Dispatches

When the internet revolution arrived, music was the canary in the coal mine.  It was the first industry to choke on the digital carbon monoxide.  As soon as masterpieces such as Dark Side of the Moon and Thriller were reduced to binary code, there was trouble inside the mine. 

The crisis caught the industry flatfooted.  Labels balked at modernizing (“CDs today, CDs tomorrow, CDs forever!”)  Once the magnitude of that mistake was apparent, they attempted a rear-guard defense with litigation.  It failed.  

The most famous example was Metallica’s crusade against Napster.  The band’s drummer, Lars Ulrich, went before a Congressional committee to explain that file-sharing was “a sophisticated version of taping a baseball game off the television”, tantamount to “theft”.  For that blunt assessment, The New York Times pilloried him with the headline: “Metallica Turns On Its Fans.”  Ulrich and his band were portrayed as fat-cats in studded leather, eager to exact economic pain on their working-class listeners.  

The economic pain was instead doled out to working musicians.  Royalties dried up, album budgets shrank.  No more mailbox money, baby.

It’s no surprise then that many musicians looked on with bitter glee as the same digital revolution consumed the news media.  After all, it was the same media that had vilified them for raising the alarm.  You don’t think Chicken Little harbored a dark little smile as the sky fell upon his ridiculers?  The idea of a fully-staffed local newspaper is now just as anachronistic as a fully-stocked record store. 

(In a supreme twist of irony, the only newspaper to fully survive the digital onslaught did so by embracing what Lars Ulrich had been advocating for: paywalling.  The New York Times dug their digital moat in 2011 and now remains financially garrisoned because of it.  Well… that and the acquisition of ‘Wordle’.)

Musicians eventually dug a moat of their own.  Digital streaming.  Spotify spearheaded a new model where consumers paid for music again.   And while many good faith criticisms can be leveled at the Green Giant, the years between Napster and the modern streaming economy were indeed bleaker.  So credit where credit is due.

The lesson is clear, though.  When a technological revolution is nigh, it’s best to adapt in anticipation, not in reaction.  To do so is to dictate the terms of a victory; rather than to surrender to the terms of a defeat.  Music’s adaptation to internet file-sharing was reactive.  That is to say, it was too late.  By the time streaming arrived, recorded music had already been devalued.  It was no longer fine wine to be paid for, it was tap water to freely chugged from the spigot.  The meek terms of a surrender.

The Artificial Intelligence revolution is now here.  Music is once again the coughing canary.  Consumer-facing AI engines can now create entire songs from simple language prompts.  On the current course, streaming services will soon be flooded with music that is wholly AI generated.  The moat of digital streaming itself will be catastrophically diluted.  

Musicians need not despair, though.  This time, the industry appears to be adapting with alacrity.  The first shot across the bow is a landmark lawsuit spearheaded by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against two of the leaders in generative AI music: Udio and Suno.   For the sake of clarity, let us focus solely on Suno.

Whereas other music generation engines can discreetly create instrumentals, lyrics or voices, Suno can do all three combined.   It does so in an instant.  The time it takes for an artist to compose and record a song varies widely; but it certainly takes longer than typing the prompt: “shoegaze pop song in the key of B major at 120BPM with lyrics about my dead dog”.  

Simply put, humans cannot compete.  In the time it takes an artist to compose and record a single song, AI can generate a tsunami of competing recordings.  As an artist sleeps, the unblinking eye of Suno will compose whole sonic libraries.

The lawsuit hinges on how those companies ‘trained’ their AI algorithms.  To create ‘new’ material, the AI engines had to ingest an immense amount of previously recorded music.   In the same way that ChatGPT scraped all the data from Facebook and Wikipedia to train its learned language models, Suno scraped the entirety of recorded music history. 

But here’s the rub.  Recorded music enjoys legal protections.  It’s not defenseless like your Aunt Sheila’s Facebook post about the Illuminati or a Wikipedia entry on Guy Fieri’s favorite fried rice.  Recorded music is copyrighted.  This lawsuit alleges that Suno has committed copyright infringement at an “almost unimaginable scale”.  

At first blush, it does seem to me like copyright infringement.  But that conclusion leads to an uncomfortable question:  When I was learning to write songs, what did I train myself on?  Was I not, in fact, involved in the same appropriation as Suno?

When I arrived in Chicago at the age of 22, I barely knew a soul.  I was a stranger in a strange land; quite literally in Oz.  I walked like a ghost between the shoppers on Michigan avenue.  I passed invisible on bridges above the tourists gliding down the Chicago River on architectural boat tours- teachers from Indiana and Ohio marveling at the towering brick monuments built by their forefathers.  

My loneliness and boredom afforded me time to consume art that I loved.  It wasn’t long before I began trying to make my own.  So I would listen to Bob Dylan’s The Freewheeling and learn his fingerpicking patterns.  Or I would leaf through Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and study his rhetorical devices.  Or maybe, I’d listen to The Band’s Music from Big Pink and find a compelling chord progression. Add a Dylan picking pattern and a Whitman rhetorical flourish on top, and voila!  A song of my own.  It was the thinking man’s paint-by-numbers.

Listening to my debut album, it is easy to hear those influences.  Maybe too easy.  I didn’t just wear them on my sleeve, I got them sleeve-tattooed! 

The artists that I was borrowing from, though, were not laboring in a vacuum themselves.  Dylan’s first albums were homages to his hero Woody Guthrie.  And upon reading Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson would have recognized his own rhetorical devices marbled throughout. 

“Good artists borrow, great artists steal” is not just a maxim, it is an injunction.  It is a demand to artists: to make everything old, new again.  But that injunction is the wellspring of countless tough questions:

Won’t the creators of AI music engines simply argue they are following in this same tradition?  

Are they simply doing with Code what I was doing with the left hemisphere of my brain?  

Does opposing their progress just make me a medieval monk railing against the Guttenburg Press?  Or stable-owner bemoaning Henry Ford’s horseless carriages?  

If something is objectively beautiful, does it matter how it is made?  

These questions, though, quickly take on the crude sophistry of a dorm room debate; elaborate exercises in missing the whole damned point.  Sure, an undergrad can stay up until midnight smoking cigarettes and debating ‘free will’.  But a decade later, if that same undergrad runs a Ponzi scheme or cheats on his wife, no one wants to hear the word ‘determinism’.  This is real life, man.

So it goes with generative AI.   What makes a human songwriter’s appropriation of prior work legitimate, and a supercomputer’s illegitimate?  The fact that we prefer it to be so.  That’s enough.  No further justification needed.  Creativity is a bedrock human endeavor.  We can decline to participate in its outsourcing.

It is edifying to spend ten thousand hours playing the guitar.  It is good for the soul to sit in front of a blank page for an afternoon.  It is beautiful to learn from an older songwriter how to write a middle-eight.  Preferring those modalities does not make a person a luddite.

One of the greatest lies of modernity is that the advance of technology is inexorable.  That we, as humans, are tiny pebbles being swept along by its irresistible current.  Nonsense.  We have agency.  Always and forever, humans have forbidden certain categories of behavior.   Our toolkit for doing so has been honed over centuries: taboos, taxes, boycotts, sanctions, subsidy removal.  And yes, lawsuits from the RIAA to protect intellectual property.

I am not suggesting that we go full-Amish on AI.  We should not entirely foreswear it.  It should just be employed to the degree that it promotes human flourishing, and curtailed to the degree that it does not.  As the author Joanna Maciejewska put it: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and write, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

ChatGPT instantly delivering a bibliography of historical interpretations of Dostoyevsky?  Sure.

Writing my essay on the meaning of “Crime and Punishment”?  Nope!

Midjourney automating the loops in a vast pattern that is part of a design?  Sounds good.

Designing my city’s Cathedral?  That’s a ‘No’ for me, dawg.

As a recovering ironic hipster, it is agonizing to admit that Lars Ulrich was right.  Metallica was completely justified in their lawsuit.  We should not have let an entire generation get accustomed to not paying for music.  And now, that camel’s nose cannot be forced back out of the tent.

Faced with the generative AI revolution, artists still have a choice.  We can maintain our hip defeatist attitude toward technology- “I guess they’re going to screw us again!”.  We can dismiss the Metallicas of the world pulling the alarm- “Look at those rich chuds just trying to buy their third beach house”.  But if we impotently sneer our way through this revolution, there will be no turning back.  Human-made music will become like the majestic brickwork that tourists flock to see in Chicago: a majestic art the dead once knew but which the living have forgotten.

In my early twenties I was struck with a feeling of grandiosity that bordered on a messianic complex.  I was living in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood in a flophouse with a parade of strangers as roommates.  My room consisted solely of a twin mattress on the floor with a stack of John Steinbeck Penguin Classics stacked beside it.  Rent was $300 a room (which, as I write it now, makes me feel like my grandfather swearing that Cokes used to cost a nickel!).  

Working construction during the day, I was scrawling lyrics in carpenter’s pencil on the discarded cut-ends of 2×4’s.  Whenever my boss would find one, he would lob it at me, and threaten to dock my pay.  At night, I was hopping from one club to another, singing those lyrics out loud.  The songs that I was writing felt raw and powerful.  They felt like the start of something; they felt like the start of something big. 

The most dangerous part of grandiosity is having it confirmed by the outside world.  It’s one thing to have a delusion; it’s another to have the outside world participate in it.  Maybe this is why so many world-famous people become frozen at the age they achieved stardom.  My rise to musical notoriety hit a natural ceiling, which spared me that dangerous feedback.  But there was a fleeting moment when there was no ceiling in sight.  And that moment took place in, of all places, Urbana Illinois.

Until then, I had been touring around the midwest on short self-booked tours.  Almost always playing to empty rooms.  That was until a radio station in Urbana- with the providential anagram WPGU- started playing my music.  I say music, and not “album”, because I had yet to even release one.  They were playing a burned CDR of my earliest songs.  Whenever they played the songs on air, the switchboard would light up (“Cokes were only a nickel, I tell you!”)

So I went to Urbana to see what all the fuss was about.  We booked a show at their legendary rock joint, The Canopy Club.  This wasn’t the typical singer-songwriter venue I was used to underselling.  Smashing Pumpkins had played The Canopy on their way up, so had the Flaming Lips.  

When I arrived at the load-in doors, I was greeted by a full staff.  There were five hundred tickets sold for the show that night.  This was new to me.  I was accustomed to walking in the front door and asking a stoned bartender where I could stash my guitar before the gig.  The Canopy had sound engineers, loaders, security guards, and a house manager.  They had even stocked the greenroom with my “rider”.  For what it’s worth, my rider at the time consisted of:

-Two packs of Marlboro Reds

-A lighter

-A case of Budweiser

-A fifth of Jim Beam

-Two sharpie markers

-A pack of athletic socks (laundry is hard to come by on the road!)

That night, as the openers plucked away to the boisterous crowd, I prowled the wings of the stage sensing utter vindication.  I had not been wrong to be grandiose, you see.  No!  It was was all of those past nightclub owners who never booked me, they were wrong.  The record labels that didn’t sign me, the other radio stations that didn’t play me- they had missed a diamond in the rough.  I was standing on the precipice of every young man’s dream: society fully participating in his delusions.  The pilot light of my grandiosity was meeting a river of fuel.

The show that night was a dream of cinematic proportions.  A packed room of undergraduates sang along to what seemed like every word.  But I wasn’t focused on the experience of the night itself.  Already, I was looking ahead.  I was focused on what it meant; what it foretold.  Before me I saw an endless string of sold out Canopy Clubs around the nation.  I saw late night television, and festival main stages, and a million bucks.  

But none of that came to pass.  The pattern that I had followed that far did not play out into the future.  It would take years before I was able to admit that to myself.  And it broke my heart.  But the heart that was inside of me at the time- vain and small- was a heart that deserved to be broken. 

The Rose Bowl Tavern, on North Race Street in Urbana, opened in the former building of the town’s U.S. Post Office.  It opened in 1946 but they didn’t officially get a liquor license until 1948.  Apparently in the post World War II glow, no one was sweating the small stuff.  

Eventually, the club was bought by its own janitor, a man named Sunny Norman who sometimes moonlighted as the entertainment.  Sunny and his wife Ruth operated the club; he ran the music, she ran the bar.  Sunny Norman & The Drifting Playboys played country music there six nights a week, with Mondays off.  It became officially and colloquially known as “The Home of Country Music” in Urbana.  

In the early years, they hosted a who’s-who of Country Music greats: Faron Young, Gene Watson, Johnny Russell, and Bobby Helms.  Bluegrass legend Allison Krause is a native of Urbana.  Local legend has it that she used to loiter in the alley behind the club before she was old enough to enter, listening to the music through an open window.  In later years the Rose Bowl welcomed progenitors of the Americana sound- Ray Wylie Hubbard, Bill Kitchen, Elizabeth Cook, and my old pal Justin Townes Earle.  

Upon entering the club on a bright and sweltering June afternoon, a patron feels as if they have been welcomed into the cool oasis of their grandfather’s basement.  The dim overhead lighting meets the bright neon on the walls like the freshwater of a river meeting the saltwater of the ocean,  a perfect brackish vibe.  The ceiling is low-slung in a manner that feels snug rather than confining.  The capacity of the club is officially 150.  Though when you walk inside, you get the feeling that number was arrived at by an unusually benevolent fire marshal.  

The bar itself is an island in the back of the room, patrons can sidle up to any side; think of a pool bar on dry land.  It’s the platonic ideal of a bar to watch a game- nothing to do but swill $3 Coors Lites and nosh Beer Nuts.  Locals say that whenever broadcaster Dick Vitale would come to town for an Illini basketball game, he’d stop by the Rose Bowl for a beer.

Its cultural influences, too, are singular.  The Rose Bowl is the best parts of a Wisconsin Supper Club mixed with a Texas juke joint.  That is, faux-wood paneling checkered with portraits of Patsy Cline and Hank Williams.  Vinyl booth seats along the window.  Vintage light sconces straight out of “Dogs Playing Poker”.  This blend is a microcosm of the town itself.  Urbana is a college-town speck in the vast agricultural ocean that is Southern Illinois; the second largest producer of corn, and the largest producer of soybeans in the nation.  The surrounding country brings to mind more Amarillo than Chicago.

I arrived there last week, guitar in hand, to play my first concert in Urbana since my conquering Canopy Club days, a decade gone now.  Assessing the layout of the club, a smile crossed my face.  It had the grizzled nightclub musician’s holy trinity- ample parking, a good sound system and a private bathroom.

I plunked my guitar on the stage and bounded down to the basement dressing room.  My rider, fifteen years later as a father of three, looks decidedly different than it used to:

-Trail Mix

-Nut Thin Crackers

-Cheese 

-Beef Jerky

-Olives

-A bottle of wine

(It’s weak, I know.  You either die a rockstar or live long enough to become a calorie-counting villain.)

That night, I stepped onto stage to do the job that I love to do.  Only this time, I wasn’t focused on the future.  I wasn’t imagining the next step or extrapolating some imagined trajectory.  I wasn’t interpreting the moment, I was enjoying it.  It turns out that a perfect Midwestern bar on a Friday night in the summer is easy to enjoy.  No grandiosity necessary.  

Human beings, we seek patterns.  When that pursuit it well-ordered it helps us stay alive.  When it is disordered it becomes a kind of paranoid hyper-vigilance.  I mistook my initial experience at the Canopy Club for an epiphany; a sudden realization of a grand destiny.  Instead, what I experienced was an apophany: a perceived meaningful pattern about things that are not interconnected.  A slightly more sophisticated version of looking at a burnt piece of toast and seeing the face of Jesus.

Heaven is the Rose Bowl Tavern.  I lived for so many years without eyes to see that.  How many others did I miss?  How many Rose Bowls in plain sight did I stare right through?  How many times did I mistake a paradise for a small dot in a pattern that didn’t exist?  How many holy moments did I treat as transactions?  A single one is too many.  

If you need me, I’ll be in the vinyl booth by the window, peering out for a glimpse of Allison Krause; scanning the corner of the bar for Dicky V. 

Bucky Baxter could have stepped out of the pages of a Mark Twain novel, perhaps as a confidence man scalping tickets to a county fair.  Or better yet, he could have jumped off the screen of a Coen brothers film, as a rakish father-figure dispensing advice of doubtful legal provenance.  In real life, he was a singularly talented pedal steel guitarist.  His career featured stints with Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, REM, and Sheryl Crowe.  But he was more than that.  Much more.  Bucky was a road dog philosopher, an artfully flawed raconteur, a spiritual folk hero.  

His professional exploits were legion.  He personally gave Dylan steel guitar lessons.  At the end of a tour with Johnny Paycheck, he had previously ordered so much ‘Bolivian marching powder’ from the road manager that instead of being tendered his paycheck, he was presented with a bill.  He went on a two week bender in Los Angeles, and emerged from Capitol Studios as the only accompanying musician on Ryan Adams’ lost album, “Suicide Handbook”.   He was once reprimanded by a bandleader for asking for advances on his “P.D.”  The incensed boss said, “P.D. stands for per diem.”  Bucky retorted, “I thought it stood for poontang and dope.”  

On a personal level he was wily and unpredictable.  He could spend hours recounting the exploits of the Kentucky-born clairvoyant, Edgar Cayce, better known as “The Sleeping Prophet”.  Later in life, he was involved in a start-up internet marketplace with the astoundingly sketchy moniker, “Moontoast”.  Once, late at night on the streets of Bellingham, I heard him give an impassioned defense of Dick Cheney’s vice presidency.  He was hard to pin down, Bucky was.

I had the privilege of touring with him some years ago.  He taught me many things.  The least of which was how to wrangle the sound of an acoustic guitar. 

(The following section is slightly technical, which will be useful to guitarists, but which might be Greek to the rest of you.  Either way, this is a good opportunity to reiterate that I never use ‘affiliate links’.  That is, I am not paid to recommend particular products. All recommendations are based on preference alone.)

In all endeavors, musical and otherwise, it is good to begin with the goal in mind.  It is necessary, then, to define what is possible when it comes to an amplified acoustic guitar.  Let us begin here: it is impossible to make an amplified acoustic guitar sound good.  It is only possible to make it sound less awful.  Electronically amplifying an acoustic instrument is, by definition, a game of compromise.  

Imagine sitting outdoors at a brewery on a beautiful Sunday afternoon; the sun is shining, the waitress brings you an ice cold beer, all is well.  All is well, that is, until a hungover undergrad with an acoustic guitar begins braying Sublime covers through the P.A.  Can you hear that sound in your head?  That is the default state of an amplified acoustic guitar.  Hot trash.  Without intervention, that’s the baseline.  The sonorous chords of the instrument are compressed into a tone that is quacky, rubbery, and plinky (all technical terms, of course).

The first step towards better acoustic guitar sound is every musician’s favorite pastime: buying shit.  Purchasing a proper signal chain is a pre-requisite for decent guitar sound.  An acoustic guitar signal chain looks like this:

Guitar > Pickup > Cable > DI

First, the guitar itself:  I recommend a vintage Guild D-25 from the 1970s or 1980s.  These still go for $600-1200 on Reverb.  They are incredibly durable guitars, made for traveling.  They project a balanced sound across the sonic spectrum.  That is to say, no particular frequency from low to high is naturally louder than another.  Instead, the player himself is able to freely emphasize notes without battling the preferences of the instrument.  

Best of all, at this reasonable price-point, traveling with a Guild is not stressful.  It’s hard to find fault with a Martin or Gibson guitar, but they are pricey.  So it is equally hard to baggage-check one of them on an airplane without having a panic attack.

Tom Waits used to play a D-25.  So did Gillian Welch.  What more do you need to hear?

Next, consider the pickup.  Broadly there are two types: active pickups which require some kind of internal power source, and passive pickups which do not.  I strongly prefer active pickups.  Yes, it is a pain to change its batteries.  But passive pickups fundamentally lack detail and clarity.  They rob a guitar’s sonic richness the way a telephone robs a human voice of its character.  

The placement of that pickup is important, too.  The most common placements are undersaddle and inside the sound hole.   To me, the undersaddle sounds rubbery.  Instead, I recommend a sound hole pickup.  Specifically, the Fishman Rare Earth.  This beauty blends the signal of a humbucker pickup with a tiny condenser mic, giving the guitarist tremendous sonic control.   For more body, boost the humbucker; for more air, boost the mic.

The guitar cable does not matter.  I don’t care what your boomer uncle says.  The ultimate fate of every guitar cable is to be forgotten on a nightclub stage during a half-drunk load out.  Spend your money elsewhere.

Finally, there is the consideration of the Direct Box or “D.I.”.  This element is necessary to transform the unbalanced signal from the instrument’s pick-up (which is carried over a quarter-inch cable) into the balanced signal carried by an XLR cable which can interface with a professional P.A..  These pieces of equipment also come in either active or passive varieties.  Although in this case, no internal battery is required, the device receives 48 volts of “phantom power” directly from the mixing board.  Again, I prefer active.  They’re simply louder and more defined.

For years, I traveled with a Radial J48.  Anything made by Radial is worth the sticker price.  They can be chucked off the top of a building and still keep ticking.  Of late, I have switched to a Neve RNDI.  Both the Radial and the Neve sound great, hold their resale value over time, and are durable.

Technical solutions only solve half the problem of terrible guitar sound, though.  The other half is more hard won.  And to understand it, we need to return to Bucky.

Getting a living legend to play in your band requires some old fashioned horse-trading.  In 2010, Bucky’s son Rayland- who is now an astonishingly good singer and songwriter in his own right- was looking to break into the business.  The Buck Man agreed to play in my band on two conditions.  First, that Rayland could open the entire tour.  And second, that Bucky would not ride in our tour van.  He would instead drive himself in his own Mercedes E-class, and I would pay for its diesel.   

Deal.

With both conditions met, we hit the road with the Baxters.  The clubs were small and the audiences were smaller.  It was my first headlining tour and there was much to be learned.  Among other problems, I was constantly losing my voice and breaking guitar strings.  It was the bushiest of bush leagues.  Unfortunately, there is no way to transcend amateur status besides putting in those embarrassing hours.

Yet, Bucky remained perfectly poised the entire time.  It was something to admire.   Here was a man who had played coliseums with Dylan. Now he was playing empty nightclubs with beer-soaked amateurs.  Yet he was doing it with style; Ray Bans, a Mercedes, Rodd & Gunn boat shoes, perfect pitch. As Charles Bukowski once said, “To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it.  To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.”

At the end of the tour, we ended up in New Orleans with a night off.  After devouring a meal of fried alligator with the whole band, Bucky pulled me aside and said, “Let’s find a place to talk, Pug.”

We escaped down the sidewalk and slipped into bar that could barely fit a dozen people.  I ordered a Sierra Nevada and Bucky ordered a Budweiser.

“You can do this if you want to.  You can play music.  You’ve got it,” he confided, “But you’re doing three things wrong.”

I was expecting some lighthearted Dylan stories, not a professional intervention.

“First, you’re drinking too much.”

“Should I quit?”

“No.  Moderate.  Moderate so you don’t have to quit.”

“I can do that,” I agreed while avoiding his eyes.

“Second, you’re choking your own voice.  You’re singing from your throat.  If you sing from your diaphragm, you’ll never lose your voice again.  You should take a voice lesson or two.”

“I can do that, also.”

“Finally, you should never break a guitar string on stage.”

This I didn’t understand.  Shouldn’t I be playing with passion on stage?  And wasn’t breaking strings a necessary side effect of passion?

“You’re confusing wildness for power.  You’re confusing volume for intensity.  That’s for amateurs.  You can play with power and still be in control.  Guitar strings are temperamental.  The more wild and violent you are with them, the more they choke up.  They don’t ring and chime.”

I began to chafe at this inventory of my shortcomings. I told Bucky as much.

We finished our drinks and retired to the band hotel.  The tour continued for a few more night but that was the last time I spoke with him, one on one.  After the final show in Austin, Rayland piled into the E-class passenger seat and they drove overnight back to Nashville.  (The diesel bill was enormous, trust me).

When I was younger, I had a hard time taking advice. Especially good advice. The kind of advice that makes you die a little death to hear it. A good piece of advice used to force me into certain stages of grief: denial, anger, and finally acceptance.  In the post-tour silence, though, I was able to reflect on Bucky’s advice. And after a good long bout of denial and anger, I accepted it. All of it.

An acoustic guitar that doesn’t sound like hot trash is all about how the strings themselves are struck; just in the manner that Bucky described. Emphatically but lightly; passionately but in control; wild but intentional.  No amount of retail enhancement can fix a poorly struck string.

In 2020, Bucky passed away in Sanibel Island, Florida.  The guitar lessons he taught me, I still use at every show.  And the style that he lived with, I still emulate every day.