New Site - Sickday - Ronnie & Sam

Ronnie Wood - What a character ... I'm sick at home today, it's hailing and pissing down outside and I'm glued to the heater along with Olive the dog ( Harvester Guitars bottlewasher ). I have 'Ronnie' for company, his autobiography that is.

I also have the Sopranos Season 1 and a website to create ... but Ronnie keeps on calling me. The son of London gypsies ( hence the 'Cleopatra' boat-race ), water-gypsies to be precise, he's a bit of a 'good' bad influence on many people I can think of. It occurred to me leafing through the plates in the middle of the book, that all those Tony Zemaitis guitars that the faces had have been a big influence on my career ( cough ) path.

I've played a 12 string acoustic Z ( oval hole, if i remember correctly ) and a metal front electric Z. The electric was lighter than I had ever imagined and had a crack running thru the entire length of it's thin mahogany body, which no-one had been game to glue up yet. I guess there's a lot of screws holding things together there. I didn't get to plug it in, just to hold it and have a bit of a Neil Young/Maybelle Carter riff on it.

All the others that I have seen have been high up on Hollywood walls or behing glass in 'ponytail' guitar shops - no fun.

Before 'Ronnie' I read Sam Cutler's book 'You Can't Always Get What You Want'. An entertaining read.

Both of these books have to join a few obvious dots for the casual reader - you know, Ronnie tells us that Eric wrote 'Layla' about Patti & that The New Yardbirds ( that he narrowly missed joining ) would go on to change their name to Led Zeppelin.

Yawn.

It's my sickday, I can be impatient with a Legend of Rock when I want to ...

Most of the time Sam errs toward personal experience rather than conjecture and 'overview' of a generation.

I met him a few years ago when he guested on an album on which I played bass. The band, Black Cab got him in to say some words over a jam piece and he came along to our Sydney and Melbourne launches of the record to speak on stage.

He has some stories to tell. I play bass, so of course I asked him about Lesh and Bill and Altamont.

That's him rolling his own on stage at the Melbourne gig between Alex's 1968/9 'blocks and binding' Jag and James' 60's Mustang.

Well, I've turned my first post on here into a name-dropping rock n roll book review. It's still raining - no spraying lacquer this week, lucky I have plenty of sanding to do too. And takeaway curry to be getting on with.