Archive for December 2006

I just experienced my first California earthquake.  Scared the living shit outta me.  It sounded like a big explosion from the back of the house, I didn’t know what the fuck was goin’ on!  I thought the water heater had exploded, or, like, a giant meteor had smashed down in the backyard.  But it was none of those things, just a little quake and everything seems to be okay.

A few years ago I blogged about an earthquake I felt in Chicago.  The one tonight one was scarier though.  It was just a jolt, but a pretty strong jolt compared to the Chicago one, which I only noticed because the floor-lamp was trembling.

Herschel got me the nicest early Christmas present!  A new (old) amp.  I love it.  It’s a ~1975 silverface Princeton Reverb, modded up somewhat… it’s got a 12" speaker instead of 10", and they got rid of the vibrato tube, so the speed and intensity knobs now control presence and master volume instead.  It sounds sooo tasty with my 335… all I have to do is turn every single knob up to 10 except the last one, master volume.  I plug in and start to play and the thing just jams, like it wants to jump up and hug me!  I think it makes you play a lot better when the amp isn’t just sitting there staring at you, looking bored.  My old amp (which I still have) is like that, just too much amp for me I guess.  Too loud and too many knobs, I can never get the same sound twice.  The Princeton gives me just 2 or 3 great sounds that are super easy for me to find… you got the clean sound, the reverbed one, the chimey one with presence turned up, the slightly dirty overdriven one.  Also it’s about 3/4 or 4/5 the size of the Hotrod, so it’s a whole lot lighter and easier for me to carry.

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I guess I’m more or less done fiddling with my pictures from the Espers tour.  The good ones are up on my Flickr… you can view them in a set or as a slideshow, though you won’t see the titles & notes if you do that.

Kick ass, I made Wikipedia!!  I swear I didn’t do that myself…

I got back to California late Monday night… had a great time touring Europe with Espers, but ohhhh it’s so good to be back home again!!  I never got much sleep on the road so I’m trying to make up for it now, but I’m totally hammered with jetlag and can only sleep 4 or 5 hours at a stretch.  Seems a lot worse on this side than it was going over to Europe… I don’t think it’s supposed to work that way but whatever!

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Opening for Espers
At Rotown
Nieuwe Binnenweg 17-19, 3014 GB Rotterdam, Netherlands
P: 010 - 436 26 69

Opening for Espers
At Ekko
Bemuurde Weerd WZ 3, Utrecht NL 3513 BH, Netherlands
P: 030 - 2317457 / F: 030 - 2310402

Opening for Bardo Pond and Espers
At Festsaal Kreuzberg
Skalitzer St. 130, Berlin DE 10119, Germany
P: 030 / 61656003

Our soundman was Dave Doughman from Swearing at Motorists. That was cool.