Show #171 May 25, 2019

For Gerri G(uitar)

Gerri G- The Go Instant Reaction 
New Guitar In Town- The Lurkers Greatest Hit: Last Will And Testament... 
Rhythm Guitar- Ben Vaughn Mood Swings 
Girl with a Blue Guitar- Cotton Mather Wild Kingdom 
My Guitar Lies Bleeding In My Arms- Tuff Darts! Tuff Darts! 
Junk- Giuda E.V.A. 
Close The Door- Vibeke The World Famous Hat Trick 
Say The Same For You- Fotomaker Fotomaker 
^Perfectly Good Guitar- John Hiatt Perfectly Good Guitar 
Guitars in the Sky- The Records Crashes 
Guitar Named Desire: The Animated Sequel- Big Dipper Crashes On The Platinum Planet 
She's the Rat- The Briefs Platinum Rats 
My Lost Colony- Vegas With Randolph Rings Around the Sun 
Inside My Head- The Impostors Mask 
*Electric Guitar- Matthew Sweet Wicked System Of Things 
*Electric Guitar- Talking Heads Fear of Music 
*Electric Guitar- Empire Expensive Sound 
*Johnny Guitar- The Nice Boys The Nice Boys 
*Johnny Guitar- Grant-Lee Phillips Strangelet 
*Johnny Played The Guitar- Slade II Keep On Rockin! 
My Brown Guitar- XTC Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2) 
Girl w/ A Guitar- Game Theory The Big Shot Chronicles 
Mars Needs Guitars!- Hoodoo Gurus Mars Needs Guitars! 
Smash My Guitar- Blue Ash No More No Less 
Jail Guitar Doors- The Clash Sound System 
^1976 Guitar- Skyhooks The Lost Album 
Guitar- Cake Prolonging the Magic 
Guitar, Guitar, Guitar- Durango 95 Mother's Day 
(If I Had An) Electric Guitar- Aunt Helen Nephews Were Never Like This 
The Girl With The Guitar (Says Oh Yeah) (demo)- The Three O'Clock The Hidden World Revealed 
Guitar Jamboree- Chris Spedding The Very Best Of Chris Spedding 

^Power Pop Peak:  #16 Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs 10/30/93

*SacroSet(s):  "Guitar" Songs

^Power Pop Prototype:  1973 

I have been a guitar guy for most of my life, even before I got my first six string beauty at age 15.  I skipped the acoustic and went straight to electric because I didn't want to be Bob Dylan, I wanted to be Ace Frehley.  Yet, there is an even earlier obsession pre-dating guitars by several years that also had a major impact on my life.

The tie-downs make for a smooth draw

From an early age I was fascinated with guns.  Perhaps due to childhood insecurity, I would carry a toy gun with me everywhere I went.   In some of the earliest photos of me, I have my trusty fake pearl-handled Colt cap guns in elaborately tooled fake leather tie-down holsters at my side.

After becoming a fan of Wild Wild West, I also started carrying a derringer in an inside pocket, though I would have killed for a quick draw sleeve like the one James West had that would launch the derringer into his hand with a flick of the wrist. 

The next gun I would obsess about was James Bond's Walther PPK.  I searched everywhere but never managed to find a realistic looking toy copy.  Eventually I had to settle for a blue plastic tracer gun.  In the 5th grade we got to wear our Halloween costumes to school.  I went as James Bond in a black suit, bow tie and, of course, the blue tracer gun in a plastic shoulder holster.  My teacher asked me why bother with the gun and holster since you couldn't see them under the jacket but then I would've just been a kid in a suit- with the gun I was James Freaking Bond!  I'm guessing this costume wouldn't pass muster today.  In any case, while US toy makers were oblivious to James Bond's widespread appeal, the Germans were right there- man I would've loved to have one of those PPK's!

What I had

What super lucky German kids had

I eventually graduated to more standard toy weaponry- my favorites being a chrome plated .45 and this surprisingly realistic looking cap gun revolver my dad called a "snub nose .38" -a name that made me love it all the more.

Love family folklore includes a story of how at age 8 or so, always strapped, in this case with my .38, I set off the metal detector at Logan Airport.  I started crying immediately but all the adults, including my parents, thought it was HILARIOUS.  I shudder to think how the same scenario would play out today- my guess is that, at the very least, flights would be missed.  

Back in my western period I had a Daisy Model 960 Trail Boss air rifle that completed my two-gun with hidden Derringer array.  It was hard as hell to cock but if you did and then stuck the muzzle in mud you could "shoot" dirt at people.  (True story- Cousin Rich once caught the webbing of his hand in the gears trying to cock the Trail Boss and did a screaming 360 degree gallop around my house holding his hurt hand between his legs. I'd like to say I was empathetic but the reality is I fell over I was laughing so hard.)  Anyway, at this point I was still more of a pistol guy than a rifle guy.  It all changed in 1975 when I was 10 years old and the TV show S.W.A.T. (Special Weapons and Tactics) came on.  The guys on the show carried .45's as sidearms, which was cool, but I was really taken with their rifles- this was the first time I had seen an M-16.

The cast of S.W.A.T.- Luca (far right with M-16) was my favorite

All the boys in my neighborhood were obsessed with S.W.A.T. and I started searching high and low for my own Special (toy) Weapon.  The branded TV show version was all plastic, which was just not going to cut it.

After months of searching I found an all-metal toy M-16 with chrome plated action that I had never seen before or since.  Seriously, I think it had more metal on it than the actual M-16, nicknamed "tonka toy" because a large portion of it was plastic.  This chrome beauty was my favorite toy until I was introduced to the real thing a few years later.
   

By age 11 my parents must've realized that my gun obsession wasn't going away anytime soon so they decided to channel it in a positive direction.  My dad called his friend Tom, a lifelong sportsman and hunter, and the three of us went to Tom's club.  I'll never forget my first visit to Old Colony Sportsman's Association in Pembroke, Mass- they had a 50 foot indoor gallery in the basement along with 50, 100 and 200 yard ranges outdoors.  Tom ran the youth program and within a month I became a fixture at the indoor range on Saturday mornings, learning to shoot in the prone position with one of their Mossberg .22 caliber open sight target rifles.  For a kid who never had any interest in sports, it was a revelation, giving me an inkling of why my classmates would get up at 4am for hockey practice or sweat their butts off during August two-a-days.  

In my estimation, one of the things that made my new sport better than the hockey and football was that it was co-ed; when it comes to target shooting, women and men are physically equal.  In fact, when we graduated from the prone to the kneeling position, most of the girls at the range had an easier time than I did with my hopelessly unstretchy, unlimber legs.

Three position target shooting

I spent an entire year practicing on Saturdays, working to improve my kneeling and standing positions.  When Tom asked me to come shoot with the club youth team, it was a huge deal.  At 12 years old I was the youngest person there yet the older kids treated me with respect.  Within a few months I joined the team, hosting matches at Old Colony against other club youth teams or traveling to clubs in neighboring towns like Holbrook, Sagamore and Braintree.  On the range the age difference between my teammates and I was a non-issue, as it soon became off the range as well.  Eventually the guys and girls on the team became closer friends than anyone I knew in school.  Hanging out with them did wonders for my confidence.  No matter how horribly my school week went, I had Tuesday nights and Saturdays with my rifle team to look forward to.

One of the things Tom brought to the youth program was a focus on International Shooting Union rather than National Rifle Association rules.  He talked about Olympic competition and how in European countries three-position target shooting was a popular sport with matches broadcast on television. When we were competing with other local clubs we stuck with NRA rules but all our bigger matches were ISU.  The Mossbergs at the club were not ISU certified so after seeing I was serious about the sport, my parents bought me my first rifle, an Anschutz Model 64.  I loved that rifle and spent hours fussing over it.  We'd been taught how to care for the club rifles and I loved the intricacies of disassembling and cleaning them.  I was even more fastidious cleaning my Model 64- just writing this the smell of Hoppe's No. 9 is filling my nostrils.

I competed with the Model 64 for two years, traveling to matches in Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire and Rhode Island.  At this point I was all in and I saved enough Boston Globe paper route money to purchase the only new rifle I would ever own- an ISU certified Anschutz 1407.  It was beautiful!  In fact, guitars are the only other objects that I have ever found as pretty as that rifle.

Along with our travels throughout New England, the Old Colony team also had regular matches on the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) campus in Cambridge, Mass.  Tom was friends with the MIT coach so we'd practice with their team- guys and girls who were in NCAA competitions!  I'd be hanging with these super cool college kids all weekend and then go right back to bottom of the pecking order when I went back to high school on Monday.  Still, I knew I could hang with older, cooler kids so this was another big confidence booster.  Of course, these older kids were also the first to get me drunk and stoned at age 12, which doesn't seem so cool now but at the time it was awesome!  When I was 13 I went to the Junior Olympic training camp in Colorado Springs, spending two weeks working on technique with other kids from around the country.  I had a fantastic time, getting along with everyone and even had a boy-crazy girl from Georgia literally chase me around!  This was further proof that I wasn't the dweeb my high school classmates considered me to be.

As teens (or in my case a pre-teen) first and ISU three-position target shooters second, my rifle team and I were pretty snobby about the regulars at our club and the other local clubs we'd compete against on the South Shore.  We had little tolerance for the camo-wearing pickup with a gun rack guys that would bring their high-powered rifles out to destroy targets for an afternoon.  We considered them "butchers," while we were "surgeons." That said, when a Massachusetts National Guard youth coach scouted me for a team to attend the National Matches in Camp Perry, Ohio I didn't bat an eye when he said we would be shooting high-powered rifles- specifically, the M-14.

M-14

I was pretty disappointed by the M-16 when I finally got to shoot one- "tonka toy" is right, it seemed cheap.  The M-14 on the other hand felt solid, it had heft and the magazine made a perfect hand rest in the standing position.  Granted I was not carrying it on a 12 mile slog through a jungle, but for me the M-14 was pretty great and my anti-high power bias was gone for good.  The National Guard gave me full use of the rifle for

A reloading press

over a year, along with a ton of ammo.  It was during this time that I learned to save my brass (spent shell casings) to re-load them.  It was a good thing too, because for the prone and sitting stages in matches you'd drop down into position and rapid fire 10 rounds in 60 seconds- practice ate up a lot of rounds.  Friends on the rifle team said this "high-power bullsh*t" was going to destroy my genteel three-position .22 shooting but I seemed to be able to go back and forth without any problems.  By this time I was also shooting 10 meter air rifle without any adjustment issues.
  

At Camp Perry I nearly made the President's 100, (top 100 in the U.S.) but my coach overheard the Navy team make a big sight adjustment to counter a strong wind before the 2oo yard rapid fire sitting stage and I did the same, only to have the wind die just as the buzzer went off.  I had a nice, tight grouping... in the 5 and 6 rings- it still irks me today.  One more thing about the M-14... when I was a sophomore in high school my speech teacher let me bring it to school to give a talk on three position high-power matches- I even brought some dummy 7.62x51mm rounds to pass around.  Can you imagine that happening today?  It's not like I kept the M-14 in my locker (my mom drove it to the school, I did my speech, she took it home) and there was no live ammo of course- but still.  After I had to return the M-14 I bought a used Remington .308 open sight target rifle that I enjoyed shooting at Old Colony's 200 foot outdoor range.  The 1407 was still my first love, but that .308 was a close second.


Along with my true friends on the rifle team, my first serious girlfriend was the younger sister of a teammate so it's not a stretch to say that while I gave my life to target shooting during those years, it gave me a life worth living- beyond the confines of Duxbury Intermediate School and Duxbury High School.  On a couple of occasions I tried to parlay my interest in shooting into high school cred by bringing kids from my school to Old Colony, yet no matter how much fun they had at the club, it was all forgotten when we were back in school on Monday.

One last thing before I close out this post- I try to keep this blog apolitical but feel I should note that while target shooting was an important part of my life, I've never gone hunting and I support common sense gun laws (starting with universal background checks, closure of the gun show loophole and reinstatement of the assault rifle ban).  Like you, I'm horrified by the mass shootings in our country.  I find the politicians who appear to chalk this endless bloodshed up to "the price of freedom" and lamely offer what I've cynically come to think of as their "Ts and Ps" (thoughts and prayers) to the victims both cowardly and revolting.  On the day I finished this post (7/28/19) there were TWO mass shootings in the U.S.- 4 dead at the Garlic Festival in Gilroy, CA and 5 dead in Chippewa  Falls, WI.  Twenty years ago after every mass shooting I used to ask the folks in my office "now can we have gun control?"  The sad thing is I don't even bother to ask this question anymore.

Needless to say, I do not have a high opinion of the NRA.  Interestingly, in all my years of target shooting, there was very little mention of the politics of gun ownership.  We were

all members of the NRA, as you had to be to participate in many of the matches, but I don't think I heard the 2nd Amendment mentioned even once.  That said, something stopped me from becoming a lifetime NRA member back then, which would've been cheaper than paying annual dues (thinking about it now, that was probably my mother- though she never mentioned anything about it to me).  It's probably naive, but I hope today's young target shooters are left alone to enjoy each other and their sport and that they are not subjected to NRA "indoctrination" or, even worse, encouraged to proselytize for the organization.

I haven't been on a rifle range in nearly 40 years, having put put down my rifles about the time I picked up the guitar.  The fact is, the latter is much more likely to attract the ladies and punk rock's DIY aesthetic was simply too hard to resist.  That said, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my parents, Tom my coach and my rifle team for helping teach me that working hard and dedicating your time and effort to something worthy of that effort can completely change your life.

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ALL KINDSA GIRLS #171