Blondie: Chris Stein
News about Chris Stein, guitarist and songwriter for the rock band Blondie.
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Posted by Chris Stein at 4/29/2004 05:23:00 AM
wound down enough to write... in milwaukee in the midst of a lot of large buildings, some kind of bleak financial district... shows have been improving last night was minneapolis, nice to meet the local troops... ironically from the stage i could see a large illuminated billboard advertising brittney spears and blink 182 at some larger venue... seattle was a lot of fun as well... after much effort i finally got rid (or at least got around) the effects of some miserable virus type thing that kept changing my homepage to "blank", blank being not even very interesting just some dumbass search thing...
i thought i had more to say but dont... we have been watching modern chinese horror movies on the bus, a lot of ghost related stuff, but some really amazing things, i recommend 'haunted office' and one called 'memories', i dont think these things are available like at tower or virgin etc. one has to track them down, we got a bunch in san fran's chinatown area... tonight is at some casino situation , i much prefer clubs and bar venues but we'll see
(cynthia sent me a link which i'll pass along http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011015&s=johnson , a slightly radical but to me very viable overview of american foreign policy stupidity... we still are rushing towards some cliff or other... being in america right now, i forget that when we are out of the country one gets a very different view of whats going on, we've been here for a while now, it'll be kind of enlightening to get over to europe later this summer and get a different perspective)
so its nice to see everyone at the shows, dont hesitate to try and say hello, sometimes we are rushed and cant do too much by way of relating to people after shows, this leg of the tour has some really long ass drives in the bus so there is a tendency for us to head out quickly after playing...
what?... nothing... thats about it... blank ness... aroooo... etc... thanx for the mail keep it coming
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Posted by Chris Stein at 4/18/2004 05:24:00 AM
tour has kicked off, LA, the first show was a bit of a struggle, the band would have been happy with some warming up in less of a high profile venue, the transition to my new cool guitar is dramatic, im still working on it... but D seemed to have a good time and we were subject to favorable reports... best part was i got to talk with Gina Gershon for quite a while after the show..! she's a gorgeous creature, and really sweet and down to earth, somehow more beautiful in person... also in attendance at the after ritual was Lemmie, I don't know if its public record or not but I've know him for slightly longer than I have known Debbie, i met him when he was still in Hawk during my second trip to the UK, we had some mutual acquaintances and i have always remembered how friendly and gracious he was in spite of my being a civilian... i met DH within a month of returning to nick, sept 73... Rodney introduced us, he's finally a little more well known as a result of the 'Mayor' movie and i saw him being greeted with "hi mayor" a couple of times... Rose McGowan, another doll, we heard Will Farrell, Mickey Bourke were about but didn't see them, Roy Thomas Baker, Nancy Sinatra, also Tom Scott was a nice surprise (horns on rapture, the sax solo on the Taxi Driver soundtrack among others)...also there was a very well known actor/comedian who will remain anonymous here cause he was so trashed and stoned it was an achievement of some kind that he was able to stand... probably others that i didn't see... the House Of Blues on sunset is quite the irony, here we have all these well heeled individuals paying to go to this place that's done up to look like some trashed out southern shotgun shack, the kind of place that in the reality of its real situation people only attended by default cause they couldn't afford better
so i got a new guitar from Fender, its a strat that's covered with black leather and is an attempt to reference the one i used in the old days, Bob Wall the guy who does the leather work for Jesse James's bike company did the cover on the guitar... we went out to Fullerton to pick it up at the Fender plant and got the tour, Paul was worried that we would be 'demystified' by seeing the guts of the operation but actually there was something great about the operation, it had a hands on kind of feel even though it was on a grand scale... the weirdness is stuff like the insanely exact copy of Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar, we met this guy John who is doing a series of 100 of them, said it took him about a week to do one... it has every nick and scratch and bit of rust copied exactly from a large color photo of the original, its really amazing in a crazy fan obsessive way, but even John the builder said that he thought it was sad that most of these guitars would just wind up hanging on walls rather than be played cause the one we tried was really a great instrument...(now that i ponder it a bit, the SRV guitar copy (as well as the line of 'aged' "relic" guitars that they make are a lot like the House of Blues joint, a brand new guitars that looks like beat up old ones with a lot of personality)
so tonight is this Divas event and we are here in the heart of American madness in lass Vegas... the duet with Eve is looking pretty great, that's with the house band, Eve has written a new 16 bar rap that's very clever, starts off with the rhythm of the basic Debbie rap and then goes off
then there's a duet with Joss Stone of one way with us, (apparently Debbie insisted that the band play,) she is very cute and her approach to melisma is more tasteful than a lot of what i hear... now honestly i have mixed feelings about this whole thing (as does DH i know) on one level its pretty straight and lame and the whole diva thing is sort of like celebrating the idea of throwing fits about your dressing room being the wrong color... on the other hand its nice to just be out there on TV... the people doing the show are very nice and as helpful as they can be, after initial tension we (the band) loosened up and the thing might actually be a fun event... i looked at a couple of 'divas' message threads and there's a lot of mention of the possibility of DH and Cyndi singing together... aint going happen this time, it was never proposed to us at any rate...
so yeah lass Vegas is the most forlorn awful fucking place in the universe, maybe im just projecting but everyone seems to be in a kind of half dead trance... walking around the casino downstairs, the old ladies zoned out feeding income (presumably) into the 'loose slots', its so sad its crazy, i keep thinking about all the images of the war that are coming back over airwaves, superimposing these explosions and burning vehicles onto the rows of cheerfully jingling machines (the proverbial ATM machine that you put your card into and get a note back that says "thank you for the money") i keep wondering how this can be going on here at the same time as all the mayhem is happening in the rest of the world...
who saw general so and so collapsing during the press briefing in Iraq the other day? im not surprised that i cant find anything about it now though I've done a bunch of searches... it was shown in conjunction with stories about the fatigue of the troops over there, that 20 thousand of them who are supposed to be coming back this week have been told they have to stay on for another 3-4 months... he was carried off the podium and the story was that 'he had the flu'... was he really demonstrating his solidarity for the exhausted soldiers who've been there for over a year already? was he just fried in the same way? Bob Woodward's book saying that 700 million in funds was diverted from Afghanistan to the build up for the Iraq invasion long before the official declaration of war, that bush asked the pentagon to start planning the invasion as early as nov. 2001, long before any of the info about the 'weapons of mass etc' was in... not much of a surprise really
couldn't the money that's generated by the insanity of lass Vegas be put to better use?
well got go to the dress rehearsal for tonight... see you all at the shows and such
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Posted by Chris Stein at 4/14/2004 05:24:00 AM
im sitting here in LA watching this incredible bullshit of the war and 9-11 buck passing on CNN... things got quite hectic in NYC and i had to wait to get out of town to write... everytime things pick up i get more mail... im noticing that a lot of you are very in tune with what im thinking; sending stuff that ive noticed or been aware of in the world/media etc... for ex. the lady in mexico i think who did her own cesarian, that movie chasing buddah, many other items, however many things like the ufo sighting by the mars rover and of course the UK alien potato chips are things i missed so keep them coming...
the first time around it took us two and a half albums before things broke in the US, maybe we're gonna see a repeat of this pattern, (for those of you who dont know parallel lines was on the US charts for six months before HOG went to number one) so im cautiously optimistic at the beginning of this cycle... im told that i'll be out of debt (oh you didnt know?) by next year at any rate
(for those of you in left field who dabble in occult weirdness you might be familiar with the old magic square that goes:
SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS which includes the name of the idiot now testifying on tv about 9-11 who is no doubt a minion of the illuminatis anyway etc etc)
so we were at the two satellite radio stations xm and sirius and im gonna try and hustle one of them into possibly giving me some airtime though im not exactly sure what for yet... i appreciate all of your efforts to get us on the air but im kind of afraid that radio as it is now is a lost cause (special thanx to scottie who says he was offering his romantic favors to dj's in his area in exchange for playing goodboys)
today we are going to go out to fender to pick up a new custom guitar they made for me... im pretty fried, woke up at like 4 am here, still on new york baby time, 6 am most days in nyc...
what else... have been reading mishimas tetralogy "the sea of fertility" for the second time, i cant believe how much of it didnt sink in the first time around... its pretty dense stuff but fits in well with whats going on in the world now... whats sad is how little of his (mishimas) writing has been translated, as i understand it only a small percentage has been done... liked hellboy a lot, finally saw the last of the lord of the rings... um...
about it for now im sure theres more but im only part awake
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