from that period (he's also known as Spit Stix from FEAR), and his band Nasalrod went on a small west-coast tour a couple weeks ago that took him through Pedro. Watt is an old friend, so…

Well, I'd argue that it's a bit disingenuous to imply that Spot/SST struggled with high-level recording concepts only obvious to audiophiles….they just plain sounded like crap. Most SST records sound like you're listening to the album being broadcast on an AM transistor radio with a single 2-inch speaker. Further,…

And you should. Personally, although Zen Arcade is regarded as their masterpiece, I wouldn't necessarily consider it a great starting point. It's a concept double-record, including a Hare Krishna chant and a 14-minute song to close it out. It might be a bit much to try and digest as a first taste.

The part of that poster that appeals to me is that there's no venue name, just some directions to an address. Probably just some random dude's house in Pedro.

That would be awesome. Though as you say probably not likely, considering the recording skills displayed on those albums. Probably doubly unlikely if it's also dependent on whatever happens to currently be up Greg Ginn's butt.

Ozzy's best 'solo' album is probably Speak of the Devil. 1 part Ozzy's vocals, 1 part Sabbath songs, 1 part Quiet Riot bassist, 1 part Night Ranger guitarist, 683 parts cocaine.

Also probably a good spot to affirm the consensus opinion that Mike Watt embodies what every musician should aspire to be. Everybody who's even spoken a word to him usually has a story of his humility and lack of pretense. I was a touch too young to catch any Minutemen action, but I saw Firehose a half-dozen times and…

This seems like a fine place to once again announce my love & hate for SST. Without them we probably wouldn't have tons of seminal, top quality bands and albums, and yet you can't help but feel that some of those albums and bands were also kept from reaching their full potential by SST never once hiring a gotdamn…

Knight Rider. A shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist. Michael Knight: a young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law.

It seemed pretty obvious to me, particularly because of how he said they slowly "bounced" them one at a time. Surely if they were going to execute them, whether for their rations or simply out of exhaustion, they weren't going to do it one at a time, over an extended stretch of time.

It's entirely possible that I misread it, but to my memory, I thought those were two different doctors….I got the impression that the first guy was like a GP at a school clinic,, since the nurse said the other students had dropped her off, and then they were in Henry's car with Henry calling that guy a quack and…

I assumed that Betty had already heard the details, and Henry was being filled in by the doctor.

Poor Sally gets stuck being the adult, once again. Even Henry, who is usually more than capable of battling against life's obstacles, breaks down at her feet and pretty much tosses the reigns right at her. Let that poor girl catch & keep some tiny piece of childhood, you ghouls!

Yeah, smartphones are obviously a plague upon live music, but we all just have to kind of grumble and pretend that's the way it's always been. There's a part of me that wants to dedicate a year of my life exclusively to steroids and weightlifting, and then go see live music every night, and wade through the crowd…