Here is an article that is in the MAY 2012 issue of Total Guitar.

For us the big thing is where Lee talks about the tone and the zero noise level of the LMG T in a studio environment. It is one of the great attributes of this guitar. The way we build them creates a solid and shielding frame for the pickups. The result is clean, pure tone, which allows one to do so much more with the sound.

Read The Article

Great band from Wales playing great music.

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6 Spielman Rd
Dartford
Kent

Dear Pat,

So sorry not to have written before (I plead insane) in bluebottle voice. Exit right amid deafening applause.

I do hope you’re very well.

We have survived yet another glorious English Winter. I wonder which day Summer falls on this year?

Oh but my dear I have been soooo busy since Christmas beside working at school. You know I was keen on Chuck Berry and I thought I was the only fan for miles but one mornin’ on Dartford Stn. (that’s so I don’t have to write a long word like station) I was holding one of Chuck’s records when a guy I knew at primary school 7-11 yrs y’know came up to me. He’s got every record Chuck Berry ever made and all his mates have too, they are all rhythm and blues fans, real R&B I mean (not this Dinah Shore, Brook Benton crap) Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Chuck, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker all the Chicago bluesmen real lowdown stuff, marvelous. Bo Diddley he’s another great.

Anyways the guy on the station, he is called Mick Jagger and all the chicks and the boys meet every Saturday morning in the ‘Carousel’ some juke-joint well one morning in Jan I was walking past and decided to look him up. Everybody’s all over me I get invited to about 10 parties. Beside that Mick is the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don’t mean maybe. I play guitar (electric) Chuck style we got us a bass player and drummer and rhythm-guitar and we practice 2 or 3 nights a week SWINGIN’.

Of course they’re all rolling in money and in massive detached houses, crazy, one’s even got a butler. I went round there with Mick (in the car of course Mick’s not mine of course) OH BOY ENGLISH IS IMPOSSIBLE.

“Can I get you anything, sir?”
”Vodka and lime, please”
”Certainly, sir”

I really felt like a lord, nearly asked for my coronet when I left.

Everything here is just fine.

I just can’t lay off Chuck Berry though, I recently got an LP of his straight from Chess Records Chicago cost me less than an English record.

Of course we’ve still got the old Lags here y’know Cliff Richard, Adam Faith and 2 new shockers Shane Fenton and Jora Leyton SUCH CRAP YOU HAVE NEVER HEARD. Except for that greaseball Sinatra ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Still I don’t get bored anymore. This Saturday I am going to an all night party.

“I looked at my watch
It was four-o-five
Man I didn’t know
If I was dead or alive”
Quote Chuck Berry
Reeling and a Rocking

12 galls of Beer Barrel of Cyder, 3 bottle Whiskey Wine. Her ma and pa gone away for the weekend I’ll twist myself till I drop (I’m glad to say).

The Saturday after Mick and I are taking 2 girls over to our favourite Rhythm & Blues club over in Ealing, Middlesex.

They got a guy on electric harmonica Cyril Davies fabulous always half drunk unshaven plays like a mad man, marvelous.

Well then I can’t think of anything else to bore you with, so I’ll sign off goodnight viewers

BIG GRIN

Luff
Keith xxxxx
Who else would write such bloody crap

Author: Keith Richards with James Fox
Title: Keith Richards – Life
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Date: Copyright 2010 by Mindless Records, LLC
Pages: 77-79

This is wonderful to watch, he was the “quiet beatle” as referred to by himself but also a man who seemed to be able to explore who he was, despite being a Beatle.

There are some great lines, some very touching moments, ( like him playing in his studio with his young son ) and pretty good insight in what it was like to be that famous. Even Eric Clapton remarked on how bright the sun shone on them back in the day. He like to bask in it, he says.

Two Thumbs Up…. Way up lol

Skeleton Guitarist – 1664, The French engineer who built this terror used springs and pulleys to make it move its hands in time with a self-playing guitar placed in it’s lap. Unfortunately, his audience thought he used sorcery . Both engineer and skeleton were burned at the stake.

Now that is a tough audience..

From: Peter Buffett

Subject: Re: Genius Is Love

I grew up watching this first hand.. but in my case my dad was doing what he loved (still does) and the money did follow.

So I know that the money truly isn’t the point. And it certainly never made him happier – he was already “tap dancing to work”.

It was just a scorecard for his particular talent. Just like a record that sells.. a computer that sells… you don’t pack up and call it a day.
You’re just being told that you’re firing on all cylinders.

81 and in the same house.. same office.. hell, he’d eat the same ham sandwich if it was next to the same chair he sits in…

It’s not work, it’s life.

Peter

_______________________________________

Subject: Re: Genius Is Love

Dear Bob.

You talked of how Elton still loves music. A few years ago the lovely man invited our band The Storys to tour with him after he heard and loved our debut album. Elton was so animated when talking about music that my favourtie memory of the whole trip (and there were a few) was whan he’d come back from a magazine awards ceremony. I happened to be in the corridor with one of my band members and Elton came over for a chat. He said he was so excited he’d just met his hero Scott Walker. He was visibly moved, couldn’t wait to tell someone and I could almost feel the hairs standing up at the back of his neck, just as mine were.

love

Steve Balsamo

_______________________________________

 Subject: Re: Genius Is Love

I worked at Tower Records on Sunset from 87 to 90 and I can verify Elton John’s overpowering love of new music. For that time period, I was sort of his personal shopper. We didn’t close the store…didn’t have to. No one really bothered celebs there…the place was constantly overrun with them. Anyway, Elton would find me, and we’d grab empty boxes and fly around the store pulling every new release. I remember turning him onto the Divinyls and then a few weeks later watching him fanboy out all over Christina Amphlett. So awesome to see a legend like Elton freak out over a current, young band just like us.  I heard him quoted as saying that if he wasn’t a rockstar, he’d want to be a clerk at Tower. I believe he would’ve.

Gary Helsinger

_______________________________________

 From: Ryan Poissant

Subject: Re: Genius Is Love

Bob,

There is a great local story from a few years back about Elton John. Elton always stays at a small historic boutique hotel when he’s through Toronto, the Windsor Arms. As legend has it, he is prone to hold court in the bar playing old blues and boogie tunes for friends and lucky guests until the wee hours. After he’s finished his sold out show at the Air Canada Centre. Here’s a guy who’s already wowed the crowd and gave it all away in front of 20k+ fans for 2= hours and then goes back to the hotel and plays for himself. That is Love.

Cheers,

Ryan

 

I read about it in the news a while  back when it was long listed for the Giller Prize. I loved the set up for the story.

This is it:

It is about black jazz musicians in Germany and France just as the Nazis are taking liberties with their power.  It centres around the disappearance of one of best  trumpet player ever to have blown a horn.  The book is written from the perspective of an old guy in modern day Baltimore and gets invited back to a premier of a film about the horn blower and this one record they put out that became the stuff of legends.

From the Amazon listing:

Berlin, 1939. The Hot Time Swingers, a popular jazz band, has been forbidden to play by the Nazis. Their young trumpet-player Hieronymus Falk, declared a musical genius by none other than Louis Armstrong, is arrested in a Paris café. He is never heard from again. He was twenty years old, a German citizen. And he was black.

Berlin, 1952. Falk is a jazz legend. Hot Time Swingers band members Sid Griffiths and Chip Jones, both African Americans from Baltimore, have appeared in a documentary about Falk. When they are invited to attend the film’s premier, Sid’s role in Falk’s fate will be questioned and the two old musicians set off on a surprising and strange journey.

From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of Paris, Sid leads the reader through a fascinating, little-known world as he describes the friendships, love affairs and treacheries that led to Falk’s incarceration in Sachsenhausen. Half-Blood Blues is a story about music and race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves, and demand of others, in the name of art.

The book is magic, all the cool language and little phrases these guys use, it really draws you into another time and world. The band travels over to Paris, to work with Louis Armstrong on a record and just paints with words such a great tone.

It is really time well spent.

There is a great line about fat sound. One guy says that if you could put pick ups on a telephone pole, you would have great fat sound, but you can’t hold a telephone pole.. lol and we’ve been chasing that thickening since….

It is very cool to see how often stuff that we really like now was a veer in another direction to correct an foreseen problem. I know some of my best work has been a result of a different direction that I took, because of a mix up or a mistake. On our custom telecaster, the standard one, we run a drill bit across the top of the aluminum block to clean it off.

One time a little piece of the bit broke off and  it travelled down the top of the block and created these tight swirls. Bernie and I looked at it first and when “Oh shit, we wrecked it” and then we both looked at each other and said ” Hey that kinda looks cool” and now it is our standard finish.

Huge stadium..