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RE: Sustain
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krichards
Posts: 597
Joined: Jan. 14 2007
From: York, England
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 RE: Sustain (in reply to estebanana)
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We seem to be wandering off topic now, as always seems to happen.
I would like to say that I appreciate all the input, and special thanks to Stephen Faulk, who has given me much to think about, as usual.
I'm thinking especially about the bridge, which is acting as a very stiff cross brace, and its relationship to the wings of the top.
Other factors that have been mentioned like, back thickness, parallel bracing, stiffness of upper bout and top thickness all play a part in the overall balance I'm sure.
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Kevin Richards
http://www.facebook.com/#!/kevin.richards.1048554
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Date Mar. 16 2016 10:05:03
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Sustain (in reply to Echi)
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A good buddy of mine has a 1969 Reyes, he took it to Reyes in 1998 to be restored and Reyes wanted to either buy it back from him or trade him a new guitar plus some for his 1969.
My friend let the guitar sit at Reyes' shop for 11 years and Reyes did not lift a finger to fix it or do anything with it. Finally my buddy called him and said send it back to me enough is enough. We have a friend who knew Fernande de Utrera well enough that when Fernanda got very sick towards the end your friend went to Spain to see her, as long as she was in Span she sad she would fetch the 1969 Reyes up in Cordoba. She got the Reyes to Sevilla and and left is with someone else a friend in Spain while she went to Chiclana to visit her dads grave. When she returned from Chiclana the guitar was a curiosity so she opened it an invited a local American guitar player over to see it and tun it up.
This fellow is not my friend but I know of him and have met him. He played the guitar, and said shortly, "Well it is not a very good guitar, but I think with new strings it might be worth a little bit. You know Reyes does not build like this anymore and his new guitars are better and worth much, much more. This one is kind of old and does not sound well, but I could take it off your hands and give your buddy some cash. This will also save you from hauling it all the way back to California."
The two ladies who were in charge of the guitar were no fools. One of them had been married to a now deceased guitarist who recorded with several of the members of the Pinini clan, including Fernanda and because they had been in such rare flamenco company, they had heard it all. They knew this American was going at getting this Reyes by down grading it. They were not stupid. They politely yet firmly said no. The Reyes as going to San Francisco to be rejoined with the owner, who is a fine guitar player that studied with for two years with Parilla and that Jerez gang.
The guitar get back to SF and my friend invites me to see it, we have some drinks pass it around the table and then he settles into playing. Wow, that guitar is a slice of heaven. And my friend owns a very fine Conde', but the early Reyes is superior in every way. The guitar is special.
The biggest criticism I hear and understand about early Reyes is that he is inconsistent, some or his guitar are very finicky about environment. A few are dogs, but most are quite good, and some are sublime. My friend left this '69 Reyes with my for a week to measure and drink in. What I found is that it was scarcely different from later Reyes guitars which I had access to. The bracing was pretty much the same, seven fans, no cut off bars. This particular guitar is distinctive, the sound is intoxicating. The kind of guitar that makes you want to make more guitars. Conde's seldom make me want to make a copy of them becasue they are so common. This early Reyes has something rare and elusive. If I make one guitar in my life which sounds like that I will be happy.
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Date Mar. 16 2016 12:26:04
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constructordeguitarras
Posts: 1676
Joined: Jan. 29 2012
From: Seattle, Washington, USA
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RE: Sustain (in reply to Ruphus)
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Ruphus, I know you are being facetious, but I am still wondering about the value of those reinforcements. According to Jose Ramirez III, in his book "Things About The Guitar," -- at least this is my recollection from reading the book many years ago -- reinforcement in that area is only to prevent cracking there, which is common.
I am also interested in the value of bracing on either side of the sound hole (not the donut). I notice that flamenco guitars usually don't have it, while classical guitars do. So what does it add (or subtract)? I just built a classical guitar and used this, lightly, and am happy with the sound. It can be very expensive to experiment but I guess I will have to.
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Ethan Deutsch
www.edluthier.com
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I always have flamenco guitars available for sale.
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Date Mar. 17 2016 17:13:32
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Sustain (in reply to Echi)
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"....Have some sympathy and some taste....."
I remember a few conversations with my main teacher Gene Clark about the piece under the fingerboard. He called it the "neck graft", which I think is not really descriptive, but I call it the fingerboard patch. This kind f reminds me a of a line from a movie.
"Some people call it a Kaiser knife, I call it a Slingblade."
I guess we could call it the Slinggraft or the Kaiserpatch, it really does not matter, because we all know about it and pretty much every one uses it on half their guitars.
What is is for? Who knows! Ramirez says it is to bolster up the top and provide cross grain security to the possibility that the fingerboard could shrink and pull the sound board. Ok. Sounds good to me.
"Wunnerful, Wunnerful..." as Lawrence Welk used to say; Hauser decoupled the glue link between the end of the ebony board and the spruce top. He in effect created a clever ' fusible link' between one component and the other. When one part of a mechanical system drives another part too hard it is designed to break before it ruins the part it is connected to.
Clever Germans, remember these are the minds that cooked up the Me. 262 jet fighter. The American pilot Chuck Yeager shot one engine off of a 262 and the dammed thing kept on going just as fast. So no wonder Segovia kept going to Hauser.
Gene used to say he thought it "added to the profundity of the sound" and maybe even helped the sound of the notes between the sound hole and the neck to body joint. I have thought about this over and over for many years. This is one of those areas in guitar making that you almost have to accept anecdotal or experiential opinion because it is a part that is very difficult, if not impossible, to separate out and gather absolute data about. It is one of those constituent parts in the guitar that serves a purpose, but can also be omitted and the omission does not seem to effect the outcome of the guitar. Many great guitars have been made both with and without this part. Hauser in fact used both a fusible link approach and this extra bar under the tip of the ebony.
Now here is an interesting usage of this bar or patch on another string instrument, and the use is clearly intended to support the notes. Lute makers in modern times who build reconstructions of historical lutes sometimes add a graft under the frets that are over the body. The top of the lute is very thin, often less than 2mm even in the upper region of the body where the belly frets are located. The tied neck frets on a lute stop at the 10th or 11th fret, then little strips of wood are glued to the top as frets to continue the scale up over the body for maybe four to six more frets.
These over the body frets also extend out over the neck block! And the territory over the neck block between the block and the first top brace is thin spruce. If you encounter a lute player ask them to play some passages on the body frets and compare that sound to the notes on the neck. Often there can be a diminished sustain or clarity on the notes that are out past the neck block. The remedy is to add a graft of spruce under that section to maintain an even quality to the notes over the body so that there are not drastic drop offs in sound or 'wonky notes' on that area of the scale.
Does this automatically indicate that the neck/fingerboard under bar serves the same function on the guitar? Maybe and maybe not. How do you prove this? Anyone care to invent a test?
In the case of the lute, the sound board is much thinner and delicate and the construction of the lute dictates that there is no fingerboard extension over the body to add mass and strength in the same manner as a guitar fingerboard, which spans the distance between the neck block and the first LATERAL brace. *What is a harmonic brace? That is simply a term Romanillos decided to use-- what is "harmonic" about it?*
So you see there is much more inherent support in the Guitar structure over the body that on a Lute and whether or not it supports sustain in every instance is a very difficult question to empirically answer.
On some guitars it helps sustain.
On some guitars it might just be going along for the ride,
On some guitars it might do actual harm to the sound.
Now I am thinking of a Rolling Stones song...
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Why is is that I have to disgorge this much information just to prove a point that this under the ebony bar is something we all know about, but really no one person can do testing in an empirical way to tell or quantify exactly how and why it works?
Why not just take every brace in the guitar that we cannot pin a function to and call it "The Appendix Brace"? Yes. That it the ticket. If we all stand tall and and stone wall together as guitar makers, we can just tell the 'know it alls' that in our collective opinion, this under the ebony bar is called the Appendix Brace and we don't have the slightest idea what it does. Group concurrence would make our lives much better.
I claim ignorance of the function of the Appendix Brace on the grounds that even if I knew what it exactly did to the sound, I would never bother to explain to a rabid troll.
Gentlemen, and in case any female builders are reading this, Esteemed Practioners of guitar making, step forward boldly and proclaim your ignorance of the Function of the Appendix Brace. And pray that the Saints Gore and Carruth will perhaps someday do tests on this part and tell us its true and mysterious function.
Not to be melodramatic, but I hope you guessed my name.
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Date Mar. 18 2016 0:34:42
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Sustain (in reply to Echi)
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quote:
These images are taken from Homenaje a la Gutarra Cordobesa, Eusebio Rioja, 1990. They show that Miguel Rodriguez and Manuel Reyes were trying out a few things in the 50s and 60s.
I think you rally nailed it when you said that these guys charted out a path and then spent most of the career fine tuning it.
These brace patterns are not really that far out and you can see the roots of this on Manuel Ramirez. Remember seeing a Manuel Ramirez guitar being payed on stage and then the stage light raked across it the right way you could see the braces telegraphing a shadow line through the top. The braces were pretty much what was later used by Reyes and most other Andaluz makers.
The flying diagonal brace the intersects the lower lateral brace may have been a Rodriguez invention or it might have come from Madrid out of the Ramirez shop of the 1950's. Anyway that diagonal is an ANCIENT idea in guitar making. !9th century and earlier guitars can be found with a combination of parallel "ladder" braces and that diagonal. It seems like late 50's and early 60's Rodriguez and Ramirez high end guitars made use of the design. I don't know who used it first, and I would not doubt it could be a case of parallel discovery. It is a very good design, I have only built it twice. Rodriguez has a special twist to it wherein he tucks the 'A' frame shaped rosette reinforcement grafts under the upper lateral brace and into the neck block. A neat piece of work to contemplate and detail that takes skill to pull off with fitting of braces.
That A frame detail is included in the design in lieu of the under the fingerboard bar we have been talking about. I have made this A frame design and by making you come to understand it in a way that is a step beyond looking at it theoretically. It lends a different feel to the top in that area and supports the top, serves that function the Ramirez claimed the neck bar does- keeping the fingerboard from stressing the top across the grain. Itt also lends stiffness along the grain, from neck block to soundhole, *without*stacking in too much mass.
Which brings up another interesting consideration about the neck bar. Torres' dimensions for this bar, which is really a strip of thin wood, where between 7 and 8mm wide and about 3mm tall. Hauser's strips are about the same but longer in length. I have a dimension from hauser that says 1.5 mm thick by 9.5 mm wide and it runs across the grain fro side to side.
This is not about mass, this is about cross grain support. If this were about mass is would be, well, massive. It is more like a strip of wood like contra puente.
On the other hand...you can find this bar or strip as presented as a more massive piece on Fleta and sometimes on Santos. But on Santos is still really says strips of wood, but the strip is wider and shorter. Fleta on the other had was thinking about something else. Fleta was beefing up that area because he was designing for the new trend of using nylon strings.
Fleta threw down two upper lateral braces AND a patch between the lateral braces and the neck block. Kind of like those people who try to quit smoking by wearing the nicotine patch and smoking at the same time. A double dose....which in Fleta's case paid off big time. Gut string trebles are more dense the nylon trebles and to get the top to respond to treble many makers after the nylon string was introduced beefed up the structure. But that is another topic.
There are a lot of things going on with this neck patch, or whatever it is officially called. And we can see that makers employ it with more than one thing in mind. And that some are adding mass, while other makers are adding a strip of cross grain bolstering. None of this is easy to quantify or reason out.
Getting back to Reyes and you mention of Bellido. I would like to hear more about your Bellido. Reyes is a maker who is a perfect example of what I call the Ansel Adams School of Guitar Building. Ansel Adams was a photographer who developed a system for judging exposure times and apertures based on what he called Zones.
Every photo student has to learn about The Zone System, a way to reason out how to use exposure in relation to how an object is lighted. Very simply put one takes a light measurement of the lightest and darkest area of the subject and works out an average exposure for that amount of light- it is more complex that that but this is the basic premise. It serves as a great metaphor in guitar making because makers like Reyes worked that way over their careers. They took a basic structure or brace pattern and figured out a Zone system wherein they listen to the 'darks and lights' and work towards a refinement of how that light moves. They are in a kind f dark room with wood and as they develop the guitar, they push or pull the amount of wood, like person printing a photogragh form a negative, until they get a good average balance of light a dark.
That is to say they printed from the same few "negatives" or brace patterns, over and over until they got it right, rather than experiment with many kinds of brace patterns. I think there is some funny correlation between Ansel Adams' concept of the Zone System and how the makers work over the same brace system and perform a personal refinement to the zones in that system.
Which is how I refute the idea of a new modern guitar vs. traditional guitar. It is all the same guitar, but with different emphasis placed in the various zones. Search You Tube, 'Guitars with Guts, 1924 Santos' and contemplate that the bracing pattern of that guitar is the same as the 1951 Barbero, and the 1960 Faustino Conde' and the whole lot of Valencia factory guitars ever since.
It all depends on how you know your zones.
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Date Mar. 18 2016 4:57:34
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Sustain (in reply to Dave White)
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quote:
Certainly in steel string guitars, the sustain and timbre of notes played on the fretboard over the body drops - even with the extra support compared to a lute - and can be restored by extending the neck support for the fretboard in this area either with wood or carbon fibre. In my first and only foray into making a flamenco guitar I have used the same principles in my steel strings of giving this area structure and support by extending the neck top support and having the outer two fan braces as A frame braces locked into it:
OK this is an interesting foil to the mass or no mass conversation.
A couple things, in flamenco guitars especially, the basses come along and are a part of package naturally, the treble strings are the slightly more difficult problem. Steel string guitars are almost the opposite, the basses are problematic but the trebles seem to be part of the main package.
On flamenco guitars they may benefit from a brace under the fingerboard, but at a certain point there will be diminishing returns and adding mass in that area will cause problems. We have to remember that in examples of fine classical guitars we have one hand Hauser who used a light strip of wood 9 mm wide and 1.5 mm thick, hardly massive. It is a strap really. Then Fleta takes the other side of the coin and he uses two lateral braces above the sound hole. Plus some more reinforcement between the neck block and lateral brace.
So each maker has made guitars with power and sustain associated with classical guitar making by using two almost diametrically opposed ideas. Then add to that compare Fleta to some makers Reyes included who on sometimes omit the fingerboard brace and there is binary opposition both getting good results.
As for the label harmonic bar, well anything and everything you glue under the top changes it harmonically, why not call them all harmonic bars? But oddly enough when you begin poking holes in the lateral bars and letting fan braces ride up to the sound hole area the feel of the guitar changes.
And these lateral braces can be pierced through with longer braces let in under them. When talking about the lateral braces and the letting braces through them there are two main ideas. Whether the braces extending under the lateral braces are coupled or uncoupled to the lateral brace.
Romanillos and Bouchet went back to Torres' idea of opening up the lateral brace under neath and letting the fanbraces move under the bridge and extend from the lower bout area up into the waist area. That is an example of Uncoupled braces with lateral brace.
Fleta, Rodriguez, Ramirez and Friederich made guitars with coupled fan braces and added diagonal braces that are mortised tightly under the lower lateral brace. Carefully coupling the main lower top area with the waist area and lateral brace.
All of them made guitars, coupled or uncoupled, with good sustain. That tells us that structure and top support are good for sustain and can be arrived at by means which are in binary opposition!
But wait, the bridge is important too. Why? because what makes all these patterns go? The correct bridge. Without a good bridge all that structure does not really mean anything. Put poorly made or a badly conceived bridge on all that hard work and the guitar probably loses between 10% and 20 % of it's potential.
We get good guitars and maybe great guitars from two or three main systems of top bracing that are basically in opposition to each other in logic, on the surface at least. And those styles or systems remain productive avenues of study and devotion. How can we pin point a single small piece of a system and give it so much emphasis?
The only thing I can think of is that we have a situation where just about anything rolls if you can figure out how to glue a good bridge to it and thickness it. The sustain thing in flamencos is part of mediating the between the top stiffness and the bridge stiffness and weight. All that sets up the tension and feel of the top. Thick top, thin top heavy braces light braces which ever way, the bridge needs to be right. And the sides need to be fairly thin to dissipate some energy and the lateral braces don't need to be coupled deeply into the sides. Maybe a contra puente, that can help cross grain stiffness.
I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong, just using Socratic method to work through a bunch of ideas, answering questions with questions to see what happens. I also have opinions that get woven in. Just my opinions.
I think we can measure stuff and weigh things and test them with tone generators and all this empirical stuff and we get a lot out of rt. But there is something else too that is more elusive, you get in a zone or a groove through working a lot and it all seems to click together for you. The real secret is to just stay in that groove and keep working. Then good things happen.
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Date Mar. 18 2016 11:06:38
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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RE: Sustain (in reply to jshelton5040)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: jshelton5040
I have long since stopped responding to the troll you are referring to.
Really? It rather seems as if you couldn´t keep yourself from uploading whatever comment after posts that I may have written on guitar construction. Usually without congruent relation to context, but for contradicting alone.
Your last example of responding from "long since" has been in this very thread just days ago.
Here also with your latest example of hysterical inability to read:
quote:
ORIGINAL: jshelton5040
... the previous suggestion from this person that I be beheaded.
Such a pity of hallucination.
Since cought with your cognitive pants down several times you show to be incapable of overcoming disgrace. And as a fragile personality who panicks from being questioned, you can´t even read first what has been said, already hitting reply buttons before absorbing a statement to start with.
For lack of better compagnion always embraced as perfect Sancho Pansa though by the Don Quijote of "no one should pe permitted an opinion unless having built first".
What unites both of you is a towering blurb about expertise and whatnot of decades of artisanry, while no one parallels your output to reknown prime instruments.
To the contrary of other builders on this board and elsewhere whose guitars (sometimes after only a few years of building) are passionately celebrated by clients and apparently rivaling guitars from reputated shops. Remarkable how these people are not showing sensitive against layman input, being relaxed on structural and building topics, willing to explain or even to pick up unheard bits and hardly ever found calling names.
Yes, there are builders (even if that not be Stephen Eden, as I just realized) who think that there are tonal effects as I descibed. And if I mention that in response to a question, there is no reason to get mad about it unless you are having a problem with yourself.
The difference between the sane and you who you are actually acting foaming in paranoia of dreaded questioning, is rounding up banally as profound inferiority complex.
No outburst and name calling can spare you that insight.
Ruphus
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Date Mar. 18 2016 16:20:00
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Anders Eliasson
Posts: 5780
Joined: Oct. 18 2006
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RE: Sustain (in reply to Echi)
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There was a tendency in art in the end of the last century, that it wasn´t the art itself that was important, it was the description of what it was that was taken serious. The "materia" was just there because the artist needed something to talk about so that his intellectual artistic me could be heard or read. It was one big cerebral celebration.
Same thing happens in many other places, lutherie being one of them.
IMHO, we very often dont know what we are doing. there´s no rocket science in lutherie. There´s a lot of good old cooking recepies and thats it.
Does anyone know exactly what happens in this or that square inch of an instrument. I´m pretty sure that the answer is no.
When more than 10 years ago, I walked the streets of Granada and asked to many questions, the answers were so diffuse that I really couldnt get any basic idea of anything.
But again, maybe its just me being to stupid. It wouldnt be the first time.
My own perception of what is going on above the lower harmonic bar is that sticks or mass makes the tone more defined. Wheather thats good or bad is up to the player. A tone can actually be to defined. It gets picky in the ears and it lacks some of the "rest" which can be overtones, a bit of 4th, 5th notes and so on. All this "rest" is often what inspires the player.
Its a bit the same when you amplify with a good eletronic amp or a valve amp. The valve amp produces something that cannot be found in the electronic solid state amp.
Oh yes, I know that many forum members find that i speak in tongues, but thats the way I am. 
And besides, I´m to lazy and stupid to learn english at a level where I can compete with the rest.
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Date Mar. 18 2016 16:53:47
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Sustain (in reply to constructordeguitarras)
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quote:
There was a tendency in art in the end of the last century, that it wasn´t the art itself that was important, it was the description of what it was that was taken serious. The "materia" was just there because the artist needed something to talk about so that his intellectual artistic me could be heard or read. It was one big cerebral celebration.
That was in the mid 1960's through mid 70's, and these artist continually proclaimed that painting is dead. Yet drawing and painting, like old Lazarus kept rising from the grave and appearing again.
There was an interesting discussion around the difference between art and objects, minimalism of the mid 60's was the movement were the artists made objects as a way to supporting an idea they had about the nature and existence of art. The place where art and guitar making diverge away from each other s that Art with a capital 'A' has a more a open self definition than Guitarmaking. Art is a bigger subject to define, but Guitarmaking is defined and judged by stricter parameters, like does the damned thing play well?
Art is very different because there is a legitimate case for a kind of art that is 'intellectually beautiful' or challenging as opposed to an art that is an experience with an object that is made an intended to be art. And realistically almost everyone conceded or concurred that they prefer to have an art based on the making of an art object that does not support a theoretical stand point, but that after the art is made maybe then talk about what it means.
Art that is made or was made to support a theoretical base was important, for one, because it showed art can delve into and be made of philosophy. Philosophy in many was is intellectually beautiful and satisfying to understand.
There is an essay written by a critic named Michael Fried called 'Art and Objecthood' and he goes after this exact idea saying that a constructed theory supported by objects turns into a kind of empty theatricality, rather than the art object we usually really like much more which exists independent of a theory before hand.
When I was in school we used to ask of a work of art, 'Does is stand on it's own as a work that the *student* maker intended as a real exploration and sincere work? Or does it illustrate a theory in the art world that is fashionable in the moment? away of calling the bluff of another student who was trying to get away, knowing or unknowing, by just leaning into some arty idea then in the air. The reason for calling that bluff is because it makes students think deeper into how they make art in relation to who they are and not rely on some theory.
These kinds of idea are like crack cocaine to me, not that I do crack or would know where to get it anyway, but addictive intellectually. So I want to turn the question around `180 degrees and ask:
If you had to create a theory and the object that illustrates this theory ends up being a guitar, what is the theory?
I would hope the answers would be comedic. 
My theory is that an advanced space fairing alien race that has light speed travel capability has developed an object to sarcastically taunt worlds that have lesser intelligence who are still stuck on the same planet. They invented this object to create static and acrimony between the inhabitants of this civilization in order to divert their intelligence and efforts to develop deep space fairing technology. The aliens made a kind of Alien Rubic's Cube to toss down to non space fairing areas of the galaxy to keep them from leaving their planet and getting out in the galaxy and getting in the way.
The thing they came up with to confound the minds of this planet was this guitar object. You find great minds which have training in physics, maths, literature, art, and they all have careers and intelligence, but when they encounter the guitar object they all ask:
"How the hell does that thing work?"
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Date Mar. 19 2016 5:24:00
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Sustain (in reply to Echi)
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You might be interested to know that one of my relatives was Ig's girlfriend. He wrote the song 'Ordinary Bummer' about her and also, it is said, the song made famous by Bowie, 'China Girl' was written about her. As much as songs can be about one person. The song Ordinary Bummer is on Zombie Birdhouse, my favorite Iggy record. My favorite song is 'Angry Hills'.
My relative is a part of rock history too, family legend has it. She was on tour with Iggy and the Stooges. When Mr. Pop started popping other women at after show parties she got pissed off and grabbed the huge bag of coke the band bought. She bribed the driver with money and coke to drive her from some crap hole city in Alabama back to NY and gave him the bag of coke as payment. Many years after this transpired I was in Oakland at a recording studio and I overheard someone talking about this story and I said hey I know who that woman was.
She came back from that tour and somewhere in NY in the late 70's early 80 's she got out of control and she became addicted to heroin, contracted HIV from shooting up with dirty works. She died, I recall in 86' or maybe 87' summer time, I'm a bit misty on details. One funny thing that my sister told me about what happened after she dumped Iggy on the tour is that she was working as a cocktail waitress in a posh NY bar where stars dropped in and Ig showed up with a woman on each arm. He saw her, pushed them off, and he practically fell to his knees asking her to take him back and she told him to go 'F' himself. She was no saint either. She was also very beautiful, she modeled for Playboy magazine.
I don't know what this means, but when someone brings up Iggy pop twice I feel like sharing this story. When she, LJ, died my dad was very sad. He told me she had fallen in with bad people. Late at night in the 80's I lived at my dads on and off I used to put Zombie Birdhouse on the hi fi and then listen to classical music ,then Coltrane tor Yuseff Latif. My dad would rumble out of his room and chat with me about music. He was stoned usually, but he was most enjoyable when he was stoned. The more stoned the better. He was great when he was really high because he was super funny and that's when he was most able to communicate that he loved us. He was like Lenny Bruce and Robin Williams rolled into one, but much weirder. Of course once in while one of his old buddies visited and brought pharma grade coke up the hill where we lived in Big Sur. More coke than Keef Richards could get up his schnoze in a year, and I have to admit once in a while I did some. Wow you don't even know you are high when you have coke like that and for that reason 90% of the time my dad was stoned on heroin because coke makes you crazy. He was not crazy, just a hyper intelligent drug addict.
He was sad because he was a survivor, he felt bad that our younger relative died because she was not as professional as he was. Iggy is a survivor too, he played the odds and amazingly lived. I always liked his music and turned my dad onto Zombie Birdhouse, because he turned me onto the jazz sax players like Sonny Rollins, we had a lot of fun talks about art and music, because that is all we ever had together. He was a great artist, but his drug problem prevented him from making it in that profession, I mean he was high end, a great painter. It is painful to watch someone kill themselves little by little, like Celine wrote in the title of his book 'Death on the Installment Plan'. My life is like a reliving of watching my dad kill himself over 30 years and knowing that if he had been able to turn it around he might have been happier.
Our styles of being in the world are different. I like to bluster about and write my way out of my demons, and you are a tough terse son of a bitch, but we are shaped by similar pain. You and I could probably get nice and drunk together and work it out. But in the mean time I think Iggys's 'Angry Hills' is also a good song for you.
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https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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