I thought I might amuse myself by making a podcast. I set up anchor, and started to read out some blog posts. Friends, I could not do it! I’ve played music live, I’ll happily sing songs, and subject people to my covers of Moonshiner and Hang me Oh Hang me (the latter by the influential and infinitely cool Dave Van Ronk, rest his soul, who wrote one song, one great song, and proceeded to complain forever more that Dylan, the weasel, had stolen his arrangement of House of the Rising Sun). Can I just read out some words, and do so with a straight face? No. It appears I cannot.
I start to read, and become acutely self aware, no guitar to hide behind I start to blush and my heart starts to race, then it happens. I can’t control it. I start to laugh. I start to laugh so heartily, so hysterically that I gasp for breath and wince.
Every time I try, it happens. I laugh. It is not an entirely comfortable experience. I listen to other podcasters tame their words and eject them into the ether to varying degrees of success. I even got lost listening to some right wing q-anon crazies inject their poison into society, I turned ’em off before they managed to make me so disgusted that the only option would be to write some vitriol on my own blog, and I am not in the mood today for a fight.
I am not sure what the secret is to making a podcast. I appear to have lost the ability to speak with any degree of clarity or elegance, let alone do so without tears of laughter running down my cheeks alarmingly. If I ever work it out, I’ll let you guys know….
Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy Dave Van Ronk. He is vastly underrated. It is such a shame he stuck to his brilliant covers, and put his energies into finding new old tunes, instead of going the route of Dylan and Baez and writing his own material. I think he would have been huge instead of an interesting footnote in folk history. I wonder what became of that glorious sounding guitar? I read on the interesting music gearhead site, http://www.equipboard.com, that he started off with a Gibson J20, then had a pair of Guild FR50-R’s. I hadn’t ever touched a Guild until very recently, when I got my Guild OM240-CE as a gift from a darling friend. I had unfairly ignored them, obsessed as I was with my Martin 000. I don’t think I would ever bother looking at another brand now. They have such a balanced tone, just all-around good guitars.
If you hear vague strains of laughter in the ether, don’t worry, it’s just me trying to record a podcast, clinging onto my Guild like a life raft…and failing miserably!