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Year 2007
November 9, 2007 Dance With Me video Hello Friends, Our "Dance WIth Me" video began in Chicago earlier this year when we performed there at Joe's on Weed St. We had the afternoon free and spent it there rehearsing and enjoying the great Chicago vibes of the neighborhood. The even light of the overcast day made for some beautiful photos of Jack in the street in front of Joe's and Will out in the garden. Our friend, Paul Nadkin, a Chicago photographer who has been shooting Jack and me in our various incarnations for decades happened to pop into our dressing room and was nice enough to get right into the spirit of the interpretive dance that seems to naturally inhabit the many frames of this video which was made almost entirely of sing frame photos shot on a Canon 5D digital SLR and edited on iMovie HD on my laptop. Jason Powell shot us during our rehearsal (and pretty much any time you see me in the frame!) and that's guitar tech Greg Mandelke who who steps in at one point. You may recognize Greg from touring with STYX. The NYC scenes were shot on 5th Ave the afternoon before our most recent Howard Stern Show appearance. Jack had just walked down from his friend's apartment uptown and I intercepted him at the corner nearest our hotel and Jason started shooting us in and out of the street as we waited for traffic to stop at the block just up from us. You may notice that practically nobody pays us any mind at all. I LOVE NEW YORK! Finally the northern California shots the day before our first show of this tour in Petaluma, California. By now the guys are getting used to the ever present 5D and the fact that there is rarely any warning when they'll be on camera which makes for the great relaxed vibe--no make-up or time to get self-conscious as is usually the case when you put folks like us who are more comfortable on a mic than in front of a camera. Will is an excellent subject with the frame by frame animation which requires more physical output, willingness and patience than the natural movements and I suspect we haven't seen the last of this kind of fun on video for him! Enjoy! TS August 15, 2007 Dear Friends, Taylor put this new guitar in my hands in New York City on August 12 at a vdeo shoot in the home office of Guitar Magazine and last night at Jones Beach I played it on stage for the first time. It's so new it has not even been given a proper name yet. I had the chance to play it and get familiar with it while video-taping a promo for a future Guitar World DVD and within minutes it felt like an old friend. I played it through the new 4-Channel Marshall Amplifier head and a Marshall 4X4 cabinet and liked the way it sounded but it wasn't until I plugged it into my own Marshall rig at the venue in Long Island a few minutes before doors opened to the public and heard it through the massive PA we're using on this tour with Def Leppard and Foreigner that I realized just how incredible this instrument is. My guitar tech, Jimmy Johnson skipped dinner to do swap out the strap pegs with strap locks and give it a once over so that I could play it right away. I started the show with it, played it on "Blue Collar Man"--killer. "Grand Illusion"--excellent! I switched to another guitar for "Too Much Time" and by accident one of the the other band's tech's had forgotten to switch off a wireless pack that was on the same frequency so when Jimmy switched on the different pack to make the change there was that horrible squeal that only comes from two transmitters being on the same frequency at the same time, so he brought the new Taylor back for a third song! It sounded so good on the solo, especially that long sustained note at the end, I was sad to take the guitar off to play "Fooling Yourself." As you probably noticed, I love my classic electric guitars--Gibsons, Fenders and my PRS. But this new guitar, aside from being a work of art esthetically, sounds so good it's all I can think about today. I woke up this morning wanting to get my hands on it and am going to have to wait because I'm in New York and it's in New Jersey where we play tonight. Our friends at Taylor Guitars knew what the stakes were, getting into the solid body electric guitar market, and they have stepped up to the plate ready to play. This guitar is a home run. TS
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