Memo to self - this is where procrastination leads..

Mike's Pith & Wind - Two words..
I’d taken the washing off the line still slightly damp and put it into the clothes dryer and was bending over adjusting the timer when my back went. Well, it was my right hip really, a memento of the move to Mt Waverley from last July and aggravated by my penchant for sitting on the couch noodling on guitar while watching the telly. Fortunately it’s not too inhibiting and I know from experience it will respond to constant attention over the next month or so, when it’s just as likely to go again.. Or not. But it’s yet another reminder that time is passing and my precious flexibility, amongst other things, is under threat from the attritions of age.
Aches and pains notwithstanding, I was reminded, when attending Dutch Tilders’ funeral service this morning, that things could be worse, far worse. There’s nothing like the death of a fellow musician to bring on a mood of reflection and introspection and I was in such a space when I was shocked into the here and now by the utterance of two chilling words, two words capable of killing anybody’s pretensions to a musical career - and those two words are ‘bygone era’.
I liked Lloyd Spiegel’s comment that Dutch was ‘that old blues guy’ for the whole of his career. Dutch’s style probably owed a lot to Brownie McGhee and Big Bill Broonzy, but Dutch put his own distinctive stamp on the blues which defied categorising by eras and it simply became Dutch Tilders’ blues. It’s fair to say the blues is timeless, but like everything else it’s.. read more

You wanna learn guitar or buy a classic piece of equipment? Check the classifieds

Dick's Toolbox - Anzac Day 2011
We are awakened well before the alarms can go off by the sound of the PA test. By some trick of acoustics “One, Two, One, Two,” sounds like “White King, White King”. It is not cold and we quietly step along the sea path being joined by a growing throng, dark against the first silver of the morning sky, like tributaries of an ever larger river. We are mostly strangers converging in the dark towards a single point, footsteps are muffled by the damp grass and voices gentle in the early hours. The morning star hangs above the east as the crowd of 7000 gathers, faces fitfully illuminated by either torch or phone screen.
The first pink flush of dawn over Bass Strait, a respectful murmur of clapping like rain on a tin roof, the muted skirl of pipes. Anzac day at Point Danger, Torquay. Australian and New Zealand flags hang side by side stirring occasionally in the morning’s breeze. read more