Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Recovery from NAMM...

My head felt like one big bloated sinus. Was on the tail end stretch of a bad cold last week. Finally got past the runny nose, sore throat and sneezing stages. Then I was in the "someone please stick a pin in my head and burst this balloon in my head" stage.

NAMM was interesting. And hectic, as usual. Not as busy as it normally is, though. They've been cracking down for the last couple years on not letting people in without proper badges and matching IDs. Plus, the Sundance Film Festival was on the same weekend this year, and there's usually a cross-over of music people from the film industry who had to flip a coin as to which event to attend.

This was the first NAMM show in recent memory that was Sinbad-free. (Inside joke... Sinbad, the comedian, is ALWAYS showing his mug at NAMM every year with his entourage in tow). I did see Jeff "Skunk" Baxter (guitar player extraordinaire from Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan fame) at the Gibson and Fender display rooms. Quite a few notables were out and about, though I didn't get much time to seek them out: George Duke, Dick Dale, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, T.M. Stevens, Bootsy Collins, Ronnie Wood, Terry Bozzio, Nikki Stix, Kelly Clarkson (why???), BT, and many others.

In Exhibit Hall "E" (the downstairs section where you find all the strange, new instruments and technologies, up-start companies, and small international entities) I blinked my eyes a few times when I came across one company displaying their florescent orange flying-V ukelele (...yes... you read that correctly).

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