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Paul Wesley

Certifiably Surly
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    2001
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Everything posted by Paul Wesley

  1. You're an awesome dad. Personally, I'd look at an 1990's American-made guitar. In my opinion, it was a pretty good era, and they're not perceived as "vintage," so the values aren't too crazy. You can find one in good shape in the $1200-1500 range, and there are a lot of options in there to find something that he loves cosmetically. Stay away from "noiseless" pickups. They suck. "Buy this once" - check "Be nice forever" - check If it doesn't work out, you should get your money back out of it. A few from a 10-minute Reverb search: Lipstick red for $1080: https://reverb.com/item/69542092-fender-american-standard-telecaster-1992-1993-lipstick-red Sunburst with rosewood neck, $1350 and accepting offers: https://reverb.com/item/77910288-1995-fender-american-standard-telecaster-with-rosewood-fretboard-3-color-sunburst Blonde, $1600 and accepting offers: https://reverb.com/item/78163624-fender-50th-anniversary-telecaster-1996-blonde edit to add: Understand that a 30-year old guitar is almost certainly going to have some minor scratches and dings. That's normal. If that feels disappointing to him, then he should get something new or nearly new.
  2. Girlfriend in a Coma
  3. Cinderella wrote some good songs and had a redeeming self-awareness that it was all schtick and grift. "Night Songs" is a decent record.
  4. Yeah, that's what the picture made me think of too.... waiting in a line to get in, then walking around and finding the table for the class you really needed, sitting there for four hours on a tile floor behind 6 other poor bastards waiting for someone to come drop it.
  5. Photo that TM photographer Wyatt McSpadden posted:
  6. Both sound great. The custom definitely sounds meatier and has more low mids. When they started, I thought it was just mic placement (closer to sound hole ---> more boom), but the difference was obvious as they passed them back and forth. I can imagine a lot of recordings where you'd prefer the standard's brightness/clarity.
  7. I agree with all the Willie and Pink Floyd nominees. All remarkable achievements, but for different reasons. Willie did it in a genre where pretty much no one was even thinking about a "concept" album, and he took simple themes (Phases) and narratives (Stranger) and - even with often bare-bones arrangements and instrumentation - turned those into far-reaching epics. Pink Floyd aimed higher in their themes and stories (it seems to me that they set out to make something epic), and also absolutely knocked them out of the stratosphere. I think DSOTM was on the billboard charts for 19 years (!!!!!). I was incredibly lucky that I happened to be in London a few years ago when the Who did "Tommy" at Royal Albert Hall. It was amazing, but that record drops off quite a bit in the back half - they even omitted a couple of of those songs when doing the record in its "entirety" - so that one can't be considered to be on the same level, IMO. It would be even harder to pick a "worst" concept album, because 99% of them are shit. But if you put a gun to my head, I'd pick a guy who grifted evangelical Christians for two decades, making straight trash with zero artistic merit. Then it got worse. He tried to grift a whole new audience with shit that had even less artistic merit. Nothing fails more spectacularly than trying to be outrageous, but just being fucking stupid.
  8. Let's do this.
  9. Was going to bump the thread to post this one, but I saw you beat me to it.
  10. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. Traditional folk music wasn't "new." And the banjo was an African instrument, not a European one.
  11. * I'm aware that the "new" genre that Elvis brought to Americans was a straight-up ripoff of black music. You could write a pretty persuasive thesis statement that every *new* American genre of music since the Civil War followed exactly that same pattern.
  12. Beatles played to an America where 28% more households had a TV. But the Beatles' audience was only 22% bigger than Elvis'. And that doesn't even account for the fact that the Beatles' *potential* audience was WAY bigger - by maybe 20 million people, AND thanks to the post-war baby boom, they had a much bigger % of that bigger audience who were teens. TV viewership just seemed like an easy and fair metric for "popular." If the question is "most influential," I agree it's the Beatles. If we wanted to compare their number of #1 hits, Elvis is going to do very poorly. Consider that he was drafted and joined the army a mere 2 years post Ed Sullivan, and then his manager sent him off to Hollywood for a decade of schlock and cringe. The 2018 documentary "Elvis the Searcher" on HBO spent a lot of time on this, and I think that's the lens I've always seen him through: he was gorgeous, he had an A+ voice, he was charismatic, he brought a new genre to Americans in a way that a single person has never done before or since. He had the most widely recognized name on the planet for a time... and then he just sort of pissed it away, he missed out on the musical explosion of the 60's, and he returned as a fat drug addict in a sequined jumpsuit, and since America loves nothing more than a profound fall from a really high place, he was the punchline of a million jokes from that day forward.
  13. Yeah, that’s fair. But also, how many 15-year old girls - who are arguably the peak demographic of pop culture - were alive for Elvis compared to the Beatles? Beatles came along right at the moment that the huge bump in population (boomers) were adolescents, so the wave they surfed was much bigger. You could take that as an argument for either artist… I’m just saying that the world changed an awful lot in the decade between.
  14. Here’s a data point: viewers of their appearance on Ed Sullivan: 1956 Elvis 72% of US homes had a TV 60 million viewers —- 1964 Beatles 92% of US homes had a TV 73 million viewers Does not control for total population, but just eyeballing those numbers… It’s Elvis Again, that’s just one data point, but that’s a pretty fair apples to apples, I think. We’re also looking at different eras… the world changed a LOT from peak Elvis to peak Beatles to peak Michael (who I would say peaked with MTV airing “Thriller” every hour).
  15. Funny, I was going to say either Elvis or the Beatles. They introduced an entirely new genre (at least for whitey), and they did it at a time when the country (and world) all consumed popular culture at exactly the same moment. For a long time, the most recognized words on the planet were (allegedly) Elvis, Jesus, and Coca-Cola.
  16. My wife just had her Spotify station playing and this song came on. Right from the beginning, I was like, "Wait, did he just say fentanyl?" Yes, he did. "He bet I couldn't take them all, And if I did and didn't die, He'd teach me how to fall, 'cause he can't teach me how to fly."
  17. This. I mean, MJ is the GOAT, and he should get all the accolades. That said, he did NOT win a championship in roughly 66% of his NBA seasons. The 95 Rockets were one of the hottest playoff teams in history. They played the four teams with the four best records in the league, were on the road all four times, and left NO doubt in each series who the better team was. Olajuwon bettered Malone, embarrassed Robinson, edged a young Shaq (whose supporting cast just wilted vs Horry/Cassel/Drexler/Smith). Those Rockets swept the Magic team that had just beaten Michael and the Bulls. “But Jordan wasn’t in shape in 1995.” Horse shit. He was a pro athlete in the prime of his career. His other career? Pro athlete. How many months was it going to take to get into such unbelievable shape that Hakeem was no longer going to be guarded by Bill Fucking Wennington and Will Fucking Perdue? How many months until BJ Armstrong would have outplayed hot-shooting Kenny Smith and Sam Cassel, or until Harper would have outplayed the younger, more athletic (and also red-hot) Robert Horry? The 1995 Bulls weren’t winning shit.
  18. So I’m genuinely curious how a story like this is reported by Daily Beast on a Friday, and then it just disappears. If the bigger media outlets reported it, I didn’t see it. (Of course, I understand that Fox isn’t going to tell their viewers) Why does that happen? I just missed the stories from other outlets? The whole thing was bullshit? Daily Beast has a leaker that they trust, but no other organizations can confirm it? Seems like someone would run a “daily beast is reporting that…” story.
  19. Arkansas and Nebraska. OU obviously. I mean, you had the Iowa State offensive lineman this year saying, "Since I've been here, it's just Iowa and Texas (as Iowa State's main rivals)" I cannot imagine Yormark and his K State cohorts getting more fired up for a game than the one vs Texas. It ain't just in-state schools. Fans all across the shithole flyover states hate us. Give us some fucking credit, man.
  20. Possibly the bravest “truth to power” since a Chinese man faced down a column of advancing tanks. RIP
  21. I think maybe when you pick a band instrument in 6th grade, the worse your decision, the more likely you'll own a Les Paul at some point. Very impressive on the Michigan scholarship, jimmyjazz.
  22. There used to be this super cool store on 35th Street called Radio Ranch. They had a lot of old scientific artifacts like chemistry lab equipment from the 50's, a super old x-ray machine with giant knobs, etc. Anyway, they had a beat-up old horn there that I bought for like $50. Turned out it was a marching mellophone, which I guess is a straightened-out French horn. It was very hard to play... much harder than a trumpet, I think. I sounded horrid. I have had other equally unsuccessful "pretty sure I can play this instrument" adventures.
  23. Trombone or French horn? Those seem like the two hardest to nail a pitch.
  24. Side bets on what band instrument Celery played? I played alto sax. Hard to get less cool than that. The fucking oboe section was kicking my backpack down the hall.
  25. Me: Data from lobbyists should be viewed with some skepticism. Criminals should be prosecuted. Slorch: “Fairy tales with massive plot holes!!!!”
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