Musician Diaries

In times of darkness, remembering this story and its moral brings me a huge relief. I've been going through some rough patches in my musical development lately that certainly feel like "broken legs". When everything should be ready to go and I should be, at last, pumping out material consistently, my audio system keeps on pooping on me, with abstruse problems that are too geeky to explain to audio people, and too audio oriented to interest the average computer geek (and the worst part is: NONE OF THEM FUCKING BELIEVE ME.) So I try to see it as a challenge to become better. No problem can be solved from the level of thought where it was created. So this can also be seen as an invitation to evolve. Don't wish for easier stuff, wish to be better. Oh, how I wished to be better right now... Anyways, by now I know well that time corrodes everything, even the tighter wall of shit. This too shall pass, and looking back I'll even see it at some point as a good thing.

I remember reading some time ago about a brilliant guitar player in David Lee Roth's band who had to step out from a tour, a recording session or something like that, because he was diagnosed a disease. The guitarist was Jason Becker, and the disease, as I've come to find out recently, was none other than the splendid shit sandwich known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. For those unfamiliar, it's a disease in which the neurons in charge of sending orders to your muscles start to die, one after another, until you get completely paralyzed. I've been recently digging into Cacophony, the band mr Becker formed in his teens with the also supernatural guitar player Marty Friedman. In such early ages, and he was already doing incredibly technical stuff. I cannot imagine the horror that must have been for an extremely gifted player like him having to lose at first his guitar ability, and knowing what came next (and what a loss for music is this, too! Imagine what world wo

Some kind of "coincidence" has gathered very close in my production line two songs that are very unlike each other, but somehow both very similar to Dead Kennedys' "California Über Alles". This one was written 2 years before "Zombie Barf", and in a very different frame of mind; one of the "moods" I get into when I try to write a little linear punk song is a persona I would call "the moron with a stick". Such moron was within me this time when I grabbed the guitar. All I knew was that it had to sound stupid, frontal, obtuse, as unequivocal as a stone hitting in the face ("Oh, a stone in my face... I wonder what is he implying...") All of this while keeping things humorous and far fetched, of course; humor is one of the most subversive tools I know. So the guitar was played almost as a percussion instrument I intended to break (therefore the retarded, semitone-after-semitone, monotone riff, the first thing that came

It was the best of times... for music listeners. Case in point: the other day I thought "hey, I'm curious about that group Gar Samuelson was in before joining Megadeth. I think I read somewhere they were technical and a bit jazzy..." I didn't even have to remember the name of the band. Just type in the tube "Gar Samuelson", and in about 8 seconds I was listening for the first time to Fatal Opera. The whole album. About 10 years ago, the exact same typing would have probably generated only excerpts, information about the band... In fact, I still remember the moment when this switch in accessibility happened for me. It was 2011; I knew that a certain band was about to release a new album, so I shyly made the query on the album, hoping to find some info on the release, track listing, some interview... To my (bittersweet) amazement, I found the whole thing was already available online; it almost "jumped" on me. Going a bit backwards, in the pre-Interne