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2005-10-14 - 11:44 p.m.

Tuned

Today, I phoned a piano tuner. Call me animal.

Yeah, maybe you phoned your ketamine contact or your high-class hooker agency, but I called a frickin' tuner of pianos - and left a message. Get hip to my hellride oblivion trip, mutha.

Getting a piano tuner in. What a great and rare treat. Like phoning a chimneysweep. Or buying shoe polish.

Infused with the spirit of getting long-untuned musical instruments in my home to perform properly, I then took my electric guitar into town, to get it 'set up' at Andy's. This is one of the longest-standing It Will Never Be Done tasks in my locker. In fact I've been back from town for a couple of hours and I still can't quite believe my neglected Fender Jaguar Japanese 80's reissue is now awaiting attention in a Denmark Street basement, and isn't gathering dust in my attic, still traumatised from my last pork-fisted attempt to coax some vague approximation of Love's '7&7 is' from its harrowed fretboard.

Part of what put me off taking the guitar in for so long was the thought of schlepping it around on the bus and tube. I hadn't considered the upside, which is that I was briefly A Man Carrying a Guitar Through Town. This confers a modicum of hipness. I could see people glancing at me, attempting to determine if I was in a band. Well, they probably assumed I was in a band. They wondered if I was in a well-known band. What they didn't know is that not only am I not in a well-known band, I'm not in an unknown band. Or any band. Except the imaginary band that all men in their mid-30's with an attic full of underacheivement and dusty musical hardware are in. The Get Back Band. Which is short for The Get Back to Work You Have No Musical Ability, Charisma or Chance of Success Either Now or In the Future or Even Fifteen Years Ago When You Were Still At Least of an Age Commensurate With Your Lamentable Rock and Roll Dreams Band. The tour passes are a right fucker.

The other reason I'd been putting off taking my guitar in is that I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT GUITARS. Really. I know about guitars what some aftershave knows about Peru. I knew the guy would ask me about the bridge and the pick-ups and the, oh, 'strings' or whatever, and I'd have to admit I was utterly clueless. Which is what happened. It's emabarrassing, not because my guitar is crap, but because it's quite good. It's like someone with no knowledge of cars turning up at the local garage asking for a tune-up for his Porsche Cabriolet, er, V8, uh, oh all, right, I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT CARS EITHER.


Bumride update: Amazon have now basically acknowledged that if I keep sending 'Orgasm' back to them, they'll keep sending it back to me. So they've given me a refund instead. Spoilsports. I was looking forward to seeing how long we could prolong our dance of incompetence. Still, I've just ordered a dvd, phone and a couple of cds from them, so I look forward to receiving a spanner, ostrich and bunch of twigs within the week.


How am I driving?
5 pennyworths so far

Profilage - Previosity - Nextitude



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