The Guitar Cabinet Theory of Life

Every person generates their own system of value based on their various obsessions. Avid gardners look at the payments for a new car, and probably think "that payment is akin to 10 oak tree seedlings, or a season's worth of annuals and perennials." I know my friend Brad, the skateboarder/artist dude of Sharklahoma, probably waits in line at the grocery store and looks at the total, going "my week's food is worth three skateboard decks." I think my friend Dave, who plays bass in Crowds and Power, looks at his bar tab sometimes and thinks, "I just spent one-eight of an Ampeg SVT cabinet this evening." I know my brother Phil likely looks at his municipal bill from the City of Berkeley, and wonders, "Is that worth a 32nd of the airfare to New Zealand?" People are screwed up when they view the world through the lens of their passions and obsessions.

I'm much the same, because when I ascribe value to the mundane and inane things we need to buy in life, I measure them by guitar cabinets. I like guitar cabinets since they are loud, a vehicle for amplifying artistic creation, and they are somewhat artistic/architectural in their design. For a thing that sits on the ground, it can have amazing power emanating from it when hooked up to a 100 watt head, which can cause something akin to hypnosis by sound. They are also something I use everyday, more so than my car or other big ticket items that people acquire for themselves. My favorites are Marshall and Vox cabinets, since they are loaded with celestion speakers, and also old vintage guitar cabinets like this Ampeg cabinet I bought from my friend Johnny Morrill, which I think is from the late 1960s. But any guitar cabinet with good speakers loaded in it sounds good.

So when someone asks why my wife and I don't have a new car, we always say we don't drive much, our cars are kind of like motor-driven grocery carts that little old ladies in South Philly drag behind them to the store, since we tend to drive once or twice a week living in Lincoln. But there's more. When I look at new car payments, I'm like "that car payment is equal to one Marshall cabinet, no way!" A year of car payments is an arena setup of guitar cabinets, 12 to be exact. Why have a new car when you don't drive, and ride your bike everywhere? Exactly, you catch my drift. This same mentality also rules our gardening and landscaping at the new house, and also painting and remodeling our house ourselves, "that's' a 5-gallon quantity of paint," "that's 4 rose bushes." I'd rather live in a garden oasis of a house than have a flashy new car that costs 2 years of college tuition to service!

I've met other mentally-deranged people that measure value by things like the equivalent of a Gretsch hollowbody guitar or Les Paul Standard; by tubes of oil or acrylic paints; by digital and film cameras; by skateboard wheels; by obsessively hoarding books and enshrining them in their home; and also by the lumber required to build a halfpipe in your backyard. Then there's people with designer clothes and expensive sports cars, and the like, and I guess they are accepted as normal.

Yet is doesn't cost much to play your guitar or skate an irrigation ditch either....

Flinthills Spring

After a brutal and long winter, Tabby, Spencer, and I spent some time in Oklahoma with our friends and to see the Norman Music Festival. We had snow this year on the ground in Lincoln from December 8 to March 7, so it was great driving down I-77 through the Flint Hills and seeing the country in springtime bloom, especially the dogwood trees.

On the ocean-sky of the Southern Plains.

Mehgan Hayes sessioning in front of the Hayes compound in Ponca City.

Spencer giving the skateboard a try.

Brad Hayes, master craftsman and sesh master. Check out his new book of paintings, But I Did... It's for sale on his site, Sharklahoma.

Susan Shores at the Norman Music Festival. We were hanging out in front of the Opolis, waiting to see the legendary Debris' play. All of our friends were there and it was a pretty fun time.

Phil Rodriguez.

Ron Haas.

Matt Bokovoy.

This James, our friend Mac's son.

Spencer playing at James' house in Moore.

Jeremy Gragg.

Charlies Shores and the dudes from Debris'.

A gas tank in Stillwater, OK.

Our friends Crystalline and Joey's acreage.

Joey took Spencer fishing in their pond, and this is the catch for the day.

The Kids Are Alright (and always will be....)

Zombie vs. Shark at Bill and Dee's in Norman, OK. Shot by Brad Hayes.

One of the great things about music is that is spans generations. As the band has played out the past year, we keep getting older (except Phil our singer, who is 21) and the crowds get younger. I guess that's fine, if nobody showed up, we'd probably call it quits. Instead, the 3 gig run last weekend brought lots of nice responses from people, who were quite a bit younger than us, so that was pretty cool.

I forget that when I was a younger music fan, it was always older musicians that proved inspiration for being a fan and also taking up an instrument. From my piano teacher Steve Bruce, to Gene Czech the choir teacher at my grade school, to Mark Lashlee who had a home studio in our garage in California, to Bob Demmon the band teacher at my high school (who played guitar in The Astronauts in the early 60s), it seems that the inclination to pick up an instrument, whether a tuba or a guitar, always begins by seeing some older, accomplished musician jamming out on their instrument.

My band plays a lot of gigs with Debris', a Chickasha, OK punk/new wave band that was a big deal in the 1970s, and who reformed about 3 years ago after many people inquired about them, the least of which was my friend Brad Hayes from Sharkbait Skate Zine. Now in their 50s, they are a hard act to follow, but I've noticed that teenagers and young adults in their early 20s are digging their music. As they say, some things return in cycles, and weird punk and new wave music is no exception. And it sucks playing after them, because you have try and play better than them. Call it intergenerational discipline, or "schooling."

This should surely make one wonder if cutting the band and music programs from public education is worth it, since it helps the brain make sense of other subjects because you deal with abstract tones, sounds, and compositional structures, and come to understand the structure of things in general?

I started off with the flutephone in grade school. Long live band and choir nerds!

The new t-shirt logo. You can order one on our Facebook page.

Chuck Ivey, bass player and one of the singers for Debris' at Universe City.

The next wave of kids that are alright at Universe City.

Debris' at Universe City.

This is Psychotic Reaction at the Ag Barn in Maysville, OK. We played a skateboard park benefit concert there in Spring 2009. The town had no public park for the kids and I was told that the school locked the playground after school, so the kids couldn't play on the school playground. So the show materialized, with Nolan Dacus organizing one among many benefit concerts.

A fan at the Maysville skateboard park benefit.

The Robert Scafe fan club at the Red Room in Norman.

Disciples of Scafe, spanning another music generation.

Debris' at Bill and Dee's in Norman. Shot by Brad Hayes.

Zombie vs. Shark at Bill and Dee's in Norman. Photo by Brad Hayes.

Debris' at Bill and Dee's in Norman. Shot by Brad Hayes.

The aftermath of the Zombie vs. Shark set at Bill and Dee's. Shot by Brad Hayes.

Fall into Winter Snow

We ended up seeing lots of family and friends over the fall down in Oklahoma and also back East. This photograph was taken at the Ponca City skatepark in November when Brad and I took Spencer to hang at the park. He was interested in the ramps for about 10 minutes, dropping in butt-slide style on the almost vertical part. Then we hit playset, the preferred play area for 3-year-olds. As they say, you have to let your kids find their own way, and maybe Spencer will play the tuba in the High School band or become a hairdresser. That's cool with us!

Bradley Hayes with Spencer.

Tabby and Spencer went to Buffalo in October to visit family, and this riding session was at Uncle Frankie and Aunt Mo's house.

At the pumpkin patch, with Tara.

These next set of photos were taken after the first blizzard hit Lincoln in early December. We had 4 more blizzards after that, I think. For the first one, I was in Philadelphia and got in the night the blizzard began to hit Lincoln. It was super hairball driving my rear-wheel drive 1972 Ford LTD the 4 miles from the airport to the house. I barely made it home, fishtailing it the whole way even at 20-25 miles per hour. How they drove those in snow back in the day is unexplainable.

In the backyard in the snow.

Nala, our dog, gave the snow a whirl despite having arthritis, but we had to carry back in after about 5 minutes. Old dogs are very stubborn, especially ours.

Spencer was too young to really know what the snow was last year in Oklahoma, so he was eating it, and figuring out what to do with it.

We built a snow igloo in the backyard and also a snowman (which is still there after 2 months!), but I had to finish the igloo later, since he demolished it by jumping on it.

We had Christmas at Pat's house in Annapolis this year, and all we did was eat a lot for 12 days, since the first blizzard that hit us in Lincoln struck the East Coast 2 days later with over 2 feet of snow in Washington, DC. So we got to see that snow twice. The highlight of the holidays was the Christmas Eve dinner at Tara's old house in Mount Pleasant in DC, where Pablo roasted a 28 lb. pig over coals on a spit for 9 hrs. before the dinner. We joked that Pablo was a Chilean hillbilly, but boy was that delicious.

Tara decorating Christmas cookies.

Kestrel opening presents.

Pat supervises the cookie making factory.

Tabby just got a fisheye lens, so here's some samples.

When my friend Dave lived at Tabby's house in South Philadelphia, we used to wake up to Dave cooking breakfast for us, and that always included a heaping plate of bacon, as Dave is the king of anything that has pork products in it. Hopefully his Philly uncles will approve, and maybe Scrapple will be next?

Well, maybe he won't become a tuba player or hairdresser, but an artist. If that's the case, I'll build an apartment and painting studio for him on our back lot. After the wrecking of the economy, I'm sure most children at back at home with the parents, so that's fine with us.

This is at the Agar Play Center in Lincoln.

Uncle Frankie and Aunt Mo in Buffalo got this t-shirt for Spencer, as there was much Yankee mania going on there during the world series.