This is a really interesting historical and technical background to the unique and sexy sound of Morphine, one of my dear departed favorite 90’s bands. I knew Mark Sandman played a heavily modified bass with two strings, but didn’t know he played everything with a slide—and the action on his strings so high.
I also like how the host goes into the interplay between Sandman and Dana Colley’s baritone sax and how the latter complimented both the bass and vocal melodies in such a unique way. There’s something about a tight group with a rock-solid drummer high in the mix that does it for me; see: Soul Coughing, Smashing Pumpkins, early Queens of the Stone Age. It also just occurred to me that Sandman died two years before I started this weblog.
I walked out of the UPS store this afternoon with a paper slip in my hand and a feeling of melancholy. It didn’t help that the sky was gray and the wind was blowing. a few moments before, I walked in the store with a neatly taped box to mail off to a guy in Miami: inside a protective cocoon of Kraft paper lay my Steinberger bass guitar, something I’ve owned since college and carried with me since then. It’s been sitting in the corner for years, and every year I would take it out and play it, but after I bought the bargain Jazz bass and compared the two, I realized how much more I enjoyed playing the Fender. I’ve shopped it around to several stores in this area and gotten lowball cash offers for it, so I put it up on Reverb at a price that seemed to be reasonable for the market and waited. That was four years ago.
Last Thursday an offer popped up from this guy in Florida, and after some back and forth we settled on a price that I felt OK with. It’s lower than I was asking (after having reduced my initial price once) but still much more than I paid for it, and at this point in history I feel better about having cash in hand than a bass collecting dust in the corner. Strangely though, I’m not as bummed out as I thought I would be; I think I came to terms with selling it a few years ago, and was just waiting for circumstance to catch up with me.
So the bass will make its way to Florida, and when the buyer takes possession, I’ll get my payment from Reverb. I feel better about rolling the dice this way—eBay was never an option—and I’m hoping it all goes smoothly.
I hopped on to Reverb last week to see what the latest comparable offerings to my Steinberger were, and the first one that popped up was a twin to mine, and the only other red XP-2 I’ve ever seen, for sale in Austin, Texas. It looks like pricing has come down some since I listed my bass—the average seems to be hovering right above $2000. The shop selling this one is calling it “rare” and are hoping to get another $500 above average, but it’s also been for sale since last year.
My listing is down, as I only got one inquiry (a trade offer for a Rickenbacker 4003) in the year I’d listed it, and no serious offers. Perhaps I lower the price and relist in the spring. It’s sitting in the corner doing nothing and I’d love to see it move to a good home.
This afternoon, on a phone call, I moved some data into Flourish and built a story around the four main cancer data points: white and red blood cells, and lymphocytes. This is a much easier way to display (and update) the data as I get it.
Wow. If Dad were still alive, I would buy this and offer to fly out to the West Coast to drive it back with him: a 1968 Ford Country Squire wagon, the spitting image of the wagon he had when Renie and I were little kids. This one has a couple of dents and dings, but overall looks like it’s in good shape. Of course, a 390 under the hood means we’d be filling it up every 15 miles, but that would be an epic trip.
I would do some light modification to this wagon—I’d repaint it in the original Ford green, find a roof rack (or the equivalent Thule roof basket) and lift it slightly for some better tires—but keep the stock hubcaps. Refresh the engine, suspension and brakes, sort out the interior, and drive the piss out of it.
So Rush Limbaugh died Wednesday after a bout of lung cancer. Cancer does suck, but seriously, fuck that guy. He and his kind are a cancer on our democracy; maybe that’s a sign of cosmic justice out there somewhere.
Good grief. One of my go-to podcasts, Reply All, did a series on the racism scandal at Bon Appétit, a very popular magazine and online property which has been accused of keeping people of color out of the spotlight. That exposed an identical problem at Gimlet Media, the podcast channel that publishes Reply All. What a mess.
I went back and looked at the Reverb listing for my bass after having forgotten it for a couple of weeks; it’s been viewed 8,000 times but there are still no concrete offers. Meanwhile there are a couple of others listed for more money elsewhere; I’d love to know if anything is moving right now. Here’s to hoping an offer comes out of the blue.
So far there have been no bites on the Steinberger; the listing has gotten 800+ views and 4 watchers but no offers. I’m not paying anything to leave it up there, so I’ll just sit on it and see what happens. Update: I got one offer this morning from a guy who wants to trade it for a Rickenbacker 4003 Pearlstar—something I might have been interested in back in my Geddy Lee worship days, but at this point I’d rather have the cash.
At work, I finally completed a torturous process that began two months ago to design and publish a digital report. The report itself launched last month but due to various editorial and review issues I had to update the PDF and then build the digital report. It’s a high-level view of the state of climate action with an eye towards the next 20 years, and it was a challenge to bring together all of the text, graphics, and digital assets. Even though the process is automated, I found myself diving into code at the tail end and fixing a ton of issues by hand, which was a pleasant surprise.
We’ve now made two different batches of Bailey’s, one from the recipe I posted earlier in the week and one from the Betty Crocker cookbook. Before you get the idea we’ve just been pouring cups of it over our cornflakes every morning, we’ve been sipping on each one slowly—the online recipe is lighter and very almondy and the Betty Crocker recipe is much heavier with more chocolate—but neither are a 100% stand-in for the real thing. So we’ll make our way through these and then we’ll try another recipe.
Jen did break out and use the galette iron on Tuesday, filling the house with the smell of Belgian dessert waffles and making it impossible to concentrate on work. There’s now a full batch sitting on the counter ready to eat when the urge to snack hits. She’s not as pleased with this batch compared to the previous one, so the search for the right modifications to that recipe continues as well.
And the duck boots that I ordered over a month ago finally arrived the other day: they are 1 size too small for my feet, which means I’m going to have to brave the crowds at Nordstrom Rack to return them sometime next week (depending on what the return window is). That was a bummer.
I posted the Steinberger on Reverb Monday morning, after replacing three of the string jaws and cleaning the whole thing up. So far there are 100+ views and 5 people “watching,” but no offers yet. I wonder if this is a good time or a bad time to sell?
It’s been pretty quiet otherwise. We’re slowly working our way through the Harry Potter films, averaging one a night, and tonight is Deathly Hallows Pt. 1. Jen made Butterbeer from a second recipe last weekend which was much better than the first attempt—but was richer than what we had at the park. In hindsight, I hadn’t really remembered how good the Half-Blood Prince is, and my ranking of Azkaban has dropped commensurately. What will we do when we’re out of movies? Well, there’s the Pixar catalog… Finn and I watched Up (thanks Linda!) together over the holiday, and enjoyed every single moment of it.
New jaws are installed and I scrubbed it down last night to take some beauty pictures. There’s a little more pitting in the aluminum than I remember but she still looks great.
There have been libraries of books written about decluttering, simplifying, and cleansing oneself of excess possessions. Companies have sprung up specifically to help people haul away their junk. Marie Kondo got famous after counseling people to keep only what sparks joy in their lives, which is a pretty clever twist on the decision-making process; most people get stuck somewhere in a corner of the basement surrounded by boxes wondering how they’re going to get them all back upstairs; they haven’t even gotten to the will-I-need-this part yet. I think the most common response to that indecision is to just say fuck it and go find a cold beer.
My problem is that I enjoy curating collections of stuff, so I tend to collect stuff faster than I cast it away. As I crawl through the basement to store things for winter or move stuff into the attic of the garage to make more space, I’m acutely aware that we’re reaching maximum density here at the Lockardugan estate. Once I’ve actually resolved to cleaning house, I’m pretty merciless when it finally comes to the go/no-go decision, so waiting around to test for joy feels more like a waste of time.
I’ve written about my oddball bass guitar here in the past. It’s one of the few things I’ve kept with me since high school. I haven’t played it much since I bought the Jazz bass. The other day, I had to move it to get something from the bookshelf, and thought about the fact that it hasn’t seen daylight in years. Then I thought about Reverb, the site I’d mentioned earlier this year, and began to seriously consider selling it. There is a music shop down the street that would buy it, but I know I’d get much less from a reseller than I’d prefer.
The bass itself is a marvel of engineering. It’s a two-piece instrument, made from a cast epoxy resin (neck) and wood (body). The neck is bolted to the body like a traditional guitar, but the composite material gives the bass a completely different feel. It’s headless, which means there’s no traditional headstock with tuning pegs. All tuning is done at the bridge (the assembly at the bottom of the bass) with screw-fed jaws that hold the ends of the strings in place. This means it needs special strings, but tuning it is very precise. It’s got a tight, fast feel and the sound has a short attack with less sustain than a big fat wood bass. When I bought the Jazz bass I was astounded at how much more I liked the full-sized instrument; the neck is thinner and (for me) faster, and I felt like I wasn’t working as hard when I was playing. The Steinberger is fast in its own way but it makes a player work a little harder.
I pulled it from the case and found that two of the jaws that hold the strings at the bridge had snapped. The bridge design is a clever one but the achilles’ heel is the relatively weak aluminum of these jaws, which the ball end of the string sets into. Over time the metal fatigues and cracks. This happened with another of the jaws years ago, and at that time I found a vendor who sold reproductions. That vendor is long gone but there’s a new one run by a luthier that worked at Steinberger in the 80’s who is producing new stock. I ordered three of these on Sunday. My plan is to set the bass back up, clean it, take some good pictures of it, and prepare it for sale.
Owning and playing it brought me hours of joy, new friendships, and great memories. I think I’ll hold on to the memories and pass the bass along to someone who will spark their own joy with it instead.
I don’t play bass regularly enough to justify buying any new equipment, but I like to look at what’s out there. Reverb is a marketplace of new and used gear, and what they have is beautiful. Additional note of interest: the average price point for the Steinberger XP2 is somewhere between $1500 and $3000. As a matter of fact, there’s currently ared XP2 listed for $2800 that’s identical to mine. A 400% appreciation in value isn’t too shabby.
Huh. Someone is selling the black 5-string version of my Steinberger bass for $1650 in D.C. I’ll have to keep an eye on this.
