November Birthdays 
a good friend rick, my son and i made the 13 hour journey up to connecticut for our annual week at national guitar workshop at the end of july. being a sucker for road side attractions we made a brief side trip to margate, nj, home of lucy the elephant. (pictures to follow)
rick and i signed up for the rockabilly/psychobilly class with mark gamsjager of the 'lustre kings', a rock'n'roll/rockabilly band that plays up in the northeast and has also backed up wanda jackson when she tours. we spend five days, six hours a day in a class, mostly playing and then attend concerts and perform in the evening. eddie angel was the guest for our class. an unmasked and soft spoken eddie came to our class one morning and talked and also played a bunch of stuff with mark, both LSJ tunes and rockabilly stuff. that afternoon, a masked eddie played with mark and a faculty drummer and bass player for about 25 of us, sticking around to answer more questions and sign stuff.
my friend rick and i played a jon and the nightriders tune 'moving target' for open mike night. we had a faculty drummer and marks 16 year old son for our bass player. (there's hope for the youth of america as he expressed he liked surf music) i don't know what all the heavy metal kids thought of it but everyone else said it was good.
for our class performance we played the carl perkins tune 'matchbox'. everyone got to solo (as you can see by the size of the class, lots of solos)
but all the rhythm was kept to a minumum. my son was on drums, and recited part of an old sermon from the 50"'s "rock and roll music is one of the contributing factors in our juvenile delenquency of today, etc, etc" as the lead in for the song. very cool.
one last surf related note. one of our adult class mates asked me if i'd ever heard of this really cool band called the insect surfers as he'd heard a few of their tunes on some surf compilation cd's. 
i was more than happy to inform him i was friends with david A. hoot.
the kids in the class were really cool and interested in surf music. most of them were into rockabilly. (one of them, kid on far left in class pic, slept through the whole thing...........oh well) i've made some compilation cds for a few of them of some of my favorite surf tunes that they will hopefully, like and share.
guitarworkshop.com
lucy the elephant.org
lustrekings.com
pictures to follow: 1. our large group playing 'matchbox'
2. lucy the elephant 3. our class 4. rick and i playing 'moving target'
click on photos to enlarge them..............
—Last edited: Aug 13, 2007 13:27:07
