Vintage

In 1959 an album was released with one of the simplest cover art ever published, next to perhaps the White Album. On one side it read "Blind Joe Death." On the other side was printed only "John Fahey." Only 95 copies of the LP were pressed. There were no liner notes and no obvious credits given to the musician playing the music. And it's arguably one of the greatest solo guitar albums ever recorded.

John Fahey was a guitarist and avid record collector. In his collection Fahey had a scratched old 78 RPM record from 1927 of a song called "John Henry" by a man called "Blind Joe Death." It is Blind Joe Death's only known recording and it's quite possible the recording was never actually released because it is not listed in the Paramount label's catalogue.

That old 78 record was so influential to John Fahey that in 1959 he released his own album under that name: the cryptically titled album with only the words "Blind Joe Death" on the cover. That album has since garnered such a cult following that the name "Blind Joe Death" is more often thought to be John Fahey himself....

The Vancouver City Limits New Music Review featured one of my bands, Leonard and the Lab Rats about a month ago. City Limits regularly tapes their shows and they posted this video of Leonard's original song, "Shakin' the Salt."

The discussion about the music business and making money has been heated for years. But it's getting even more desperate as musicians around the world struggle with trying to make money for the love of it and trying to make money from the music.

Music Think Tank is a blog that carries on this discussion, and this week published a particularly poignant article that holds no stops. It's a good summary of the way it feels to be a musician these days.

The internet has entirely switched the focus from making music to sales and marketing. While some might say that this is just the harsh reality, it's what you have to do to survive, I say bollocks. I'm not just being romantic about this. There's a choice: play gigs, experience that peculiar bonding you get with fellow band members, feel that curious mixture of love and antipathy you get from an audience – and make no money. Or obsess about selling mp3s – and make no money....

I don't often get excited about guitar effects pedals, but my interest in open source software gets me excited about this new product: The Coyote-1 Open Stomp guitar effects pedal.

It allows you to create your own effects on your computer, download them to the stomp box, and even share your effects online with others who can then download them into their own Coyote pedals.

Its creator calls it an audio sandbox. "The Coyote-1 is designed to be an 'Audio Sandbox' where people can try out effect ideas, share them with others, and take them gigging."