Review - Hawkwind's "Road to Utopia"

Hawkwind - Road to Utopia

The weather has cooled off enough to use my big stereo just in time to listen to a brand new Hawkwind album on it first.

While I read Hawkwind’s initial posting about it a couple of months ago, and new it was going to be a mostly acoustic album, the sound of it still caught me by surprise once I put it on.

It’s a rehashing, mostly acoustic of a number of their songs spanning almost five decades.  What I didn’t expect were the horn and string arrangements, like a full-blown, light pop music album.  I don’t mean horns like Nik Turner’s “asthmatic water fowl” style of saxophone, but total pop music horns.

The two instrumental songs, Hymn to the Sun and Intro The Night are both pretty boring, and thankfully short.

The song, The Flying Doctor sounds like a far more rollicking tale in this version, with the vocals a lot clearer in more muddy, electric ones.  It’s a lot easier to hear the story of the drug addicted doctor.

My favorite on this album, the one that sounds the most like you’d expect from Hawkwind, is The Watcher with Eric Clapton playing electric guitar.

Overall, I like it.  But I have to wonder, would I enjoy this music if it was some other group and not Hawkwind.  I’m not so sure.  Maybe only because I thought they were playing Hawkwind songs.

Quora Question: What kind of guitar do you own, and which one do you want to own?

What kind of guitar do you own, and which one do you want to own?

This is my answer from a Quora question...

What Kind of Guitar Do You Own?

Late last year, 2017, I bought a brand new surf green made-in-Mexico Fender Stratocaster.



It’s the first time in my life I’ve touched a guitar. I’m 48 now. In 3rd grade I played the cello for a year, when my mother had a future planned out for me as a concert cellist (I think she was mostly attracted to the idea I’d have a job where I had to wear a tuxedo to work). Then we moved, wound up in a small town and there weren’t any cellos to borrow or rent for me to continue my lessons.

In 6th grade I played the saxophone for half a year when our whole class had half a year of band. I stunk at both instruments. Twinkle Twinkle Little Starwas always out of reach for me, and I minced the Little Lamb Mary Hadbeyond any reasonable form.

But I love music. It’s one of those things I spend an inordinate amount of my income on. And the last few summers I’ve been watching punk rock bands play concerts in Tompkins Square Park here in New York City. So I felt inspired to try and learn a little how to play, and I figured the first step was to actually get a guitar.

I’ve long liked the look of Stratocasters. They simply scream out “rock n roll!” (there’s others that do, too) and I figured since I never held a guitar before the contoured shape might be a little more comfortable to learn with. Since I’m obsessed with the color green, that was the obvious color. I debated whether I should spend more for a genuine branded Fender, or go for a cheaper Squier, but I read the Squier ones have less quality control, and I figured that with my complete inexperience paying a little more would ensure the godawful sound coming from it was my playing, rather than a defective instrument.

I bought a bunch of beginner books, and I signed up for Fender Playwhich has some good beginners’ lessons, that I’m struggling with.

I bought Rocksmith 2014 as well, so I could plug the guitar into the computer as a controller. I got started with that, but my desk chair isn't comfortable to sit on with the guitar and play. My wife is going to give me her old laptop, so I’ll install it on there when she goes overseas for a few months. Then I can put it on the coffee table and play sitting on the floor.

So, I’ve been practicing off and on for over half a year now. I still can’t play any songs. I can’t even play any chords that use more than two fingers on the frets. I can’t play many of them that use just two fingers.

With riffs that use just one string I can’t get my left hand’s fingers up and down the fretboard accurately to actually play note after note after note correctly.

One issue I’m having is I’ve gotten terribly fat the last few years, so the guitar hangs at a funny angle over my belly. That means I have to twist my wrist further around the neck to reach the strings further up on the neck.

Maybe what I need is a live tutor, someone who can start off by seeing how I’m holding the bloody thing to help me correct myself, and then start off with solutions to my obvious problems. I don’t know.

I haven’t been practicing as much since my wife returned from her previous four month trip home to India. I feel a bit foolish picking it up and fumbling around while she’s in hearing range. She’s not very patient with other people trying to learn things around her, either. And when she sees me with it, she assumes I’m free to do chores and run errands.

Maybe I shouldn’t have waiting so long in life to try and learn. Not when my fingers are stiff and achy, about the same age when arthritis started to get debilitating for my father.

And Which Guitar Do You Want to Own?

Well, there’s a few… From punk rock concerts I’ve been to lately, I’ve noticed the majority of the guitar players, especially the ones I liked, were playing various guitars with humbucker pickups rather than single-coil.

I want a Stratocaster with one (or more) humbucker pickups, as they produce more of the sound I’d like to get, if I could actually play it. They have a few green options, plus I could pay more for one from their Mod Shop that would be nicely customized for me. Now that they introduced the Player line, I’ll probably buy one of those.

I was thinking I’d like a green Gibson SG as well. There aren’t many green options out there, unless I look around on eBay. Most of those in any sort of affordable range have only one pickup, but I’m not such an advanced player that that should affect me. The few others are whoppingly expensive professional models.

And while not green, some of the 2018 SG models, the Standard HP 2018, are absolutely gorgeous… I could see myself getting the blood orange or even the hot pink fade. They’re a bit more than I’d like to spend, though, given that I can’t actually play the thing…

On the other hand, I’d long admired, but dismissed for myself, Gibson Les Pauls, despite a number of musicians whose work I like playing them. I remember a friend long ago who said they were extremely heavy, so as a raw beginner I didn’t want to find myself fighting the extra weight of one when I already can’t play. But I went to a couple of punk rock shows in June and some guitarists were playing Les Pauls, including several groups with two guitarists, a Les Paul player next to an SG player and I found myself drawn towards watching the Les Paul player quite a lot more. I mean a lot more.

Looking around online, I sure like the green Slash Anaconda Les Paulis beautiful (and green!). But its price is more than I should actually spend on a guitar I can’t play, no matter how good I think I’d feel holding it and failing to play (I suppose a less expensive Epiphone version is an option). Maybe I could hold it, pretend to play and put on a Guns & Roses CD or something…

Of course, no purchases until my wife goes on her three month trip home to India in a couple of months. I’ll buy whatever I buy on a credit card she doesn’t know about (I’m not talking about screwing around with credit cards, I’ll still pay it off once I get the bill) and my story is basically that I found it/them on Craigslist being sold by “Mrs. Jepsen”. Her husband had passed away and their adult kids weren’t interested in his guitars, so she was selling them… A little more practice and I’ll get the finer points of the story down convincingly…

And bearing in mind our teeny, tiny New York City apartment doesn’t have much space for “stuff” to accumulate… Although, I think if I get more I can buy wall mounts to get them up off the floor so my wife won’t get too mad.

Guns!

Guns!

I am not a gun owner or gun enthusiast, and I’ve never shot a firearm (BB gun, yes, and my father seriously emphasized not pointing it anyone). I grew up in rural Oregon where guns abound, and at my high school lots of students kept guns in their vehicles for convenience shooting animals in the woods after school.

With all the controversy about guns, and especially the right wing folks wanting more and more guns, more guns in schools, everyone armed, etc. and how I'm appalled at how they treat teenagers who are speaking out after being shot at at their school in February.

I was thinking about how most of the right wing commentators have little right to speak, as they probably haven't been shot at.

And I realized I've been shot at twice, myself.  Maybe that does give me some qualification to open my mouth about the issue.

I went to a college that was a gun free zone, though as a new policy at that college, it wasn’t yet enforced very well, and I was shot at, twice (not hit either time). Both shooters were, in theory, responsible gun owners, military reservists, one a sergeant in the Air Force and the other a Marine. Yet both treated their guns like toys.

The first incident was the first day back our sophomore year. My buddy, the Air Force sergeant, brought a gun for the school year, intending to shoot small rodents around campus (not an uncommon sport there…)

We were hanging around, meeting up after our folks all dropped us off, and he took the gun out, waving it around to show it off. He pointed it at me. I told him not to, but he laughed and said it wasn’t loaded. I asked him again to point it away, then I got lucky.

Lucky that he lowered it just far enough between my thighs (and I was skinny then, had thigh gap) that his “see, it’s not loaded,” didn’t end up being the last words I ever heard. The look on his face, the shock, when he pulled the trigger on his “not loaded” gun, from the shot that came out of his own hand… All that came out of his mouth for the next few minutes, till our hearts stopped racing, was a combination of “oh fuck” and “I’m sorry.”

Much later that same year, me and him, tripping on LSD, were getting out of the concrete dormitory for a walk in the high desert scrub behind the campus, a popular spot for shooting and motor sports. But we didn’t go all that far out there. We heard laughing and then gunshots from a hill in the not too far distance. Bullets were hitting the ground around us.

We discussed it and decided that someone was shooting at us, and that it would behoove us to depart, back to campus.

Later, after the drugs had mostly worn off I was back in my room, and my roommate, a Marine reservist, returned. He said it was him and another gun enthusiast friend who’d been shooting at us. He explained they were bored, since Klamath Falls, Oregon has little youth entertainment, so they grabbed some of their guns to go out into the high desert scrub and disintegrate some lizards or other small animals.

Bored. Bored and armed. They happened to spot me and the other fellow and got it in mind to scare us, just for entertainment. Of course, they didn’t know about the LSD, so they kept shooting around us, unsure why we weren’t reacting with panic. They were afraid we might have been armed and angry so they didn’t want to let us know at the time who they were, hiding behind a low hill.

So, while I was shot at twice, neither time by anyone actually intending to hit me, both involved highly trained gun owners with a military background. But away from their military units with their discipline, structure, responsibility and accountability, both guys treated their deadly weapons as toys.

I don’t feel making schools a gun toting zone would increase safety. Sure, someone might, and there’s no guarantee of success, stop a malicious shooter, but just having guns around increases the odds of accidents and unintended shootings (“see, it’s not loaded…”).