Life

Dig the pics Skateboard Heroes fans!

  • by Drew

Holy freeform progressive lenses, Batman! Have you seen the new Friends of Skateboard Heroes (F.O.S.H.) page? We finally got around to loading up the awesome sketches collected at the New york Comic Con a few months ago. Sure, it’s been a bit of a wait, but we were busy setting y’all up with new comic pages. But now, as we draw to the conclusion of the Issue 1 Antecedental story, we have another sketch or two on the backburner. So, we’ve got to work through the backlog. Only fair, right?

Life

The Mechanical Cover

  • by Drew

The astute music-file/recording artist/duplication provider may actually find the title of this post amusing because it combines some musical terminology that may not be familiar to the general public. See, when you cover a published song on a distributed recording, you have to pay royalties to the songwriter(s) and publisher(s) of the source material. It’s called a mechanical royalty and is based on the number of units you produce. Interestingly enough, you can actually perform any covers you want live (as long as they are not recorded or broadcast) without any sort of royalty payment ot the intellectual property owner. So… we can blame that little lapse for the mind numbing number of times I’ve had to hear Piano Man while trying to enjoy a nice meal in a mid range restaurant with my bets girl.

Anyway, the thought that inspired this post was my love of album or CD covers that use mechanical or industrial objects. Sometimes it is just an object. Sometimes it it is a collage or constructed image using metals and spools and pulleys and things. I just love that kind of stuff. Shiny, rusty, greasy metal. So cool.

Examples? They may date me. Or maybe not. My tastes are pretty fixed.

Check out these awesome covers from Jawbox, The Orb, and Cop Shoot Cop.

  

 

PS Blog

Save The Toys!!!

  • by Drew

Hey, did I mention the awesome free Skateboard Heroes mini-comic we handed out at the annual Toys For Tots Extravaganza hosted by Alterniverse in Salt Point. It was totally radical and is totally free to download at www.SkateboardHeroes.com.

Do it!

Noise

Death of the Turntable

  • by Drew

Back when I did radio, we had all this mobile dj equipment for parties and such. We had the coffin covered in carpet, housing two turntables (and a microphone!) and a portable CD player by the mid 90s. Nowadays they’ve got CD scratchers and mixing apps for the iPhone. I mean, on the one hand, it’s cool to be able mix between tracks with an iPod and rock the house mp3 style. But really, it’s gotten way too hard to witness a classic scratch artist working the vinyl. Sure, there are purists out there still keeping it real, but the wedding scene, man, it’s technology all the way. What happened to mullets and tuxedo t-shirts? I’m so old.

Noise

Talking Guitar

  • by Drew

I was talking guitar with the Mom of one of my oldest son’s friends last night at the school’s holiday concert. I was explaining that while the size of my guitar collection is impressive, I don’t have any standout show pieces of significant value. I have a few cheap instruments to beat on and a good number of very serviceable performer’s instruments. I never picked up a crazy high priced instrument because my guitars were taken out to clubs and bars and where they get knocked over, spilled on and stolen.

But I do love my Dearmonds. I’ve surely written about them before. They were Korean and later Indonesian-made guitars based on classic Guild models. Fender set up the line after acquiring Guild in the 90s. They already owned the Dearmond brand of classic American electronics, so they combined the two and created a line of imports that outsold their higher priced American counterparts.

One of my favorites is an M72, which is based on the Guild Bluebird. The Bluesbird had that classic Les Paul look. Like a carved top Gibson Les Paul Studio or Standard rather than the slab body junior style. It’s such a sweet player, but man, is it heavy!

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