Tour Blog
11th November, 2010
Day 33 – 21st gig, Canyon Club, Agoura Hills, CA, USA
As planned, I headed out to the guitar shops in the morning. I decided to start with the shops that we hadn’t had time for the previous day. In the Mesa Boogie shop I tried out a guitar made by a small company based just outside of Seattle called Nash Guitars. They make guitars based on old fender models – artificially distressed to look old. I fell in love with a $1900 white Telecaster model – what an amazing guitar.
After the Mesa Boogie shop we went over the road to the Guitar Centre that we’d visited the previous day. After some time I found their vintage room – what an amazing place. All manner of vintage and rare guitars in one huge room, just waiting to be picked up and played. One unlabelled Telecaster caught my eye – just sitting among a group of unassuming guitars. I asked the shop assistant what it was and he told me that it was a 1959 Telecaster worth $15,000… I just HAD to plug it in! To my amazement the guitar, a instrument that a collector would kill for, wasn’t a patch on the Nash guitar I’d played in the previous shop. It didn’t sound or feel anywhere near as good – no one can call me a guitar snob!
After the trip to the guitar shops we headed back to our hotel and then to the gig venue. The Canyon club was a really cool place, adorned with guitars (some displayed in tables, and some hung on the wall).
The place had the look and feel of an eastern temple – a large carved Buddha welcomed people at the front door, while elsewhere there was a Tibetan temple bar and a shrine to Jimi Hendrix. The floor of the entire club was a large patchwork of individual Afghan rugs.
The gig was good fun – sound on stage was good and the audience was really appreciative. As has been the case recently, we had a support band. Our support this evening was a band who, as far as I could gather, take a common chord progression and then link together small snippets of famous songs that use that chord progression – very entertaining and an enlightening reminder that there’s nothing new under the sun!
After the gig we went to another McDonald’s drive though… on foot!
