Edward Van Halen RIP
Put some respect on his name
The Boy Who Never Grew Up was the master of the mysterious “brown sound” emitted from his amp
Life is a finite series of notes, wrung from a precarious position
For the past 46 years, guitarists around the world have tried to replicate the tones they’ve heard coming out the speaker cabinets of Edward Van Halen’s overdriven amp. Edward referred to his tone as the brown sound, and for nearly half a century, a debate has raged among guitarists about how best to emulate it. Where does this tone come from? Some say it’s the amp. Some say it’s the pickups. Others argue about tone woods, about trem blocks, about pedals and the batteries in those pedals. The truth is that it’s everything: the strings and the pickups; the guitar’s neck, body, hardware, and appointments; the cable that connects the instrument to the amplifier; the effects pedals and the amp and the tubes in the amp and how it’s EQ’d; the speakers in the cabinet that the amp runs through and the room the amp’s played in; the furniture in that room and the human bodies that absorb, dampen, or …
American Football
Midwestern Emo was born in Urbana, Illinois, at Chris’s house
If the blues is the sound of America’s rivers, then emo is the sound of her basements
If we save America’s midwestern emo houses from college-town yuppie developers, we can have music in the future, too
Mike Kinsella, Steve Holmes, Steve Lamos, and Chris Strong lived a mere five-minute walk from each other’s homes in Urbana, a mid-sized city in a midwestern state that is often thought of as the heartland of America. (The geographic center of the lower forty-eight is actually a solid nine-hour drive east, in the town of Lebanon, Kansas; and while Kansas too has a legitimate claim on heartland status, the name of Lebanon does not necessarily evoke for waves of amber grain patriotism like plain ole Urbana does.) According to the 1997 student-staff directory at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, Mike Kinsella and Steve Holmes lived together at 609 W. Elm in Urbana, Illinois. Lamos lived at 109 ½ W. Washington. Strong lived at 704 W. High.
Mike and Steve and Steve were in a band that rehearsed at each other’s houses. When that band released its debut album, for the cover they …
Oh, Wolverines!
Wildlife artist cultivates the skills of a wilderness tracker and trapper in his hunt for the elusive ‘woods devil’
Tar-colored sludge concocted from the potent glands of skunk and beaver produces an alluring stench
He still hasn’t painted a wolverine
Up here on the pass, traversing a corniced ridge, the wind is howling, full of thick, sideways-flying icy flakes, and you can hardly make out the pack bouncing in front of you. We are traveling in single-file, like intrepid grade-schoolers. Hatchets in hand, hunched under the weight of a decaying deer leg, we hike. Our snowshoes plunge into the fresh January snow, as we take turns at the brutal task of leading, breaking trail in the deep powder. For the rest of us followers, the sequence goes like this: brace… lean into the wind… study the faint, snowshoe-sized hole left by the traveler in front of you… leap into it… balance… repeat. This is how you walk on the moon. This is how you stay alive.
Despite a lifetime of wandering on foot, I remain a clumsy hiker. When it’s my turn to lead, I make a wrong step and disappear to my armpits in a nondescript drift. I flail for a moment, then give in, my …
