While cutting a guitar track recently, I discovered that my damn Fender Pro Junior tubes were going microphonic again. I love the sound of that amp, since it does some nice power tube overload in a more controlled setting for recording, but it just eats tubes! Maybe the tech who re-tubed it last just didn’t bias it correctly. I don’t know. For whatever the reason, I get a sound and gain structure and then I start hearing that tell-tale resonance. The tubes were making that dreadful noise again.

What could I do? I couldn’t call up my assistant and get him on the case. He was on vacation. :~) I didn’t have another amp like that one at my disposal either. With a heavy heart, I considered using an amp simulator. An amp simulator is a device or piece of software through which one can play an electric instrument, like a guitar or bass, and connect directly to a sound system or recording console. The simulator makes the instrument sound as if it’s plugged into a miked amplifier.

For the non-technical, it should be noted that in most recording situations, an electric guitar is almost never plugged directly into the console. The sound coming off most electric guitar pickups is pretty lousy. The transients will knock your head off and the tone just dies in your arms. Amplifiers round off those transients and add the color that we have all come to know as the sound of an electric guitar on record.

There are notable exceptions, but the direct sound is very distinctive. You can hear it on most any Motown record. The guitar on “Black Dog” by Led Zeppelin, though layered, is also direct. Compare those guitars to the miked amplifier sounds on “Back Stabbers” by the O’Jays or “Misty Mountain Hop” on side two of the same Zeppelin album.

For reasons of physics that I won’t get into, an amp simulator comes pretty close to the real thing. The feel for the player can be different, but the sound of the various simulators available seems to be getting better all the time. So why, you may wonder, wouldn’t I use them regularly? I could plug my guitars directly into my recording console and get any sound I wanted, at any level I chose, with almost no effort. I wouldn’t disturb the neighbors. I wouldn’t have to set up mics. I’d never need to lift a heavy amplifier again. Anyone listening to my records would never know the difference.

The reason is that a great sound with minimal effort presents a moral dilemma for me. Recording music is an art, as much as the creation of the music itself. You’re not just slapping a microphone in front of a sound source and pressing Record. Nuances like the mic you choose, where exactly you place it in relation to the source and the room in which you do all of this make all the difference in the rendering of your sonic statement. It takes know-how, experience and discipline to do it right.

I don’t auto-tune my vocal tracks. I don’t quantize my sequences. I never work with looped phrases. Twenty years ago, an engineer plugged me into his new rack-mount Tech21 Sansamp unit for an overdub. His rack was right next to a perfectly good Marshall half stack and I just exploded! I only use amps! Don’t you respect that? (I’ve mellowed since then.) Now, faced with equipment failure, I was at the same creative crossroads. How could I call myself a producer if I just dialed up whatever guitar sound I wanted and wasn’t directly (no pun intended) responsible for its every detail? I DO care about art. I’m an ARTIST, damn it! Oh the humanity.

Well, much like the letting go that allowed me to use synthesizers, which was the realization that with them more of my music gets made than without, which is the whole point, I went with the simulator and finished a great-sounding track.

It turns out that the amp simulator I used provided an unimaginable level of control. You could choose the mic you wanted to simulate, where you would place it in front of the virtual guitar amp, the size of the room in which you recorded your amp and where you wanted to place the microphones in that room to capture the acoustic environment. Hell, the virtual amp even hummed! There were plenty of creative decisions with which to ease my guilty conscience. The only decision I didn’t have to make was whether to proceed with microphonic power tubes.

Maybe they’ll add that to the next version!

“I just can’t… stand myself!” – Bruce Springsteen, live version of “Fire”. 1986

Over the last five years or so, I’ve really questioned the value of being an American. During that time, I’ve come to believe that the classic images and ideas that are used to reinforce the “greatness” of the United States are platitudes. Land of opportunity, the American dream, the pursuit of happiness and fill in the blank were drummed into my head ever since I was kid. When I hear President Obama come anywhere near one of those images in a State of the Union address, it rings false in my ears.

In the cold light of the modern United States, all of that nonsense seems to have to taken the form of an incredibly sinister system of propaganda. It’s almost as if the president has to parade those long since eroded ideas out in front of Americans as a Pavlovian trigger, lest they completely shut off for good or just burn the place down. As long as somebody blows a trumpet and rattles off a few of those grade school platitudes, we’re still in the United States of America. It’s like Dunkin’ Donuts. As long as they have a few on a rack, they don’t have to rename the place and lose the brand identify they’ve built. But everybody, save a few old folks maybe, knows that their business is coffee now. Everybody’s in on it. It’s just another absurdity we don’t waste energy thinking about.

In my darkest moments, and in those of many disillusioned people I know, I devise a new American dream: To be free of my house, whose value is the same as it was probably sometime in the 90s. To acquire the means to gather up my family and leave this country. To sleep well in a place where what the American Congress is ruining today might not affect us, where bankers aren’t working closely with them to screw us, where the infrastructure isn’t crumbling, where excuses are not the most valuable currency of all and where the collective psyche of the people around us has yet to buckle beneath the weight of just one… more… lie…

Sorry. I’m back.

“The only thing that counts in the end… is Power. Naked, merciless Force!”  – Ursus, Beneath The Planet of the Apes. 1969

It’s easy to become cynical when your government seems to be run by Ursus. You know, it’s even worse than Ursus. At least he didn’t lie about it. No. The American government commands the human herd by deceit, stealing the fortunes of their freedom and security a penny at a time. Perhaps it’s a function of my age and experience, but it does seem that overnight, an American needed to be an economist, a lawyer, a millionaire and a captain of industry to keep from being a rung in the ladder of someone else’s success. American success has become purely the domain of the unscrupulous. Such regrettable innocence. I’m so ashamed. What the hell did I expect from a country whose national anthem is about bombs for chrissakes? And a rewrite of a drinking song to boot?

Between the Occupy Wall Street movement last year, the current uproar about the internet being at risk with SOPA and the IP Protection act, and any number of Congressional inadequacies being brought to light every month, maybe it isn’t just me. God, what a mess. What now?

“One change always leaves the way prepared for the introduction of another.” – Niccoló Machiavelli, The Prince. 1537

“Here’s comes a change, and another change, and another change, and another wave of change…” – Todd Rundgren, “Pulse”. 1981

Perhaps the veil is dropping. Perhaps the innocence is finally over. My country and my government are a mess and I’m in the middle of it. There’s no way to understand the whole thing before acting. Like any mess, the only way to clean it up is to start. Whatever’s closest to you will suffice. Get dirty. Make mistakes. Just don’t do nothing.

I must do what is in my power to do. I write to my representatives. I write this blog. I dedicate my music and my songs to the ideas that I believe need to be heard. I vote with my dollars. I’m selective about the businesses I support. I’ve pulled my money out of banks. I forego needless luxuries. I strive to think for myself. I look over both shoulders. I do whatever I can not to get taken. I educate myself. I complain. I make noise. I raise my child to learn truths that can protect her.

I can’t change everything. But I may be able to play into the change of one thing, paving the way for another.  I’m not proud of my country, but I’m still sick of it belonging to someone else.

A little over a decade ago, I went to this quack psychologist. He took my insurance and he was local. Since I had no mentally ill friends to refer me to anyone else, I gave him a whirl. It didn’t take long before I gave him the slip. The first thing that bothered me about him was that he was kinda creepy. He was tall, heavyset and gray, white-haired even, but with these black eyebrows. He had a build whose maintenance was clearly dependent upon a sedentary lifestyle, which wouldn’t have been so bad if he didn’t wear these white short-sleeved dress shirts like an electrical engineer working on government contracts circa 1967. The thing is you could see that his arms were going to atrophy, and not because of any inability to move, but because he was kinda milksoppy. The worst part was that he only referred to himself as Dr. Cisco, never by his first name. He would meet me at the door for sessions and he’d have to shake my hand. Always the dead fish. Always. It got so I was trying to avoid the interaction after a few sessions. It just made me so uncomfortable. Once he looked down at me (Christ, he was tall) with kind of smirk after my body language suggested that I wanted to get into the office without the customary greeting. Like one of my ancient aunts from Brooklyn, he said, “You don’t shake hands?” Talk about oppressive… From this distance, the cat was the poster boy for neuroses, but what the hell did I know then?

The only thing I learned from this guy, other than that seeing a therapist who doesn’t gain your trust is like talking about your life with someone on the bus, is that your dreams are you. He would ask me near the end of our sessions if I had any dreams. I would describe the images and he would tell me what some of the major symbols usually represented and he would draw connections between them and the experiences I’d confided to him about my waking life. In retrospect, it was more like fortune telling than therapy, because to understand the dream, I think you have to understand the person having it, but I still got a kick out of it. I told him about a dream I had of driving on a long two lane road with many hills and bends. He told me about how it was my life journey, my path. Made good sense to me. I also dreamt that my house was on fire, but I still walked down another street to avoid the commotion with the fire trucks. This one was perfectly in line with a guy going through a divorce.

I soon grew tired of the weekly parlor game with the Cisco kid, but the dream thing still interested me. However, the practice of dream interpretation becomes a bit more punitive if you make the mistake of asking your five year old what she dreamt of. Now, every day when I wake up, it’s like being asked for the goddamned report. “What did you dream about, Daddy?” How many times can you say “hot dogs and doughnuts” before she catches on? Last week, I told her about an actual dream I had in which Batman was dating Angie Harmon. Not Michael Keaton Batman, Adam West Batman. Not being hip to either character, she simply refused to accept it as real and pressed me for the truth. I’m just not up for this sort of thing before I’ve even gotten out of bed. Her dreams are always about kitty cats and puppies and her friends and stuff. Hell, where’s the analysis in that? I already know that stuff about her. What’s the point?

I’m still trying to figure out how Adam West Batman could get anywhere near a woman like Angie Harmon. And more importantly, why in my dream did it upset me so damn much? To hell with that shrink, man.

I suppose it’s not very exciting to most people. However, it’s exciting to me. You see, when you’d visit my site previously, you’d be loading it from a server in Canada. Now, it’s a server in the US, controlled by someone who might just appreciate my business. I’ll let you know about that.

In the meantime, if you use Netfirms to host your site, maybe you should stop.

Let me know if you think my site is faster now…

Since I’m opening the show at Salem Roadhouse Cafe this Saturday, my set will be short. It’s a stretch to do the hard sell when I only get 20-25 minutes onstage, but I didn’t want to say nothing about it. I thought it might be more fun to watch a video than to read an online announcement, so here goes:

Come to the concert. There will be cookies. Everybody likes cookies.

On Saturday, October 8, 2011 at 7:30pm, I’ll be performing solo at Salem Roadhouse Cafe. The cafe is in the basement of Townley Presbyterian Church, 829 Salem Road, Union, NJ.

I’ll be opening the show, so it’ll be a short set. I’ll be playing guitar and piano and performing some new songs for the first time. This will be my first solo engagement in years. I didn’t think I’d ever play alone again, but I was grateful to have been invited based upon my performance at the cafe with another band. I’ve done a great deal of auditioning and rehearsing with other musicians over the last years, but I seem destined to play solo for the moment. Regardless of the configuration, it feels good to be getting out.

This concert will be taped for television. As I understand it, I’ll be interviewed before I go on. Oh, how I love to talk about myself! :~)

I was supposed to do play this venue last November, but I had to run out and rush my daughter to the hospital with symptoms of anaphylaxis. Now that her allergies are known, I’m sure I’ll get to play this time. I hope I see some friends there.

Copyright is one of those weird things in which some people just don’t recognize absolutes. In definition and in principle, copyright seems clear enough: The creator of a work or the person to which copyright is assigned has the exclusive right to control the use of the work. Copyright includes not only the right to copy and distribute the work, but also to adapt the work. The odd thing is how even after everything that’s occurred with file sharing, copyright can be so recklessly ignored by musicians. One might think that musicians, in their passion for the art, would recognize the value of intellectual property, but it seems that a good number of them suffer from the popular misconception that songs belong to everyone.

They don’t.

On YouTube, it’s entirely commonplace to see videos of musicians performing “covers.” It’s usually someone with a guitar or keyboard performing for the camera. While I understand the value of promoting oneself with video, most of these “cover” videos violate copyright law. We all learn and play songs by our favorite artists. That’s how most of us learned to play. However, as soon as you upload a recording of yourself performing those songs, whether for fun or profit, if you don’t have a license to do so, you’re violating the law. (Actually on YouTube, you’d need a sync license, since a video goes with it.)

YouTube gets itself off the hook by having you swear that you own the content you’re uploading. They’ll even take action if a copyright owner complains to them about a violation. They suspend accounts all the time. There’s the other thing about them asking you to say that they don’t have to compensate you for your video being played, but at least you’re in control. No one’s making you upload your video for free public viewing. Regardless of whether you’re making money or even want to, I think you have to respect the value of creative works and the laws designed to protect them. Without copyright, we’d be culturally bereft.

There’s an ethical question at play and a good amount of self-policing when it comes to copyright law. Fortunes have been made because it can be so easy to get around it. To put it in the simplest terms, I know how hard it is to write songs. When I see a video of a “cover version,” I’m not thinking about the performance. I’m thinking about licensing. I can’t help it.

What just happened? I didn’t see that coming. As I was putting my studio back together after the hurricane cleanup, it occurred to me that my head is just buzzing from the events of the last three months. Still, I’m almost starting to feel normal again. In fact, this writing is very much a therapeutic act.

Out of nowhere, I experienced an encore of debilitating anxiety this summer. I say an encore because I have not experienced such a bout since 2000. Since that time a decade ago, I’ve become quite an expert on drugs, meditation, hypnosis and therapy to overcome the problem. This expertise made the resurgence of the condition in my life all the more shocking, as I had believed it to be thoroughly under control, left utterly in the past.

Since their role in one’s life when they take hold can quickly spiral into full consumption, panic attacks can serve either as a catalyst for personal metamorphosis or as the first nail in one’s coffin. When I first discovered the power of seemingly involuntary physical manifestations of irrational fear, I immediately chose the former. If I could change the way that I lived, the way that I thought and the way I reacted to the stressors I allowed into my consciousness, I was sure I could reclaim my ability to function. I made the decision to do just that while still on a gurney in the emergency room, waiting for the Ativan that had been injected into my thigh to take effect. I would later learn that the same drug is administered to quell seizures, albeit in higher doses.

As I stared up at the ceiling in that room they had me lying in, I listened to doctors talking to other people who’d been brought to the ER in the middle of the night. “How much heroin did you take tonight?” I heard one of them say to an incoherent person I couldn’t see. I couldn’t decide who was in worse condition, that guy who had overdosed on a known substance, or me, who had yet to learn what was actually occurring in his body but nevertheless believed that he too, was dying. Maybe we were very much the same, he and I. My old man came into the room just then. He’d been watching me place enormous demands on myself since I was old enough to reason. Demands that could only lead me to such a state. “We always knew I’d end up here,” I said, though I’d had my doubts over the years. Mercifully, the old man didn’t agree or disagree.

I had canceled a gig that night, completely unable to perform. I would not return to performing and recording for years.

Believing that panic disorder was contained had made me soft. I had become lax with behavior modification and coping techniques. My life is very different than it was 10 years ago, therefore what triggers anxiety for me now is different. The old stuff, I have down. The new stuff requires its own consideration. I think that’s why the spike occurred this summer. I still had to shut down, but I understood everything that was happening to me this time. I know when I’m being lied to by my own mind and body. I knew exactly what to do. Within a month or two, I’d awakened as if from a dream, wiser, with perhaps an even greater metamorphosis afoot. And not a moment too soon. I have not lived hard as many musicians have, but I know that anxiety will age you prematurely too. None of us can afford the years, can we?

A friend of mine uttered an excellent quotable this year and I keep coming back to it. He knows who he is. I give him all the credit. We were discussing the ridiculous money-grabs that are attempted by former rock superstars in the internet age. It seems now that some formerly prominent musical figures are quite accessible in one way or another if you have the cash.

I think this whole thing started with the Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp. In this institution, which costs something like $10,000, you get to spend a week with rock star camp counselors who spend the time coaching you through forming and rehearsing a band of other “campers,” culminating in a gig at same notable joint in whatever city they’re in. I think they write a song and record it too. So now, you can be a dentist and still have a “once in a lifetime” opportunity to “jam” with Ace Frehley. You can tell your friends what an honor it was and how you’ll never wash your hand again after high-fiving Kip Winger. I believe it to be an obscene waste of money and self-esteem, but hey, it’s your money and all. 

The saddest byproduct of the Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp is that it has identified a niche market of people with untold amounts of disposable income. As audiences wane, it has become worthwhile for some artists to leverage the “rabid fan grown old and professional” set to make up the difference. There may not be as many people in the audience to pay $100 for a ticket as there used to be, but if you can locate 100 of them who’ll fork over $5,000 to 10,000 for a special experience with you over the course of a tour or event, well… just do the math.

My friend said it best when we were discussing Todd Rundgren. He said that he didn’t really want to hang out with him, camp in a tent on his property in Hawaii and take a dump in his bathroom. In short, he said, “I can’t afford to be a fan anymore.” Hence, this new series I’m attempting here.

For this first installment of I can’t afford to be a fan, I’ve chosen Paul Stanley.

In the old days, a smashed guitar was thrown to the wolves in the front row of the concert to fight to the death over. I know I never wanted to be one of the people in the fray, scratching and clawing for a splintered prop. That was just crazy. But I never once thought of the ceremonial tossing of finale remains as a wasted revenue opportunity. Enter Kiss and my old pal Paul Stanley.

You can buy the guitar that Paul will break on stage at every city on the tour. Paul will autograph it. It will include your name. The writing will say that Paul Stanley broke this guitar for Horace onstage in Holmdel NJ in 2011, or whatever. You can buy yours here.

http://shop.paulstanleyguitars.com/

I can’t decide whether or not I should let the site tell the story. If you’re too lazy to click that link, I’ll lay it on you. The broken guitars range from $4300 to $5500. Like the Kiss backstage VIP package, this of course, does not include a ticket to the concert.

So friends, love your music. Love your favorite artists. And take heart, for I will stand beside you and thousands of others who need not be ashamed to say…

I can’t afford to be a fan.

I seldom speak in terms of death. Lately I’ve come to feel that most everything in life is so maddeningly tenuous already. To speak of death too often is to invite it in, and as it already lurks in every corner, I never feel compelled to give it more airtime. I’ve been shown in so many ways over the last year that nothing I’ve ever clung to has ever been tethered to me by more than the slenderest of threads. I can recount no unendurable tragedies that have befallen me during that time, but a shift has occurred in my mind and by mere cognizance, perhaps in the ground beneath me as well.

I thought of this today as when I came across this blog post. It describes a wall in New Orleans where people would come and record something they want to do before they die. This seems like a fashionable thing. People make “bucket lists” all the time now. However, I didn’t think of it on those terms at all. I was encouraged when I discovered that the author of the post also did not.

I read some of the items other people put on the list. My life situation and experience could have borne out some of the same wishes. What parents wouldn’t want to see their children graduate? When I read items like those, I was struck by the fact that I had never considered that I might not have those experiences. There’s no guarantee of witnessing even the most conventional milestones and I know that very well. Still, I never thought to aspire to them. There is a lesson in that for me.

My contemplation was this: Does a man who eschews a comfort zone in the pursuit of a deliberate, significant and non-complacent life eventually find himself in a world in which he has no place? After all, these esoteric virtues could very well be elaborate lies told to young people in books to motivate them. Can a man ever know contentment if he embraces living only as a series of mountains to climb? That I even ask these questions is answer enough. One cannot make contentment another mountain. All of living cannot be a pursuit, neither for achievement nor justice.

My list, if you could call it that, was not populated snapshot moments like graduations, lottery tickets, completed albums, hit records or anything like that. The only the wish that came to me was that before I depart the mortal plane, that I would finally have learned to put the damn desperation to rest, that I could measure progress without sacrificing peace.

For there is no event, no accomplishment, no experience that I would consider significant enough to cross off a list that when empty permits me to object to death a bit less. My wish is a vow to sweeten the life I have left, without making it a race, or worse, a countdown.