– Your time and attention are valuable and rare, only share them with corporate interests on rare and valuable occasions.

– Regular intake of news is bad for your mind, your body, and your spirit. Consume just enough to be an informed citizen but no more.

– Prefer physical experiences to digital facsimiles or fantasies. Engage all five senses. Move. You will remember more, feel more, live better, and perceive time at a slower pace.

– Use digital media for consumption and publication but prefer physical media for creative work. Physical items will last longer and will not fall victim to changes in formats or media or the whims of cloud providers.

– Spend some time every day reconnecting with the previous days thoughts and feelings and contemplating the day ahead but spend most of your time in the present moment as much as you are able.

– Be aware of the influence of capitalism on your activities, especially those activities that matter most to you. Monetization is what they used to call “selling out”.

– Prefer food that is green, fresh, and unprocessed but a pizza now and then is good for the soul.

– Consider that you are a part of the animal kingdom and that the other animals are your actual relatives. Let that reality inform how you treat them.

– Stay out of internet flame wars. Fighting with strangers makes you feel good in the short term and feel bad in the long term. Fighting with family and friends just feels bad all around.

– Be offline by default, online with intention.  Don’t keep your phone on your person all the time.  Mute most notifications.  Use it only when you really need to.

– Go outside, especially when you don’t think you feel like it.

– Your actions have far more power to change your thoughts than your thoughts do to change your actions. Decide what you wish to change about how you think or feel, start acting as if you think or feel that way, and you soon will.

– Avoid multi-tasking. First do one thing, then do another thing, the total time you spend will be less than if you tried to do them at the same time.

– Make time to actively and intentionally listen to music. Don’t relegate it to a background soundtrack all the time. Sit down, stop doing other stuff, really listen. It’ll help.

– Try new things. Go to new places. Meet new people.  Eat new foods. Listen to new music. Read new authors.

– Read books and long-form essays and articles regularly, tweets/feeds/listicles/news infrequently (if at all).

– When you spend money with a business, don’t give them any further rights beyond the current transaction. Don’t sign up for marketing emails or grant them permissions to monetize their relationship with you. You already gave them your money, don’t give them your future time as well.

– If the gas station has pumps that play ads at you, go to a different gas station, unless there is a mute button.

– When you do work with digital technologies, prefer open-source, non-proprietary, and community based to the corporate alternative.

– Be patient with other people. Be kind to them. Apologize when you step out of line. Hope for the same in return but if you don’t get it, do it anyway.

– And as Steve McQueen once said: Attack life, it’s going to kill you anyhow.

The Nuclear Gopher recording studio started life in the basement at my parent’s house where I spent most of my formative years. We moved into the house when I was 7 and I lived there until I was 19. One particular room in the basement was always “the music room” and contained a drum kit and various instruments that my siblings and I used extensively to learn to play instruments and make and record music. It was, frankly, a great way to grow up.

We started making music in the basement almost immediately after the family moved in. By the time Rhett and I finally purchased a four-track to improve our recordings we had already made the first four Lavone albums on stereo equipment and tape recorders. When we bought the four-track, we decided to call it a Studio and chose the name Nuclear Gopher Original Electronic Stereophonic Recording Studio, a bit of a mouthful but it was still the same old basement room, just with more instruments, microphones, and equipment. That christening was in 1989, almost a decade into our time there and the good old Nuclear Gopher continued to be the place we recorded our albums through the end of The Lavone era, around 2003, giving NG a lifespan of over 20 years. It went through a couple of names. When we decided to start a label we called it Nuclear Gopher Cheese Factory, which was great, but we went online in 1994 and people thought we dealt in dairy products so after a while NGCF became Nuclear Gopher Productions, NGP. But through the name changes and all the rest, it was still Nuclear Gopher. Sadly, all good things come to an end and once all the kids were out living adult lives, the room was reclaimed by parental units for more mundane usages like exercise bikes and storage.

Honestly… It wasn’t a great space. The floor was some sort of 1970’s vinyl tile, the walls were cinder block painted white, the only furniture was an ancient gold couch, but magic happened there and it’s embedded deep in the heart of a lot of my friends.

My adult life in general didn’t present me with obvious ways to record music in my home. I always wanted to but I was a 20-something who was raising a kid and I lived in a series of apartments where setting up a drum kit would have been cause for eviction. This didn’t stop me from trying to make music. I would write on a guitar and set up time to meet up with Rhett and we would go into the Gopher and track new songs, but it was a far cry from the first part of my life when I could make music almost any time I wanted to. I’ve never been great at combining organizational skills and creativity so this time period wasn’t a particularly productive one in terms of musical output. The Lavone went from 1-2 albums of new material per year to a six year hiatus and one final album that we put together in a final spurt of creativity before everything came to a screeching halt with my departure from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the end of the Nuclear Gopher record label and then Rhett’s unbelievably shocking and tragic death.

In 2003, just prior to the big changes, Rhett and I were working on a new Lavone album, untitled, and had two or three songs tracked. I decided one day to setup a little recording rig in my apartment. Not a studio, per se, but a simple recording system with an iMac, a copy of ProTools Free, and a few basics like microphones and a guitar. I didn’t really know what I was doing but I made a little album called The Message Will Be Kept that I didn’t really share with many people. It was more of an experiment than anything.

It was successful enough that I decided to keep working with those simple tools but switched to Garageband and moved down to the unheated garage in my apartment complex where I could at least have a little privacy. Drums were out of the question but I couldn’t play them anyhow so loops would have to do. With that arrangement I made my third solo album, The Context, and the results were pretty good. I released it under a new label, Tasty Rerun Productions, and I started pondering how I could get things a little better while still stuck in an apartment.

I tried a few things. Amp modelers were pretty new technology but they allowed me to record loud guitar parts without playing loud guitars. I picked up an electronic drum kit that let me drum without getting the landlord pissed (although I did manage to get one nasty-gram about a neighbor complaining about the kick drum making pounding noises through their ceiling… oops). With that modest arrangement and a weekend spent at a vacation rental in Duluth to record some of the songs, I managed to finish an album called Songs of Bo Redoubt, which was my first really ambitious solo album. I finished Bo Redoubt in 2006, the same year that Esther and I got married and bought our first house in Apple Valley. We moved into the house in September and by the following February, 2007, I finally had a proper basement studio setup that was at least something like the old Nuclear Gopher. There was a proper drum kit, all my Bo Redoubt gear, a computer setup with a 16-track audio interface, it was really thrilling. With all that power I managed another album in the space of a month with a band I formed called Trumpet Marine. The album was called Louder, Longer, Lobster and I was really happy with the result. Tasty Rerun had three albums in the catalog and for the first time in my adult life I had my very own recording studio.  I called it The Nuclear Gopher Too.

I would love to say that joy and rapture followed but the truth is that the subsequent years were challenging for a number of reasons, none of which really had anything to do with music. There were family struggles and work struggles and Trumpet Marine didn’t turn out how I had hoped, lasting all of two years with only that one album and a handful of gigs played to show for the effort. I made another record in 2008, The Legendary Adventures of Prosciutto Pig, but it wasn’t particularly good and I was disheartened on many fronts.

This was the start of a period in which I wrote some, recorded some, and tried hard to find a groove but failed repeatedly. Music just seemed too hard to do, to be honest. The hours I would spend in the studio would have flashes of the old magic but mostly it was lonely and I was sad. I cobbled together a set of songs I had been working on (and a couple of retreads from earlier albums) into an album called A Man Could Get Tired and Other Songs and released it and in 2012 I recorded a strong album called Blood and Scotch/Valentine, I did a set of mostly Lavone covers called lavoneloveletter but I just couldn’t get the sort of traction I longed for. It felt a lot like it was pointless.

In 2014 I took a Sunday and setup a micro-studio in the coal room in the basement, tracked half a dozen songs in a single session, and put out an EP called The Coal Room around Christmas time and that, as they say, was that. I had ideas, lots of them. The Coal Room was going to be one of a quartet of EP releases, but the other ones never got off the ground. I started working on different albums with different titles, The Universal Thump and The Wolf Is At The Door, but I just couldn’t manage a coherent piece of work. I have so so so many sessions and songs from that time period sitting on hard drives and backup discs, but none of it ever seemed to feel like I was doing what I wanted to be doing. It was really frustrating.

In order to be doing something with music, I joined a band called Robots From the Future. They had me playing keys, an instrument I could barely play, but I thought it might shake things up a bit and as a bonus I would get better at keys. Plus, it had been a few years since Trumpet Marine and I missed collaborating with other people. But, as it turned out, Robots wasn’t entirely right for me. I struggled with keyboards, I liked the songs but the style of music was such that I couldn’t see any option for contributing creatively with any of my own material, and I left the band after a while. I shortly joined a new band formed by one of the members of Robots and his wife. It was called Fistful of Datas and it was a 90’s cover band. Playing covers every once and a while was fun but playing in a dedicated cover band was something I had sworn I would never do. I shocked myself by saying yes and I had a blast for a couple years. I initially played bass, which is probably my favorite instrument to play, but when the song called for it I also jumped over to keys. I truly hated some of the songs we played but I truly loved some too and it was a great group of people. Still, I had to step away from the band for a couple of months, they had a few gigs and needed a bass player, they brought in the bass player from Robots, and when I returned I was stuck as full-time keyboards again, which was about as much fun for me as a root canal, especially when we played songs I didn’t like. I stuck it out for a bit but then I left. I had enjoyed it for a bit but when I started to dread the thought of playing another show or practicing another song by the Spice Girls, I knew I had to leave and I did.

I told myself that I would now be able to start getting serious about recording my own material again but a funny thing happened. I bought a different house, moved up to a former-farm property in Hugo with a bunch of trees and land and something I never dreamed was possible: out buildings.

I began to dream of a dedicated recording studio, outside of my house but on my property, where I could go late at night and feel completely free to do whatever I wanted to do. Maybe that was what I needed to get my creative life back into a groove. There was only one teensy problem: none of the buildings was suitable in the state I found it. There are four buildings on my property that are not my house. There is a small garage with a root cellar in the back which is detached from the house at the bottom of the hill, a very large barn that has been partially finished inside with several garage stalls on the lower level and a big open second level, there is a large shed (or small building) with around 400 square feet of space that we call the Cedar Cabin, and lastly there is a heated and insulated large garage with four and a half stalls. Where should this studio go?

The obvious choice was the barn. The barn has the most space, it’s close to the house, and there isn’t really any other obvious use for it. The problems with the barn were that it was home to a few barn cats, when they weren’t there it was a target for nocturnal raccoon raids, and it was neither insulated nor heated nor cooled. It seemed like using the barn for a studio would be a massive undertaking.

The big heated garage building was a non-starter. For one thing, it wasn’t sell suited in terms of layout, for another I really wanted to use it as a garage so I could tinker with old cars, do maintenance on the mowers and tractors and the like, and (of course) work on our cars.

The little garage with the root cellar was likewise a non-starter. Too small, not heated, and much more useful for storing gardening equipment or roots than for making music.

This left the Cedar Cabin. It was small enough to heat and cool for not too much money, big enough for a studio, and seemed like a good possibility. There was just one snag… It is on low lying land, things get very wet around here, and it doesn’t have a cement slab floor, it basically has paving stones on dirt. No matter how I sliced it, I couldn’t imagine storing computers or guitars or anything else that would be sensitive to climate in such a building. I started planning to use the space anyhow and came up with quite a few elaborate plans. I was going to build a solar heat box to provide a heating boost in the winter without cost, I bought a small standalone kitchenette, and I brainstormed and brainstormed how to deal with the floor. I came up with a plan that involved pulling up most of the “floor”, installing drain tile around the perimeter, and building a subfloor over the top of it with a moisture barrier and foam panels and sand and the like. It was going to a big project but I thought I could see how to do it if I tried. In 2018, when Scott Homan and his crew came out to the property to film a live video shoot for the movie Witness Underground, we converted the space into a performance space/studio and did, in fact, have pretty good success. Still, I couldn’t use the building year round.

And it wasn’t as if I didn’t have a studio, I still had a basement setup like I had back in Apple Valley.  I guess you could call it Nuclear Gopher 2 1/2?  I could still make music, but I felt really uncomfortable working in the space because it is located directly below the bedroom where Esther and four dogs might have opinions about me making noise at 2:00 AM or even 6:00 AM for that matter.

It felt less like having a studio and more like having a room to store all my gear.  My musical productivity improved exactly 0%.

I joined a band called Awkward Bodies, and we got a practice space in Minneapolis. With that space I started to think that maybe I just didn’t need the studio I kept planning. If I really wanted to, I could go to the Minneapolis space, bring gear, and record. That didn’t really work though because it’s a building filled with bands practicing. There is usually a lot of bleed of sound from the others. Besides, it is a 30-45 minute drive to Minneapolis from Hugo. Not conducive to impromptu or routine studio work.

And that’s how things stood for the last few years.  I wasn’t making much music on my own but I was having a good time with Awkward Bodies and playing bass and cover songs were few and far between (we played a Flaming Lips set at a bowling alley once but that was just cool). I started to just consider that maybe I would never get the studio setup I had been dreaming of. Which is dumb. I have buildings for god’s sake. I have recording gear. Clearly there must be an option.

This week I finally figured it out. The barn had been the right call all along, I just hadn’t seen it.

The penny dropped for me three days ago or so. I was writing about this and I suddenly asked myself what Rhett and I would have done back in The Lavone times. The answer was blindingly obvious. We never made plans, we didn’t wait for a good option, we just started working with what we had available and we would gradually upgrade and improve things until they got better. When we first wanted to make music, we didn’t have a drum kit so we built one out of ice cream buckets and cardboard. We didn’t have a guitar so we enlisted a friend who had one to join our band. Our earliest recordings were done by putting a tape recorder with a built in microphone in the middle of the room and pressing record. We replaced that with a cheap stereo and when we need a microphone we accidentally discovered that a pair of headphones could be plugged into the microphone input and you could sing into one of the ear pieces and it worked as a microphone. We iterated. We were agile. We did the best we could with what we had and we never let circumstances stop us from making our albums. It is the same DIY “just do it” ethic that made the Witness Underground shoot a success, the same ethic that made all of Nuclear Gopher happen, it’s what I do for a my day job for god’s sake; leading agile, iterative, software engineering teams. My entire experience in life in creating anything ever has been based around the idea that you start doing the work first, you figure out how to do it better by accumulating experience second. If I would just take the agile DIY approach to the recording studio instead of indulging in analysis paralysis and daydreaming, I would likely be in a much better position to get where I want to go.

This train of thought was really triggered by a couple of things. First, I got COVID and I had good reason to believe that I was going to struggle very badly with it. I have a long medical history of severe lung related illnesses and so I have been a virtual hermit for the last two years. As soon as I started returning to “normal life” and going to an office a few times a week I got COVID almost immediately. But, because I avoided it for two years and got all my shots, because I take daily lung meds, and because I was eligible for the new anti-COVID pill, I learned that COVID is something I can handle. After the last two years, surviving COVID felt like a new lease on life. The second thing is photography. A few months back I returned to film photography, something I haven’t done in close to 20 years but also something I greatly enjoyed back in my teens. I decided to learn to develop my own film and then I decided to setup a home dark room. At first I set it up in the bathroom but it was too cramped and unpleasant. My results were poor. But, I figured out a way to black out a few windows in the basement and make a workable darkroom space. After a few sessions down there I started to evolve the setup based on experience, moving things around, figuring things out in response to actually trying to work in the space. The post-COVID high and the fun of solving the problems of learning film photography, developing and darkroom process really made me feel inspired to finally make writing and recording music a part of my regular routine again, not just something I manage to pull of when the stars align.

So, Ryan, the obvious question is: which building is good enough, right now, for you to start working in? The answer was clear. The barn. Right now the ground around the Cedar Cabin is wet, the interior is too damp to consider working there, whereas the barn just needed to be cleaned out and might be too hot or muggy, but if so I have a portable air conditioner and a portable dehumidifier so, it seemed feasible.

I decided to just go out there, bring my work laptop, and spend the day working in the barn off of a hotspot and getting a feel for the place. I cleaned while I was on calls and meetings, which is something I do in the house too, so, no big deal. I can easily attend meetings while tidying up at the same time. It was a bit warm, as I suspected, but the lower level was quite cool so I decided I could just put a fan next to the stairway, pull the cool air up, and survive. It was quite comfortable. There was raccoon shit and some old straw and blankets that the barn cats used to use (they are long gone, I wish them well, haven’t seen a barn cat in years) but on the first day I was able to make half of the upper level of the barn into a usable space.

I was so excited I could barely believe it. I resolved to keep momentum and to bring some musical equipment out the next day. The following morning I grabbed my old cassette four-track, an acoustic guitar, a couple microphones and some cables. I started toying around and before I knew it I had an inkling for a song. An hour or so later and I had a new song, with lyrics, and a tape demo laid down. And it was a good one. And it came to me easily. Songwriting has become a struggle because it’s so hard to get into the right head space for it but when I was finally in a space of my own with the most basic tools of the trade at my disposal, there was a song just waiting.

That was Thursday May 12, 2022, the birthday for my new studio which I’m pretty tempted to call the Nuclear Gopher Hay Factory as a callback to the old Cheese Factory days. I have upgrades and improvements to make, but it’s a usable space as of now. I finally have this studio thing figured out. Hell. Yes.

I’ve been planning and planning to record my new solo album for seemingly the last 7 years.  I’ve written tons of songs and laid down demos and even released a few of them as singles with videos and everything but, and this is a big but, I haven’t recorded anything that I was certain was for a new album.  I have basically been in a sort of creative limbo.

A few weeks back I thought of a way to finally get the ball rolling.  I went through a bunch of old voice memos, iPad demos, recording sessions, and assorted odds and ends from the last few years and found out that I had dozens of potential tracks for an album if I could just get myself to knuckle down and do the work.  Today I finally started doing the work by tracking the basic tracks for the first song I’ve chosen to work on.  I’ve decided on the sound and artistic direction for the album and given myself a few parameters for recording it that ought to make it an interesting challenge.

Basically, I’ve decided to do something I haven’t done since the 1990’s and track the album on tape.  I will bring the tracks into the computer for mixing and mastering, but I’m doing the actual recording on a 4-track reel-to-reel deck so the album will be what is known as ADD (Analog recording, Digital mixing, Digital mastering).  Why bother with that?  I suppose it’s because arbitrary constraints can make the recording process more interesting and I’m hopeful that the resulting album will have a more cohesive sound if all the instruments are recorded on the same reel-to-reel tape system.  I could use a tape emulation plugin or something but that would violate one of the other constraints I’ve decided on: no digital effects trickery.  I won’t be comping or looping or faking anything, no recording to a grid, I’m just going to play the instruments and sing and if I screw up I will stop and rewind and do the take again until I get it right, just like in the pre-digital days.  Any guitar or vocal effects I want will be part of the original takes, no post-processing plugins.

It has been a very long time since I recorded this way.  It’s extremely primitive, but that’s the idea.  I want the record to represent actual performances as they occurred at a specific point in time.  I don’t want to be second-guessing and tweaking and doubting myself or leaving room to defer decisions about tones or sounds until some future point.  Do the thing, record the thing, move on, that’s the plan.  If there are imperfections, so be it, but the result will be real and it will be physically printed on tape.

Indecision can be one of the enemies of creativity.  Creativity involves inspiration and planning and disciplined execution and it can, of course, involve meticulous editing and revision and alteration to get things exactly perfect, but when recording as a solo artist (as opposed to with a band) it can be fairly easy to wind up with a sterile sounding result because every track is recorded in isolation.  You don’t have the live dynamics happening between yourself and another person that brings humanity into the process.  Removing some of the crutches that you lean on to get a “polished” result is a possible way to bring back a little of the natural feeling to the recordings.  I know that the albums I did in the old days on 4-track cassette were harder to make because of the inherent limitations of the technology and they sounded less refined but more alive.

I’m a much better musician now than I was 25 years ago and I know a lot more about recording.  I also have much higher fidelity equipment so I don’t anticipate this sounding like those old 4-track records, but neither will it sound quite like the pure digital stuff I’ve been tracking since the early aughts.  If I get a result that is coherent and warm and makes the record I hear in my head, the extra work will be worth it.

I expect that tomorrow I will be completing the tracking for the first song and planning the next session.  I think I can finish tracking the record in a couple of weeks once I get going since all the songs are already written.

Today I worked on a new recording of my song “Ostrich” which I released as a video single a few years back.  I laid down vocals, guitars, and bass.  Drums, piano, and one more guitar part will happen tomorrow.  My plan is to keep each song to no more than eight total tracks and a “Let It Be… Naked” level of production complexity so I won’t be going crazy with lots of over-dubs.  The session today took about three hours.  Up next will likely be “Brenda Loves James”, “Flying Through the Frames”, “Mostly Water”, “Never Replace You”, “Monkey Mind”, “Basement Heroes”, “What A Day”, “Because”, “Complicated Animals”, “The Wolf Is At The Door” or any one of a few more that I have written down on a list but can’t recall off the top of my head.  Like I said, I have a pretty big backlog of songs.  The album will wind up weighing in at a dozen songs minimum, probably fourteen if all goes according to plan.  Just because I have a list doesn’t mean I won’t change it up a bit.

I think this is gonna be a good one.  I am feeling the mojo.  🙂

The title should be fairly self-explanatory.  Here is a run down of every guitar I have ever owned, to the best of my knowledge.  I still own some of these.  The pictures are not my actual guitars unless noted.

This was how it began.  The year was 1986.  Rhett and I had just decided to form The Lavone.  I need a guitar.  With $160 in hand I went to the Burnsville Center, walked into Schmitt Music, and walked out with the COOLEST FUCKING GUITAR THEY HAD.  At least, that’s how I saw it.  I was 12.  I liked Lamborghinis.  This was obviously the coolest guitar.  I mean, just look at it.  It didn’t sound good or play good but neither did I.  For the first three years of The Lavone, it didn’t matter, this was my axe.  Then, in 1989, I got The Black Ric.

Knut-Koupee music in Burnsville was the place, and this black-on-black 12-string Rickenbacker called my name from somewhere out in space.  I had never seen a guitar like it and after three years with the Katana I was ready for an upgrade.  The Ric was semi-hollow, it was $600, and I bussed tables and washed dishes for six months to buy it.  Worth it.  This became my main machine and before long I sold the Katana, but not before acquiring a couple more guitars to go with the Ric.

My friend Sue in photography class told me she had a guitar I could buy for $40 and without even seeing it I agreed.  The guitar in question was a Teisco Del-Rey E-110, a cheaply made, thin bodied, all around low rent guitar with microphonic sounding pickups.  It was the anti-Ric and I LOVED it.  It just had charm.  Charisma.  It was light and you couldn’t take yourself too seriously when you were playing it.  I wrote and recorded several songs with this bad boy.  However, I had another even stranger guitar.  If you can even call it that…

This was the Casio DG-20 guitar synthesizer.  A guitar? A synth?  It was basically a synth with strings and frets.  The strings didn’t make sound, they were plastic, but they triggered the notes.  The Casio knew what notes to play because the frets were RUBBER.  That’s right, they sensed when you pressed down on them.  This low tech approach worked shockingly well and I played this thing on several Lavone tracks on two consecutive albums before passing it on to a schoolmate.

As it turns out, you can’t go forever as a band without acquiring a bass guitar and that brings us to…

I had no way of knowing it at the time, but the first bass guitar I ever bought was one rare beast, it was a Toyota!  You could be pardoned for doing a double take on this one because there are precious few Toyota musical instruments in the world.  Even the internet knows very little about these things other than that they were made sometime in the 60’s or 70’s.  I know it played and sounded great and I have no idea what became of it but damn I wish I had this thing back in my hands today.  What a cool bass that was…  It wasn’t the only cool bass I got around this time period.  The second was also quite the oddball.

OK, so, that looks like a Rickenbacker 4001 and it played like a 4001 and it sounded like a 4001 but it was in fact a clone made by Ibanez (note the IBZ on the headstock).  Ric sued the crap out of Ibanez for these clones and they stopped making them but that didn’t stop me from buying one and playing the hell out of it (pictured here, me with Purple Triangles at a grad party in 1992).  This bass may still be in the possession of my younger brother, I have no way of knowing.  I hope it is.  Side note: the guitar being played by Sy on the right hand side of the pic here is my actual black-on-black Ric.

Eventually I got married and ran into financial difficulties and wound up selling the black Ric and using the money to buy a used car.  Sigh…  I still had another guitar, however, an acoustic.

You would think that for as many years as I owned this particular guitar that I could tell you what it was but I honestly can’t.  It was an Alvarez acoustic, it saw many many gigs and sessions and heavy usage and at some point I didn’t have it any more.  I honestly don’t know what model it was or when it left me, but here it is, being played by the lovely and talented Cindy Ivy at a show, my Alvarez acoustic.

Truth is, the mid and late 90’s were not great moments in guitar ownership for me.  There was this…

I don’t really know what I was thinking.  Of all the guitars I have ever owned, this felt the least like ME.  I guess I wanted to try the Strat thing at least once in my life?  I dunno.  I had it for a couple of years, never fell in love, sold it off.  During that time I also tried another Fender, this one a bass.

Around 1998 or so I acquired a 5-string Fender Jazz Bass V similar to the one pictured here.  I played it for a couple of years and then sold it.  I liked it, honestly.  Played nice and looked good enough. This was the bass I played at the very last gig that The Lavone ever played in 2000.

Around this time I ditched the red Strat for another more interesting guitar, a bit of a rarity actually…

Now this was a sweet guitar.  After years of playing the mystery Alvarez and the boring red thing, I once again owned a guitar that I was interested in playing.  The Harmony Rebel looked good, sounded good, and played good and I loved it.  Between this and the 5-string bass, I was pretty happy with my options, especially when I consider that I had one more guitar, purchased in Liverpool in 2000.

You can’t really see a lot of detail in the picture, but this 12-string Hondo acoustic is still in possession and is therefore the guitar I have owned the longest at this point, 22 years.  I bought this guitar at a pawn shop in Liverpool and this pic is me playing it at a hostel the day I bought it.  I later added a resonator cone to it and dubbed it the Hon-Dobro and I have since used it exclusively for those rare occasions when I want open-tuning 12-string slide guitar.  Rare, but still…

Around 2004 my life changed a lot and I decided I wanted to do a lot of recording on a tight budget.  I wanted a lot of guitar tones from one guitar so I bought this next one.

My Variax 500 has been with me now for about 16 years and it still works, which is a bit surprising considering what a strange piece of tech it is.  Easily the weirdest guitar since my Casio DG-20, the Variax is NOT a synthesizer but it’s not a traditional guitar either.  It’s a guitar without traditional pickups.  It only has piezoelectric pickups built into the bridge.  These capture the string vibrations and transmit them to an on-board modeling processor that process the string signals in real time.  It can switch between electric and acoustic sounds, alternate tunings, even emulate 12-strings, and it does it all with relatively high quality.  Not only that, it can model a Telecaster, Strat, Les Paul, Rickenbacker, Gibson 335, all sorts of other guitars.  It’s versatile as shit, albeit a little gimmicky.  Still, for versatility on a budget, it worked for me and it’s still down in the studio.  In fact, I also own a second, newer, one that combines the modeling stuff with single-coils.  It’s basically a Strat with modeling built in.  Neither guitar is “cool” but they are useful studio and stage tools.

The Variax was fine but I found myself in need of a bass guitar as well so, this time, I built one.  Sort of.

Shown here is what I lovingly refer to as The Pinup Bass.  It began life as a cheap knockoff of a Fender Jazz Bass built by some company called S101.  Made in Korea, maybe?  It was black with a white pick-guard and it sounded like crap.  But it was sub-$100 and I just wanted it for it’s body.  I gutted it, painted it white, got a brushed aluminum pick-guard for it, then I installed real Fender pots and wiring and control plate and some EMG Vintage Active pickups.  I also replaced the E tuner with a Hipshot drop-D bass extender so I can go into a drop-D tuning any time I want and than jump right back to standard.  As a final touch I put pinup girl decals on the body and headstock.  The resulting bass sounds great, plays great, it’s one of a kind and it’s not going to be mistaken for anything else if it’s stolen.

This wasn’t the only guitar that I stumbled across around 2007/2008.  I also bought a car, a 2007 Volkswagen Jetta, and it came with, of all things…

Despite being made by First Act, a guitar manufacturer that is targeted at kids and first time players of not particularly high quality, the VW Guitar is surprisingly good.  It has lovely pickups, great action, a built in battery-powered practice pre-amp so you can play it through your car stereo aux jack (no, really, it’s really cool), and it even looks good.  The VIN number of the car is engraved on a plate on the back, it has a matching gig bag, the guitar strap is made of seat-belt mesh, it’s really wild.  I no longer have the car but I still have the Garagemaster and I love the little thing.

The other guitar I picked up around this time was an acoustic.

After years of owning cheapo acoustics like the Alvarez and Hondo (and also I think there was a Yamaha 12-string in there for a bit but I can’t remember enough about it to find a pic) I finally decided to splurge a little and buy something a bit better sounding.  I went to The Podium (sadly, no longer in business) and I played every acoustic that was sub-$800, which I had decided was my ceiling.  For around $500 I got myself a Martin.  Yes, the construction of the neck, sides, and back, are all cheap compared to a proper Martin, but the top is solid sitka with classic Martin X bracing and it just sounds like a fucking Martin dreadnought.  Seriously could not believe it the first time I heard it and I still think it sounds amazing.  You know what?  When I bought it I was warned that the neck would bend, the sides would split, blah blah blah…  This thing has now served me as a daily driver for almost 15 years and it still plays like new, looks like new, and sounds like new.  Not bad for $500.  In fact, I just checked Reverb and found this same guitar selling for $640 even after all these years.  Apparently, these are now fairly rare and sought after.  Hmm.  I think I’ll keep mine.

The next guitar I added to my life was an unplanned event.  Let’s call it a temporary moment of insanity…

I really didn’t mean to buy this one but it was a one day special sale, it has P90s and a Bigsby, it’s SO SHINY, and it’s a semi-hollow.  I haven’t owned a semi since the Rebel.  I just couldn’t say no.  And I didn’t.  And I have no regrets.  I do, however, have other guitars.  Including my second stab at building one for myself, my beloved “Partscaster” Tele.

So here’s the deal with my “Telecaster”.  It began when I bought a guitar for $79 off of Woot.com.  Yes, you read that right, Woot.  The website that sells cheap shit by making it sound funny.  I expected the guitar to be an unplayable atrocity but as it was, it wasn’t half bad.  Wasn’t great either.  I threw a GFS tremolo on it and toyed around with it and then I was granted a gift, the remains of a real Telecaster.  Pickguard, controls and chrome, pickups, neck, bridge, everything but the body.  My buddy Chad Stanley had sent a Tele body off for repaint one day and never got it back.  The other parts were homeless.  So, I took the body from my $79 Woot guitar and the neck and electronics from his Fender and made my “Telecaster”.  Wootcaster?  Tell-nobody-caster?  I dunno, but I play it, it feels like a Tele, sounds like a Tele, it’s a Tele living on in some imitation Tele body.  Probably made of graham crackers or sawdust, but it seems to work.  Pretty too.

And let’s mention those other two guitars pictured here while we’re at it.

Sometimes you get absurdly lucky at a pawn shop and you find something selling for a price so low you seriously wonder if they made a typo or looked up the wrong instrument or something.  Such was the case with my 2006 Gibson Les Paul Studio.  I won’t say how cheap I got it for but let’s just say it was likely they thought it was an Epiphone.  Anyhow, I was stoked and I brought it home and I played it for a few years and then I got a crush on SG style guitars and I mostly stopped playing it.  It was not that there was anything wrong with the Les Paul, but like my previous experience with my red Strat, the classic guitar that had been played to death by half the guitarist population just didn’t excite me enough.  I wound up trading it to Chad Stanley even up for…

Is it worth as much as a Les Paul?  Probably not, but Chad had already given me the parts for my Tele, we’ve been friends for 1000 years, he really wanted the LP, and I really wanted the G400.  It was a good trade.  I think it needs a Bigsby though…  And maybe a re-paint.  One of these days…  Besides, it looked really good next to the bass I had just acquired…

I had started playing bass in this 90’s cover band called Fistful of Datas and one day The Pinup Bass developed an issue and I couldn’t play it for the upcoming show, which was that night.  I needed a bass for one gig.  Just one.  I stopped in to Guitar Center and bought the cheapest bass they had, the Epiphone EB-0.  One pickup, short-scale, sub-$200.  You know what?  I really really liked it.  A lot.  I liked the sound, the simplicity, the feel, it was shocking how much I liked that bass.  Enough so that I decided to sell it and upgrade to…

This is my current primary bass guitar.  The one I bought was used and relatively inexpensive but it came with black strings installed on it, which was a nice touch.  It’s a pretty fantastic bass, in my opinion.  I play it regularly in Awkward Bodies and I don’t (yet) see any reason to change that.

Having mostly settled on a daily driver bass and a stable of electric guitars, I decided that I wanted to get something special for the film premiere of Witness Underground last November, but what?

Over the summer, while preparing for the show, Esther and I took a roadtrip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where we happened to drive through a small town called Germfask.  On the side of the road was an instrument store and I pulled over and stopped in.  It was HEAVEN.  Guitar Man’s Ruff Cut Music was a guitar geek nirvana and Chip was it’s resident Buddha.  He had guitars there I couldn’t believe and I vowed to return to buy a special guitar for my show.  A few months later, I did.

When I returned to Chip’s shop with my buddy Michael, I spent the better part of an afternoon just playing everything, weighing the pros and cons, talking myself into and out of various purchases, but the J45 caught my eye within seconds of walking in the door and once I played it, no other guitar in the shop could beat it.  I fell in love.  The tone, the feel, it was the first acoustic I had ever played that I preferred to my Martin and it was drop dead gorgeous.  It came home with me and will be with me from now until I’m buried if I have anything to say about it.

And this takes me to my final guitar, one I’ve wanted all along.  Over the years I’ve had only two real Fenders.  That red Strat back in the 90’s and the purple Bass V.  My very first guitar was a Squier, which is a type of Fender, sure, and my Wootcaster is mostly actual Telecaster parts, but a proper legit Fender?  There has only ever been one that I really wanted.  Around the time I bought The Black Ric I was contemplating another guitar at Knut-Koupee, the Jazzmaster, and despite 35+ years of owning guitars it wasn’t until this winter that I finally snagged one.

Will I acquire more guitars?  Duh.  Of course I will.  Technically I have a couple more I didn’t mention here.  I have two that I’m building (one is a replica Rickenbacker 325, the other a replica Les Paul), I own an Alvarez baritone acoustic that slipped my mind, I have an old 1960’s Decca acoustic that is not in playable condition, parts of a couple others that I might restore or cobble together (particularly cool is the body to a 1960’s Zen-On Victoria ZES-1400, a truly unusual guitar).  It never ends, but this is a tour through all the primary guitars I’ve owned and loved and played and recorded with over the last 35 years.  I still own quite a few of these and it’ll take a lot of convincing to get me to part with them.

How many guitars does a guy need?  Just one more.

 

It is shortly after 8:00 AM on a Sunday morning and I have coffee brewing in the next room. Last night was the first snow fall of the year. We got maybe an inch, it is unlikely to stick around but driving home in it last night was a bit treacherous. Two days ago I had the experience of sitting in a large, beautiful, theater filled with friends, family, and strangers, and watching them watch a movie that is heavily based on my life and in which I feature prominently. The film is called Witness Underground and it was showing as part of the 22nd Annual Sound Unseen film festival. This was the Minneapolis premiere and a lot of people turned out for it.

I want to take a moment here to answer some of the most recurring questions about WU, tell some backstory of why Witness Underground exists, what motivated it, why I participated, and what it has been like for me. I’ve said some things online about it on social media platforms but haven’t written about it (or much of anything else, honestly) here on my blog so it’s high time I do something about that.

Here are some of the questions I have been repeatedly asked about Witness Underground since it hit the film festival circuit earlier this year and my answers.

Q. What is Witness Underground about?

WU is about something called Nuclear Gopher and the impact it had on the lives of the people involved with it. Nuclear Gopher began as a label that my brother Rhett and I used to distribute music we made as a band called The Lavone starting in the mid 1980’s. Over the years, Nuclear Gopher wound up the nucleus of a larger scene involving many bands, recordings, zero-budget movies, music festivals, and a website that united hundreds or thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses across the Midwest in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, the Dakotas, Illinois, and Missouri. Witness Underground tells the stories of myself, James Zimmerman, Cindy and Eric Elvendahl, and Chad Rhiger and our relationships to each other, the Watchtower Society (Jehovah’s Witnesses) and the Nuclear Gopher both during our time within the religion and heyday of NG and also after NG ceased to be and we exited the religion.

Q. What motivated the making of this film?

I did not make this movie, it was made by a director named Scott Homan. I did not meet Scott prior to the making of this movie but he had been aware of both myself and Nuclear Gopher. I am somewhat notorious within the local Jehovah’s Witness community for my many years of openly talking about my reasons for leaving the faith and for indirectly encouraging others to think critically for themselves about their religious beliefs. Scott is a former Jehovah’s Witness and filmmaker who wanted to tell his own story by telling the stories of others who have gone through similar experiences. He has made a series of short films on the topic featuring many other former Witnesses (the film series is called XJW Coming Out and it’s great). Witness Underground began when Scott connected with me online and asked me to tell my story.

That explains a little of Scott’s motivation, but it doesn’t really explain mine. I did not need to participate in this project, I left the Witnesses a long time ago and Nuclear Gopher had receded quite far into the rear-view mirror when Scott contacted me, but I wanted the story to be told and I had struggled for years with how to tell it. If somebody else wanted to take a crack at it, I was willing to cooperate. I had some ground rules though. First, I did not want the resulting film to be a hatchet job against the Jehovah’s Witnesses. There are enough of those around and felt it would have demeaned all the creative and wonderful things we did to simply use my life and music and former community as some sort of vehicle to get people to listen to anti-Witness propaganda. The movie needed to be about the love we had for each other, the role that music and creativity played in helping us all be better adjusted and happy within the Watchtower community, and the like. My hope was to humanize our experience, highlight both the joy and the pain we all went through, and create a meaningful document that honored a very important part of my life.

Q. But doesn’t Witness Underground attack the Jehovah’s Witnesses?

Attack? No. The Jehovah’s Witness religion is the context in which the events of the movie took place. It is literally impossible to tell the story of my life without talking about Nuclear Gopher and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The movie also delves into some of the reasons I left the religion and the fallout in my personal life that resulted from my loss of belief in their teachings. Do the Witnesses look good when this story is told? They do not. In many ways they come across as insular, mean, dishonest, judgmental, and cruel based on their policy of strictly shunning former members and many of their doctrinal teachings that are flatly contradicted by evidence, science, and basic reason. Some of that is in the movie because it had to be. Nothing else in the movie would make sense without it. But, and this is important to me, that is NOT the point of Witness Underground. The point of Witness Underground is to demonstrate to people that a person undergoing a crisis of conscience and seeking truth for themselves is not an inherently “demonic” or “diseased” person. They are sincere and can retain all of their love, humanity, empathy, curiousity, and the rest. If they become bitter, angry, resentful, suicidal, or spend the rest of their life obsessing about their former faith, it is only because of the cruel treatment they are subjected to. For a communal species such as ours, communal shunning (included being ostracized from blood family members) it one of the most painful psychological punishments it is possible to subject another person to. It can lead to years of therapy and self-harm in many many cases. Friends and family members of both current and former Witnesses need to know about this trauma and people facing their own crises need to know that they can have a fulfilling life and feel good about themselves even when their path takes them away from the Witnesses.

Q.  I’m not a Witness and I have never been one.  Why should I care about this movie?

While this movie may take place in the world of Jehovah’s Witnesses and their former members, it is not really about that.  The movie is about stepping out of the constraints and boxes that we are born into and being brave enough to pursue our personal truths wherever they lead.  In showing after showing the movie has resonated with members of the LGBTQ+ community, former Catholics and Evangelicals, the non-religious, people from all walks of life and backgrounds, because, simply put, the process of growing into being your true self is a universal process.  While this film may be of particular interest to X/JW and indie music communities, it is not intended to be targeted towards them.  Rather it is intended to use the experiences in the film to create a broader sense of connection among people with diverse experiences.

Q. How involved where you in the making of the film?

Less so than you might think. I sat down for an on-camera interview in Denver and spent a day or two with the film crew at my home in Minnesota shooting B-roll footage and a live music video shoot with the members of HighTV out in one of my out-buildings. I shared archival photos, videos, and recordings with the WU crew. The vast majority of the work on the film involved exploring the archival media and building a coherent narrative out of the interview footage of myself, James Zimmerman, Chad Rhiger, Eric Elvendahl and Cindy Elvendahl. I had very little to do with any of that effort, an effort that took two+ years of dedication and hard work to craft the resulting movie. I am very impressed by the resulting film, personally.

Q. Where can I see Witness Underground?

That depends. The film has played at several film festivals throughout the US this year. It will play at more. Some are virtual, some are in-person. You can find out when and where it is playing at www.witnessunderground.com.

Q. Where can I find your music/books/films/etc?

When Nuclear Gopher was operating (1989-2005) we started leveraging a music licensing philosophy called Creative Commons. Creative Commons allows somebody to publish media online for free distribution and sharing with others without giving up their rights to the works. It is what is known as “copyleft” instead of “copyright”. Due to this fact, many older Nuclear Gopher music and movies are permanently archived for posterity at the Internet Archive (archive.org) and are freely available for you to download, keep, and even use in your own derivative works provided that you share and share alike and also provide attribution to the original artists. Some Nuclear Gopher music is also available on streaming services such as YouTube, TIDAL, Spotify and Bandcamp. A collection of my blog writings is available as a free CC-licensed ebook called Hira-Hira, also at archive.org.

Q. Will Nuclear Gopher return?

Yes. Nuclear Gopher officially resumed operations this year in the wake of the film. The new Nuclear Gopher will re-issue newly restored and remastered versions of some older NG music, there will be a sound track from the film, and, most importantly, several new artists are already excited to have NG release and promote their future work.

Q. If the old Nuclear Gopher was just for Witness artists does that mean the new Nuclear Gopher is just for ex-Witnesses?

Absolutely not. The new Nuclear Gopher is for anybody, regardless of their religious beliefs or lack there of, completely unrelated to whether or not they have even heard of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Watchtower may have been the environment that incubated the Gopher, but it was always really about music, art, creativity, and a DIY ethos. We would have made our music if we had been raised Catholic, Buddhist, or with no religion at all because we love music and art. Nuclear Gopher was and is a nucleus for connecting a community of people through the power of art and music and I look forward to bringing it back to life for everybody and getting some more good energy out into the world. We all need it.

Q. Have your Witness family members seen the movie? What did they think?

I have no idea but I doubt it. Ironically, most Witnesses would consider watching WU to be against their religion. Several of my extended non-Witness family have seen the film and reached out to me with their thoughts. My siblings were invited years ago to participate in the film and share their perspectives, thoughts, and memories but elected not to do so. My father likely knows of the film through the family grapevine. The Watchtower shunning policy dictates that my Witness family members have no contact with me unless absolutely necessary so I don’t know if we will ever discuss Witness Underground, but I hope we do.

Q. If they do see it, what would you like to say to them about it?

Dear Reed, Robbie, and Dad. I love you with all my heart and I know from first hand experience how terrible this movie probably makes you feel. Instead of this terrible feeling, we could have had lovely and fulfilling relationships for the last 17 years. We could have eaten meals together and gone fishing and made music and laughed and been happy. My son could have known his cousins and Aunt Robbie and Uncle Reed and his grandfather and you could have known him. I could have been a really cool uncle to Ian and Felix and Petra and they would have loved playing with our rescue dogs. Life could have been peaceful, loving, and normal and we would have all been richer for it. It still could be. As long as their is life and love, I will never stop hoping we can be a family again, no matter our differences of belief. My door has always been open to you and it always will be. The film is a celebration of what was and a document of the tragedy of what is, but the future is not yet written.

Q. Would you say there are any lessons in this film that apply to the larger world and times we are living in?

Definitely.  The processes of information control, in-group/out-group structure, end of the world mythology, and many other beliefs, teachings, and structures within the Watchtower Society are found in other parts of our culture and, while the specific beliefs vary, the patterns are common.  The personality cult of Donald Trump, for example, has strong parallels to the Watchtower: leadership is idolized, critical thought is hampered and discouraged, adherence to a strict point of view is strongly encouraged, media consumption and information is limited only to approved channels with any unapproved channel being decried as fake/phony/dishonest/evil, people on the rest of the political spectrum are “un-American”, etc., and families are being torn apart by the divisions created.  This movie demonstrates the conflict and division over belief systems and blind allegiance to cults and tribes and the pain it all causes.  It illustrates the need for patience with ones’ self and loved ones if restoration of normal relationships is to have any chance of taking place.  Where there is life, there is always hope, and one way to deal with the negative feelings and suffering that occur when families are fractured by religious or political or other factors is to create, create, create.  Action, practice, activity, these are powerful healers and the way to move beyond the obsessive thoughts/judgments/wishes that these situations can create and help find whatever peace there is to be found.

Q. Now what?

I guess we’ll see, won’t we?

Going through some old files today I ran across a comic book I drew back in elementary school: Vioman #1. Now you too can enjoy my 5th grade comic book dreams…

Vioman #1 (PDF)

Enjoy.

(From the soundtrack to the film Witness Underground)

The first computer program I ever wrote was in BASIC on a Commodore VIC-20. I was in second grade.

Many years and many programs later, I have now worked in software engineering for over 25 years (going on 27, actually) but I don’t code much anymore. Years ago I moved into “leadership” positions. Architect, team lead, technical director, and finally just plain director, which is a purely managerial position which I have held for over five years. I haven’t committed any code to any production software since I moved into that role. Admittedly, my days of regular heads down coding had been long gone before I completely moved into leadership, but it was initially a bit of a shock to no longer have even a small amount of coding in my day to day job.

The teams I lead today work in technology that I have never even worked in as a programmer. I am quite familiar with the core languages (HTML and JavaScript) but I have never been a full-time software developer working in the particular mix of technologies and architectures that my teams work in. Sometimes I miss coding.

Here’s the thing though… When I think about coding I usually realize pretty quickly that there isn’t anything in particular that I actually want to create. It’s like being in the mood to cook but not being hungry. You’re not going to dig in the pantry for no good reason.

The modern internet and mobile application landscape and the current set of technologies used in the standard technology of our phones, laptops, and smart devices is certainly powerful and, one would think it would tempt me to spend some of my spare time playing around with the latest and greatest, but I kinda hate it all. I don’t hate it because it’s new, I hate it because it’s boring to me. It’s too powerful, too easy. The latest and greatest is too much a part of my daily life and my day job, even if I’m not actually doing any coding myself these days. The idea of building a modern React application on a modern stack (Mongo, Express, etc) just bores me to tears. I want something more challenging and pointless.

There are actually programming languages that exist for the sole purpose of being challenging and pointless. One is called brainfuck and it’s entire purpose to destroy your mind while you attempt to create code that hurts to read. According to Wikipedia The code to print “Hello world!” on the screen in brainfuck is as follows:

++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>+<<<<-]>>.>—.+++++++..+++.>>.<-.<.+++.——.——–.>>+.>++.

If I mistyped anything and got that wrong I don’t care. I have no interest in anything QUITE that pointless and challenging, but I don’t want to do any boring modern development either. What is a poor boy to do?

I think I know. Retro programming, writing new code for the old and obsolete.

It is with this in mind that I have decided to start learning how to code C++ applications for Apple Macintosh 68k machines (generally, pre-1995) and not just for fun, I actually have an application in mind that I wish existed on for my old Macs so I have decided to learn to code for these machines and write it.

The program I have in mind is a WYSIWYG Markdown editor based on the user interface of Microsoft Word 5.1a, the best word processing program ever written. And it won’t just edit Markdown, this app will also be able to post to WordPress.

Markdown and WordPress are things that didn’t exist in the mid-90’s and there are no MD editors for machines this old. What’s more, web interfaces for blogging tools like WordPress require https capabilities that don’t exist on these older machines and therefore make communication generally impossible. There is no financial or market incentive to write software with either of these features, but as a purely intellectual exercise for my own amusement? Well, that’s another matter.

So, tonight I started in on learning C++ on the Macintosh with an old copy of the CodeWarrior IDE and (probably because of the sheer silliness of the whole pursuit) I had a good time. It was actually fun. I think I’ll call it Marker “5.1” as an homage to the Parker “51” fountain pen, Markdown, and Word 5.1. This ought to actually be a good time.