Category Archives: Music

Dumb lyrics and new stuff

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One of the advantages of working at home, which I do every Friday, is that I can put music on actual speakers, rather than use headphones, which I sometimes do in the office. Plus, my selection of music is bigger at home than at work, because I haven’t ripped my entire CD collection yet. For example, right now I’m listening to Tom Cochrane’s excellent live album The Symphony Sessions, which I haven’t listened to in ages. But every time I hear the Tom Cochrane song “Good Times”, I have to shake my head at the following lyric:

Oh, good times we had
Wouldn’t worry about tomorrow ’cause tonight was all we had, yeah
Oh, good times we knew
I’d tell you about them baby, but you were there
you were with me too

“I’d tell you about them, but you were there”? C’mon Tom, surely you could have done better than that.

I got a couple of new things this week: one available to everyone, and one specific to me. Mozilla Firefox 2.0 was released a couple of days ago, and I’ve already upgraded both my home and work machines. Honestly, I haven’t noticed much of a difference. Everything I use pretty much works as it did before — seamlessly. One difference is that there’s a spell-checker built-in, so hopefully my blog postings won’t contain any speling mistaiks spelling mistakes. Strange how the word “blog” is marked as being spelled wrong, and it doesn’t like html tags either…

The other new thing I got this week was a new radio for my car. My old radio was a JVC MP3 player that I got a few years ago, which served me very well, but was starting to get flaky. First off, one of the letters on the display was broken (probably because I dropped the faceplate one too many times), and more importantly, the CD player stopped working reliably. If there was no CD in the player, it would complain a lot, with some cryptic error message, beeping, and cutting the radio out for a couple of seconds. If you tried to put a CD in, it would frequently complain about it and spit it back out, or accept it, spend 10-15 seconds reading the disk, and then spit it out. I’d spend 10-15 minutes trying to get the damn disk in the player, and then I’d have to keep that disk in for the next couple of weeks, because taking it out and trying to put another one in was just too much work.

The new one is made by a company called “Dual”, which I’ve never heard of, but the radio was cheap at Wal-Mart (sorry Tom). Mine doesn’t seem to be shown on the Dual web site, but this one looks exactly the same and has the same features, though I think mine has less power. It has all the features of my old one, I think, plus it will play WMA files, which the old one wouldn’t. There are a few things that annoy me about the new one, though:

  • You can’t see the radio station / CD track name and the clock at the same time. However, powering on and off is much faster, and it shows the clock when the power is off, which the old one did not (unless you pressed the “Display” button).
  • The old radio would let you name radio stations, so if I was listening to Q107, the display would say “Q107” (once I programmed that in) rather than “107.1”. This one just shows frequencies.
  • The new one takes a long time to decode MP3 tracks — when I switch from radio to a CD (even one that I was listening to before I put the radio on), it takes upwards of 15 seconds before a track starts playing. Surely the computer in the radio is advanced enough that it can pre-read the CD so that it has the next, say, 30 seconds of music in memory and ready to play once I switch to CD mode.
  • When playing MP3 tracks, my old one would display the album name once at the beginning of the album, and then display the track name, and leave the track name on during the song. The new one shows whatever you ask for (track name for me), but nothing else unless you cycle through the viewing options.
  • When navigating through songs and albums, they’ve decided that the most useful thing to show is the track number, rather than the song or album name. To jump ahead to another album or track, I need to: (1) let the song play long enough to identify it, (2) wait for 5-10 seconds until it decides to show me the track name, or (3) start clicking buttons until it shows me the track name. Of course, this is a car stereo, so it would have been nice for the designers to give a little bit of extra thought to the usability factor; if I’m futzing with the radio while driving, I want to be able to do stuff as quickly as possible.

All in all, it’ll be fine. I’ll get used to the limitations quickly I’m sure, and it no longer takes 15 minutes to change CDs, so that’s a plus.

De Do Do Do De Da Da Da

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On my way to work the other day, I heard two different songs by The Police on
two different radio stations. It occurred to me that I hadn’t listened to The
Police in a while, and that they were a really good band. They’re all
really good musicians, and Sting wrote some really good rock songs, before he
went all adult-comtemporary and lame. I don’t mind some of his solo stuff, but
his work with The Police was orders of magnitude better. Spirits In
The Material World, Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic, De Do Do Do De Da Da Da
(not the cleverest song title ever, but a great song), Don’t Stand So Close To
Me, King Of Pain, Can’t Stand Losing You, Message in a Bottle, Roxanne, Every Breath You Take — they only released five albums, but they had so many
great songs. It’s too bad they broke up when they did (actually, I believe they never officially broke up, they just went on “hiatus”, but after more than 20 years, I think it’s safe to say they broke up).

I “restarted” my guitar lessons last Thursday. I’ve been taking lessons for a
little over a year, and I’ve learned a lot, but I wanted to do more music theory
than my teacher (John) can do. He suggested I switch over to the other guy (Terry)
that teaches at the same place I go, since Terry knows music theory better and
can teach it better. We started out going over basic stuff like the string
names, major scales, and major chords (root, 3rd, and 5th), and by the end of the
half-hour, we’d also talked about minor chords (root, flat 3rd, 5th), 7th chords
(major or minor chord plus the 7th), and he mentioned diminished and augmented
chords, though I don’t know exactly how they’re defined. I even have homework.
I think the next few months are going to be challenging, and I probably won’t
get any better as a guitar player, but having the theory background will
eventually make me a better player.

Queensryche Live

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I borrowed a fairly new Queensrÿche album from the library the other
day, called “The Art of Live”. Kind of a self-aggrandizing title, I thought
(“We’re so good live, we’ve turned it into an art”), but they used
to be one of my favourite bands (as I’ve blogged before), so
I thought I’d give it a try. What a disappointment. Part of my disappointment
comes from the fact that most of the songs are from the last few Queensrÿche
studio albums, which I didn’t really like, and not so much from the first 4 or 5,
which I did like. Even ignoring that, there are other problems: the crowd noise
is almost non-existent (a live album without crowd noise is just weird to listen
to), and there are no backing vocals. This doesn’t matter much for some
songs, but for a song like Anybody Listening, it really loses something
without the backing vocals. I guess Chris DeGarmo was the primary backing
vocalist, since he’s no longer with the band. Hey, maybe that’s the reason I don’t like as much of the new stuff — he wrote all the
songs I liked too. Another weird thing is that on
the song My Global Mind, it sounds like they’ve shut off the amplifiers, or at
least turned the distortion way down — it’s not quite an acoustic version,
but it certainly isn’t as heavy as the original version. I think if it
was a pure acoustic version, it would be OK, but it just seems mixed up
here. Operation: LIVECrime was a pretty good live Queensrÿche album, but this one just seems to continue the downward spiral of a formerly great band.

I also got a greatest hits album by Silverchair from the library, but I
haven’t listened to it yet. I will be sure to keep you, Constant Reader,
informed. (Kind of a Stephen King thing there)

Rock ‘n’ Roll Family Tree

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A number of years ago, I created a web page called “The Rock ‘n’ Roll Family Tree”. It was a static page of bands and musicians that linked them all, i.e. a musician that was in two bands linked those two bands. If another musician in one of those bands was also in a third band, then that band was linked as well, and so on. A band was only considered linked if a member of that band was also a member of another band — things like guest appearances, one-off duets, session work, and things like that didn’t count. Eventually, I had well over 100 bands linked, including everyone from Black Sabbath to Culture Club to Foreigner to Strawberry Alarm Clock.

Unfortunately, I’ve since lost the original list, but I’ve
been toying with the idea of re-creating it. Of course, I’d do it in PHP now, with
a backing database. I’d love to use SQL Anywhere (the database product I work on)
as the backing store, but very few web hosting companies (if any) offer SQL
Anywhere support (mine does not), and I am not willing to host the site myself on
my own home machine. I’d also love to add a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon-type
thing where you could enter two musicians or bands and display
the links between them, but that’s a lot more work. For example, to get from
Whitesnake to Metallica, you could do this:

  • Steve Vai was in Whitesnake
  • Rudy Sarzo was in Whitesnake with Steve Vai
  • Rudy Sarzo was also in Quiet Riot with Randy Rhoads
  • Randy Rhoads played with Ozzy Osbourne
  • Mike Trujillo also played with Ozzy Osbourne
  • Mike Trujillo is now in Metallica

In many cases, there are multiple ways to get from one band to another —
Steve Vai also played with David Lee Roth, as did a guitarist named Jason Becker.
Becker was previously in a band called Cacophony with Marty Friedman, who later
joined Megadeth with Dave Mustaine, and Mustaine used to be in Metallica.

Just for completeness, Steve Vai appeared in a movie in 2006 called
Crazy, with Chris Ellis, who was also in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon. And
Kevin Bacon is also a musician, having recorded an album or two with his brother,
so maybe he’ll make this list too.

Aw, crap. I just found bandtoband.com,
which is exactly what I described above. They took my idea and ran with it.
(Though I suppose it’s possible that they simply had the same idea, and
didn’t steal it from me.) They have almost 7,000 bands in their database, so I
suppose there’s no reason for me to do it.

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Downloading music legally? You can do that?

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I entered the world of legally-downloaded digital music a couple of weeks ago. I admit, I have downloaded some music illegally — from Napster several years ago, just some songs that I liked from bands that I didn’t want a whole album of. In a few cases, I ended up buying the album anyway, and in the cases where I didn’t, I generally don’t listen to those songs anymore anyway. I have also downloaded some music from various torrent sites – mainly for guitar practice. Being in the software industry, I’m not a big fan of pirating stuff, so I feel kind of dirty (and not just a little bit hypocritical) doing it.

To ease my guilty conscience, I have been looking for a place to buy digital music that (a) had a good selection of stuff (lots of sites have independent stuff, but I wanted big labels as well), (b) the ability to purchase single songs, not just entire albums, and (c) no restrictions on the downloaded files. Most of the sites I’ve found so far (like iTunes) have restrictions on the files — you can only listen to the songs so many times or for such-and-such a time limit, or you can only download the files to a particular device (or small set of devices), or stuff like that. I want the ability to make CDs, copy MP3s around anywhere I want, stuff like that. My guitar teacher told me about puretracks.com, so I checked it out. It has all three of the criteria I listed above, plus the prices are good, and best of all, the site is Canadian. The only minor caveat is that the files you download are compressed WMA files, not MP3, so they can only be played with Windows Media Player. However, the license you get allows you to burn CDs, and Media Player can do that. So, I downloaded a few albums, and for each one, burned a CD, then fired up my MP3 ripper and ripped the CD to MP3s, so now I have the unrestricted MP3 files that I wanted. I have no intention of illegally distributing these files, I just want to be able to copy them between my computers, use them on my MP3 player in the car, and on the MP3 player I bought for Gail for her birthday (which she has yet to open, 2 months later). It’s annoying to have to burn a CD and then rip it (and then erase it, so I can use it again for the next album), rather than just convert from WMA to MP3 directly. The MP3 ripper I have (CDex) has that ability, but can’t seem to handle these WMA files (possibly because they’re licensed), so until I figure out how to do the conversion, I’ll have to go through this extra step. Annoying and time-consuming, but not that big a deal.

The first things I downloaded were the song “River Below” by Billy Talent, and the first album from Godsmack. I had heard good things about Godsmack, but I didn’t know any of their stuff. I did read in the Wikipedia entry on them that they are often compared to Alice In Chains (and are, in fact, named after an Alice in Chains song), and I like Alice in Chains, so I figured what the hell. It only took about three Godsmack songs before I decided I should probably just go ahead and buy the other three Godsmack albums too. I asked my friend Steve, who’s into lots of really heavy stuff, and he said that all the Godsmack albums are really good. A week after my first download, I downloaded the entire Billy Talent album, as well as the third (Faceless) and fourth (IV) Godsmack albums — for some reason, the second one (Awake) is only available on physical CD. I haven’t gotten to the IV album yet, but from the first two, I’m not hearing much of a similarity to Alice in Chains. So far, it seems more like Metallica’s James Hetfield singing with Stone Temple Pilots. A couple of songs even sound kind of like Creed, though I have thought in the past that Creed sounded like STP anyway. I like the Billy Talent stuff as well — the guitarist has an interesting style, though the singer is a little screechy sometimes.

Maybe I should go all out and ease my guilty mind by going through the songs that I downloaded illegally and either (a) erasing them, or (b) buying them through puretracks. Of course, if I do that, then I’d have to go and actually buy the first season of Family Guy too…

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Let me give you some good advice, young man, you better learn to play guitar

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It’s been almost a year since I started my weekly guitar lessons. Still no Grammy award, but I’m certainly better than I was a year ago. Favourite songs to play: Blackbird by The Beatles and The Rain Song by Led Zeppelin (though you have to retune the guitar for that one, which is kind of a pain). The lessons have certainly been helpful, but more because I’m forced to get the guitar out at least once a week and play it. I’m getting some instruction in my technique, but according to my teacher, that’s good enough that I don’t need much instruction there, just practice. My problem is music theory, and while my teacher does go over it, I’m not retaining much of it. At one point, he was explaining relative chords and stuff, and suddenly a bunch of stuff made sense — I even understood why the guitar strings are tuned the way they are, and not simply to a chord. Of course, a couple of months later, I don’t remember any of that now. It’s not my teacher’s fault, though, I just have to get off my ass and put more time into learning that stuff.

It’s my son’s birthday! Nicky turns the big ‘4’ today. I can’t believe he’ll be starting school (JK) in the fall. We got a package from the school just yesterday about it – his teacher will be Mrs. Tilton, who is new at Greenleaf. We were hoping Ms. Urfey would be his teacher – she’s taught JK at Greenleaf for at least the past 4 years, and is really good. She, however, wanted to move over to teaching grade 2, so they had to bring in another JK teacher. Nicky is looking forward to school, though I don’t think he has any clue what’s in store for him; then again, does any kid starting JK? Probably not. I think the teacher might have her hands full with him, until she can (hopefully) tone down his joking moods, when he loses control of himself, and “no, Nicky” doesn’t really mean anything. Hopefully Mrs. Tilton will have more luck doing that than we have, since she presumably has more experience in dealing with small children than we do. He’s also got three full months before he starts, so maybe he’ll grow out of it by then.

Update: Nicky’s teacher will not be Mrs. Tilton. We requested that he be moved to the A stream (i.e. Wednesday, Friday, and every other Monday rather then Tuesday, Thursday and every other Monday), and they have already done this for us (Gail being chair of the school council may have had a hand in this), so his teacher will be Mrs. Tyrosvoutis. I think that’s the right spelling, anyway – the kids call her Mrs. T. I pity da fool who pronounces her name wrong.

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The Fab Three and the other guy

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An old guitarist’s joke:

What do you call a guy who hangs around with musicians?
The drummer.

I’ve been playing an MP3 CD on shuffle in the car for the past few days. It’s got both the Blue and Red Beatles Greatest Hits albums, as well as some Aerosmith, all five Max Webster albums, and the Eagles – I guess it’s my classic rock mix. Anyway, whenever I listen to the Beatles for any length of time, I am constantly amazed at Ringo Starr. I can think of no band to which the joke above applies more than the Beatles.

Obviously John and Paul were the chief songwriters, and were also great singers and musicians. George was a great guitar player, and while he didn’t write many songs for the Beatles, the ones he did write (Here Comes The Sun, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Something) are really good, and he wasn’t a half-bad singer either. And then there’s Ringo. A pretty good drummer, but a lousy singer, and what songs did he write of any significance? Here’s the list: Octopus’s Garden. The other day I hit Octopus’s Garden during my shuffle, and halfway through the song I had to skip to the next track; I just couldn’t listen to it anymore. It’s the kind of song I would expect from The Wiggles, not from one of the best rock bands ever. The next track that came up was Yesterday, an absolute classic, and one of my favourite Beatles songs. The juxtaposition (what a great word!) was just painful. I also thought that the segue from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (sung by John and Paul) and With a Little Help From My Friends (sung by Ringo) was a little weird, especially given the lyrics at the end of Sgt. Pepper:

I don’t really want to stop the show
But I thought you might like to know
That the singer’s gonna sing a song
And he wants you all to sing along
So let me introduce to you
The one and only Billy Shears

It’s like they’re saying “Here’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for, our singer, the one, the only, Billy Shears!” (big buildup) and then Ringo starts singing (big letdown). This is what we’ve been waiting for? Ironic, too, that the first line of the song is “What would you think if I sang out of tune”.

OK, I guess that’s enough Ringo-bashing for one day.

Concerts I’ve seen

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Here is a list of bands I have seen live. A number in brackets indicates
the number of times I’ve seen that band. They are listed in the order in which
I remembered them while making the list, not the order in which they occurred.

The Captain and Tennille CNE Grandstand – hey, I was only
6
Rush (3) All Maple Leaf Gardens, I think
Triumph (3) MLG twice, and their last-ever show at Kingswood
the day before Rik Emmett left the band
Rik Emmett Opened for Kim Mitchell at the CNE
Kim Mitchell (2) CNE and the Village Green at U of Waterloo
during frosh week
Bob Seger MLG
Bruce Springsteen CNE
The Eagles CNE
Don Henley Kingswood
Honeymoon Suite (6) Kingswood a couple of times, Ontario Place
forum, The Diamond.
Whitesnake CNE
Iron Maiden MLG?
Anthrax MLG? Opened for Maiden
Bruce Dickinson Rock ‘n Roll Heaven
Metallica (2) Copps Colliseum and Olympic Stadium in
Montreal. In Montreal, they played for about an hour before James Hetfield got
burned by some pyrotechnics (during Fade To Black, ironically), and they had to
cut the show short to take him to the hospital. See Guns ‘n Roses below – this
was the same show.
Faith No More Olympic Stadium – opened for Metallica and
GNR
Guns ‘n Roses Olympic Stadium – left the stage after 45 minutes,
causing a riot. Gail and I didn’t notice, because we had left 20 minutes before
that to go see Blue Rodeo, who were playing a free show down the street.
Blue Rodeo (3) A bar in Montreal, The Diamond, and the Village Green at U of W
Corrosion of Conformity Opened for Metallica at Copps
Voivod Opened for Rush at MLG. They sucked.
Saga MLG
Styx CNE
Heart Kingswood
Haywire Kingswood
The Rolling Stones CNE
The Who CNE – Very disappointed. No band that was that popular,
with that much material, that has been around for 30+ years should be allowed to
play a 90-minute show. The Stones played over 3 hours.
Paul McCartney SkyDome – fantastic show
Red Rider Opening for Rush at MLG
Tom Cochrane (2) Some place in Ottawa (New Years Eve 1992), and
The Twist in Waterloo
Chalk Circle The Twist
Ray Lyell and the Storm The Twist
The Tragically Hip Fed Hall (!) at U of Waterloo
Jeff Healey Fed Hall
Bryan Adams Molson Park
Sass Jordan Molson Park
The Steve Miller Band Molson Park
Moxy Fruvous Molson Park
Extreme Molson Park
Barenaked Ladies Kingswood
Def Leppard CNE
The Wallflowers ACC, opening for John Mellencamp
John Mellencamp (3) CNE, Molson Amphitheater (when Gail was
8 months pregnant), and ACC. The one at the CNE was probably the loudest concert
I’ve even been to.
Crowded House Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle
The Posies Bumbershoot – opened for Crowded House
Van Halen CNE, but sadly, never with David Lee Roth
Aldo Nova MLG, opened for Saga
Prism Entex
Sheryl Crow CNE, opened for the Eagles
BTO CNE, opened for Van Halen

Update: Added third Blue Rodeo show, Moxy Fruvous, and Extreme – thanks Fais! Also remembered Barenaked Ladies and Aldo Nova

Update: Added Prism

Update: Added Sheryl Crow

Update: Added BTO opening for Van Halen. There was a third band on the bill, but I can’t remember who it was.

Shark-jumping

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I’ve been a fan of The Tea Party since their first album Splendor Solis. I, like everyone else, noted Jeff Martin’s striking similarity (in both looks and voice) to Jim Morrison, but by the time their second album The Edges of Twilight (one of my favourite albums) was released, I’d forgotten about that. Martin and the rest of the Tea Party definitely had their own unique musical style (though not dissimilar to that of Led Zeppelin), and he’s a very talented guitarist.

The next album, Transmission, was also good – heavier, and without the Eastern musical influences that The Edges of Twilight had, but unmistakeably The Tea Party. Psychopomp is still my favourite Tea Party song ever, and Temptation, Gyroscope, Alarum, and Emerald are all great songs. (Hmmm…just noticed that Army Ants is the only song on that album that doesn’t have a one-word title.) I guess Triptych was when they started to go downhill. It was a pretty good album – The Messenger and Chimera are really good songs, and Samsara was reminiscent of The Edges of Twilight. However, the first song I heard from this album was Heaven Coming Down, which was not quite a sappy love song, but close. It certainly didn’t have the same Tea Party edge, and was much more radio-friendly than most of their stuff. When I first heard it, I thought “Uh-oh, sounds like Jeff Martin fell in love or got married or something between the last album and this one”. I remember laughing when the radio DJ said basically the same thing once the song was over.

The Interzone Mantras had some great songs (Angels, Lullaby, Cathartik), but more not-so-great stuff, and the last album, Seven Circles, was not great at all. Writing’s on the Wall was not bad, but was less than 3 minutes long. Wishing You Would Stay was pretty good, but Holly McNarland’s backing vocals really made that song. I guess Martin realized that they’d jumped the shark, and he left the band. Since he was the guitarist, singer, chief songwriter, arranger, and producer, his leaving effectively killed the band. I don’t know if the other two guys in the band even considered finding a replacement, but I really hope they didn’t.

So the other day I’m in Future Shop, and I see a solo album from Jeff Martin called Exile and the Kingdom. I didn’t know at the time that the Tea Party had broken up, so I just figured he’d put his own solo record together. I picked it up (only $9.99!), and I’ve listened to it at work a couple of times now. Unfortunately, it seems that either (a) he’s continuing the downward trend, since this album isn’t even as good as Seven Circles (the worst Tea Party album), or (b) the other members of the Tea Party contibuted a lot more than just bass, keyboards and drums to that band. Most of the album is just kind of boring and forgettable, but the last song, Good Time Song, is dreadful. Granted, I’ve only listened to the album twice now, so I’ll try to keep an open mind and listen to it a few more times, in case it grows on me. I didn’t like Dream Theater’s Scenes from a Memory when I first heard it, and now it’s my favourite Dream Theater album, so it could happen, I guess.

On a similar note, I also recently picked up Queensrÿche‘s new album Operation: Mindcrime II, the “sequel” to their amazing 1986 concept album Operation: Mindcrime. Can you have a sequel to an album? I suppose if it’s a concept album, you can. Made a bunch of money for Meat Loaf. Anyway, this is another example, like Jeff Martin, of a band that’s jumped the shark. Their first couple of albums were pretty good, Rage For Order was very good, and then came Mindcrime, which made Queensrÿche one of the biggest progressive rock bands around. After that came Empire, another great album, which contained the radio-friendly-but-still-cool hit Silent Lucidity. Promised Land was next, and it was good too, but then they dropped off big-time. Their next two albums, Hear in the Now Frontier and Q2K, weren’t good at all, and then I lost interest. I’m not even sure if there was another album or two in there. (Somewhere after Empire they released Operation: LIVECrime, which was a live performance of the entire Mindcrime album.) MC II was released a couple of weeks ago, and I picked it up, just to see how they would continue the story. The result so far: meh. It’s good, but as my sister might say, it’s no screaming hell. There should have been more continuity (both musical and story-wise) from the first album (they should talk to Dream Theater about how to do this). In general, it doesn’t sound like a sequel, it sounds like a completely different album containing a story that happens to involve people with the same names as the first album.

I hate to say it, since I’m a huge Hip fan, but I think The Tragically Hip have also jumped the shark. Their last three albums have been quite forgettable, though the live DVD “That Night In Toronto” released last fall was really good. Another shark-jumping band might be Audioslave — and after only 2 albums. Their second album was very disappointing, considering how good the first one was. Rush hasn’t gotten to the point of producing really bad albums, but the last few are certainly not as good as their earlier stuff, so maybe they should call it a career. A couple of years ago, I thought U2 had jumped the shark as well, but they seemed to be off of whatever drugs caused the Zooropa and Pop albums, and the last couple have been really good.

All Steves, all the time

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Ever notice how a lot of great guitar players are named Steve? Steve Howe (Yes), Steve Vai, Steve Harris (Iron Maiden), Steve Lukather (Toto), Steve Morse (now with Deep Purple), Steve Hackett (Genesis), Steve Stevens (Billy Idol), and the late Steve Clark (Def Leppard) and Stevie Ray Vaughan. You got a few Jimmys too (Hendrix, Page, Vaughan), a couple of Erics (Clapton, Johnson), three Adrians (Vandenburg from Whitesnake, Belew from King Crimson, and Smith from Iron Maiden), and even a guy named Vivian (Campbell, from both Def Leppard and Whitesnake) but still it seems like an inordinate number of Steves.

Look around for great guitar players named Graeme, and you’ll be looking for a while. In fact, look around for anyone remotely famous named Graeme (with that spelling), and you’ll find exactly two – a composer named Graeme Revell, who’s done lots of movie soundtracks, and Graeme MacKay, who does political cartoons for the Hamilton Spectator. Maybe someday I’ll join that list, though as what, I don’t know.