(second block, fourth letter of the prisoners' quadratic tap code...)

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...am here to tap through the walls.


Wed Aug, 06 2008

Good For Howie

This afternoon, I spent almost an hour on the telephone with Howie Lindeman. He's a live audio and recording engineer, and I met him working for Peabo ten years ago now.

Howie has been putting up with the damage from a heart attack for almost twenty years. He had been set to go for quadruple bypass surgery when his doctor waylaid him onto a different path. Here's what they did:

They drained over a liter of blood from his body. (He laid around for a while after that.) They sent it off to Israel, where adult stem cells where cultivated. After about three weeks, over eighty million of his own stem cells arrived by courier where he was lying on an operating table in the Dominican Republic. In order for these things to do their job, they had to be injected directly into the heart through his femoral artery, and his heart had to be stopped because its normal motion would prevent them from anchoring.

Seven times, they stopped Howie's heart for five to six minutes for each injection, and then woke him up again. The whole procedure ran six and a half hours.

He went into the thing with his heart doing about seven percent of its job. He spent one day in Intensive Care just because of the wound site near his groin for the entry to the femoral artery. Four days after that, he was driving all the live audio for the Pope at Yankee Stadium, with his pump going at about eighty-six percent of rated capacity.

Laughing right out loud, I asked him, "How do you feel?"

"Like a million bucks," he said. "Like a million bucks." He said it again. That's hard to imagine. Howie's been a live-wire all the time I've known him, and he was sick all that time. I don't know who's going to be able to handle him now.



(Howie, Osaka Blue Note, c. 1998)

It's disgraceful that he had to chase the thing around like that. None of this is legal in The Land of The Free.

~~~~~

(Howie's doctor is Dr. Zannos Grekos in Bonita Springs, Florida and you can get briefed on his work at Regenocyte.)

Aug 06, 08 | 10:30 pm

AxeBites

Various guitars I see floating by, mostly Gibson and mostly eBay.

Early Norlin ES-335 -- 1970, in Walnut ("ES-335TDW"). This is a period-piece look and feel, and arguably the sound as well but that's to cut things very finely. A "classic" 335 would be the original of 1958 in the Sunburst or Natural finish, or the Cherry Red of 1959; the Walnut of 1970 (second year of that finish offering) is not really a "classic" 335. In the history of the Gibson aesthetic, this is analogous to, say, vertically-striped polyester bell-bottoms or Bahama Blue shag carpeting. None of this is to say that they're not cool guitars, and this is a nice one. Excellent photographs.

Chrome hardware, featuring the trapeze tailpiece (like my L-47 and I've always liked it) and ABR-1 bridge with period-typical nylon saddles. Bound rosewood fretboard, with small block markers, and then the crown inlay at the machine head. These would be the T-top Humbuckers. Vintage Nazis would moan that the upper bouts are pointy (the body templates were wearing-out in the factory) and the fourteen-degree machine head with the volute signals a sometimes not-fun era of the line, but these things really do rock or moan or whatever you want a 335-type semi-hollow to do. ...which, of course, is because it really is a 335.


In the months since I've let AxeBites languish all to bleedin' hell, Gibson's Robot Guitar technology has sifted out to other models than the original Les Paul application. I don't know how it's going: I still haven't even seen one of these self-tuners. I don't see piles of them burning on the sides of the highway, nor reverent hangings in display cases over bars, so who knows? This 2008 Robot SG is ready to rock in the Metallic Red. Nickel hardware; it's the stoptail wired for data to send to the tuners, with dual Humbuckers. It's a bound rosewood fretboard, but I really like the single-bound machine head with the crown inlay. That's a real cool old-school look, right there, to set off that crazy-ass color. {nod}