.:: DonnieNix.net ::.

I haven’t updated this in a while. Probably won’t ever again.

So, this is just a placeholder…great.

New guitar gear…

Peavey Vypyr 30w amplifier. Sweet tones. It’s a modeling amp, so it can be programmed to sound like a number of other amps, including a Marshall stack, a Krankenstein, and old school Fender dual reverb…it sounds GREAT and is a lot of fun.

Also, the acoustic in the corner was a present from my kids. Isn’t that great!

I love Christmas.

Been riding this week. Trying to regain the passion. I’ve had two decent rides this week. Sorba Woodstock finished the new Van Michael Trail at Blankets. It’s an advanced trail, so I am avoiding it until July. I think we all know why. The new reroutes on the Mosquito Bite trail are really nice.

I’m ordering a new guitar tomorrow. Either an Ibanez GAX70 or an Agile AL-2000 Les Paul copy. See the picture in the post below for the Ibanez. Whichever I get, it will be a nice upgrade and should hold me over for a while, at least until I can afford a new Gibson ES335 Alex Lifeson Signature model for $3000. I played the Ibanez at Guitar Center yesterday and it had good action, a nice tone and felt really comfortable. The Agile gets rave reviews online though and is a very credible Les Paul copy. Decisions, descisions…

Me and Jake saw The Incredible Hulk yesterday. Huge huge improvement over the first Hulk movie. This Hulk was much more badass and not quite as emo. The fight scenes were great.

I’m looking forward to:

1. Vacation in Savannah over the July 4th holiday.
2. Rush at the Alpharetta Amphitheater July 22. Last show on their Snakes and Arrows tour. Oh hell yeah.
3. Getting my Digitech RP50 multi-effects processor delivered. I won this in an eBay auction. Basically, it will let me sound like David Gilmour, the Edge, or Billy Duffy even though I can’t play like them.
4. Riding Dupont in July

Me and Creamsicle (I named my bike Creamsicle because it’s the same shade of orange…yeah, I know) drove up to Waleska to check out the newest trails in Cherokee County. I wasn’t expecting much but was still disappointed. I guess I should have taken it as a bad omen when I pulled up to the trailhead, and there were NO cars at all. On a Sunday where there is not a cloud in the sky and 75 degrees, you’d think every trail would be covered with humans. I drove by Blankets Creek before coming up here and there was no parking at all. That’s why I decided to check out these trails. I figured that I’d be bouncing off of people all around BC, so why not go ahead and take the opportunity to try the new trail.

When I first got there, I thought, cool, I’ll be the only one out there, that’ll be neat. Ha. Boy, did I read the signs wrong.

First of all you start off on a steep as hell gravel road that takes you to some really crappy jeep road. This is the trail. Ninety percent jeep road. There’s a few trails running off the jeep road that wind around and connect back up with it. These are labeled as advanced trails. I would have to say that whoever designed and laid out these trails were not mountain bikers. None of the trails have any flow whatsoever and some of the zig-zags are so tight, you can’t maneuver a bike through them without hooking a tree. One section had a 3 ft deep dip right after a blind curve, that followed two consective ultra-tight turns, so by the time you hit the dip, your speed was killed so much that you could not roll it.

One other section had a steep uphill, rolling into a 90 degree switchback with a log laid across the apex of the turn. I tried this twice and both times got hung on the log because the steep climb up to it and then the sharp turn wouldn’t allow me to have any speed to pop over the log. It was totally out of place.

I feel bad about trashing the trails around here, because I know the people who worked them tried, but man did they miss out. It’s a pretty big expanse of forest that they had to work with, and instead of winding the trail through the woods and making the most of the space, a’la Big Creek, Chicopee, and Blankets, they made all the little connector trails a “shortest line between point A and point B” type of design. Instead of making 6 nice switchbacks going down that hill, they made one steep, narrow, brake-burning, slide down the hill.

They could have jammed 6 or 7 miles of trails in there, instead, it’s only about 3 miles of tedious up and down. For a mountain bike trail, it makes a great running trail.

Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been busy, and this blogging thing is kind of silly anyways.

I’ve been listening to The Beatles a lot lately, and just finished Hunter Davies’ book on their golden era, from the beginning through 1968.This was the only guy that was given complete access to the Fab Four during that time and he traveled with them for a long time and got to know them pretty well. He interviewed all the family members, and even Pete Best, and compiled a wealth of personal information on the group and their lives coming from the rough neighborhoods of post-WWII Liverpool.

After I finished the book and listened to their catalog (I have a rotten commute and a lot of time to listen) I’ve decided that The Beatles phenomenon was simply nothing more than “right place, right time”. The world was ready for something a little more daring than the sappy pulp the Beach Boys were passing around. The surf music scene didn’t appeal to anyone that didn’t live near a coast. The burgeoning folk music scene was too mellow; Elvis was back and forth at this time between sappy love songs and what-not. Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis were churning out song after song that sounded exactly the same.

The time was right for a revolution in rock and roll and The Beatles just happened to be there.

The Beatles honed their style in Hamburg Germany, where they played 5 sets a day, up to 12 hours per day. They pretty much were a cover band at that time, rehashing old blues tunes and mixing in a few original compositions. Most of their early original songs were just love-story slop if you get right down to it. The lyrics are just a bunch of “I love you, she loves you, we love you, blah blah blah yeah yeah yeah”. The thing that won them fans was the energy and the style. They played with such a different style and performed with a collective energy that no one had seen before, and the world was ready for it.

By the time that Ringo joined them and they signed with EMI, they were so efficient with their songs that they blasted them out in the studio in just a few days. The hype machine helped them, and Brian Epstein was a master of promotion. Beatlemania followed, but it was more out of a lust for the boys than a lust for their music.

Their music was different, no doubt. The frenzy and mania over the group was unprecedented. Still, the first few albums were just a lot of sap. Love songs for the teeny-bopper. It paved the way though for more experimental stuff, and their music seemed to grow with their audience. By the time they came out with the white album, their core audience, the ones that had fallen over and fainted at the site of them, was smoking dope, holding peace rallies and using the Beatles music as a rallying point.

It is almost like no one really sat down and listened and tried to understand the lyrics at all. I mean, the first 4 albums are pretty much the same song, over and over, with a different beat and tempo. The subject is the same at least, only worked different. Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt Peppers are honestly the only revolutionary albums the Beatles truly gave us, and even there, some of the songs are just rehashed ego trips. By the time Magical Mystery Tour dropped, John was so weird that none of his songs made sense, and he didn’t care. I fully believe that in the back of his mind, he said, I can put out whatever tripe I want and these numbskulls will buy it and call me a genius. How else do you explain the lyrics for I am the Walrus?

Seriously though, they have had flashes of honest-to-goodness brilliance, where the lyrics and the music came together and created magic, but hasn’t that happened to nearly every band that has been signed?

The Beatles were set free to experiment in ways other bands never dreamed of, and they had that early on due to all the screaming success of the first albums. That experimentation has been hailed by critics and fans as the epitome of rock and roll. I agree somewhat that it changed the direction of music, but if it hadn’t been them, I really believe someone else would have. Brian Wilson had a good shot in 1966 with Pet Sounds, and has actually been credited with pushing the Beatles in that direction. If you listen to Sgt Peppers, you will hear the Brian Wilson sound all through that album. The only problem was that Brian wrote love songs. The world was still looking for something different. Revolver and Sgt Pepper’s were different and so the Beatles gained even more leverage.

Their last several albums though were pretty much brain dumping, and they really didn’t care about each other at that time and they really didn’t care about The Beatles. If you listening close enough, it’s obvious they are carrying on simply because it was expected. None of them wanted to be there, and that’s why they started recording their own stuff without the others being around. John’s music in Abbey Road, Let It Be, and the White Album is some of the worst crap that the Beatles recorded. George was so into his peace and love Indian phase that his music makes your teeth hurt. Paul was the only one still trying to pound out good rock and roll songs, or at the least, decent pop tunes. To me, this era for Paul was just the beginning of his Wings period. The songs that Wings pumped out were the same as the late Beatles McCartney songs.

Paul caught and still catches the most grief over the Beatles breakup. It’s a little unfair because in reality, he was the only one that really wanted the band to continue on, and he was fighting for that until the end. John wanted to be elsewhere, George wanted to be on a different spiritual plane, and Ringo just wanted to go.

Despite all of this, what I’ve read over the last several years, what I’ve listened too, and what I’ve written, I still love the Beatles and can listen to them any time of day. I just do it now with a more realistic view of what they were about and what their music means.

I decided that my old blog looked like crap. It was also a pain in the rump to maneuver around in the thing. And it kept logging me out so that I had to first log in as a user and then login again as the administrator. What a hassle. So, I installed this puppy.

This is WordPress and I’m going to use it instead of blogger.com and other blogs or content management systems. I have comments turned off because I’m not looking for validation or reassurance. If I post a blog crying about what a crappy biker I am, or how much my tooth hurts, I don’t want people telling me to “Man up, you pansy, it’ll be okay”.

So, there you have it. I’ll try to post more often, but since only one or two people read it regularly, I’ll probably just call them and rant about whatever’s on my mind instead of posting it here.

Eh, whatever.

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Riding bikes, working on bikes, looking at bikes, reading about bikes.

http://www.donnienix.net for my real blog.