I'm taking a mental health day tomorrow. Since getting back from Christmas is Corpus I've been going pretty much all day every day, playing long sets several nights and dealing with some life stuff.

New Years Eve took the cake. Great crowd at Friends for once. Started off on a sour note as the Fender TB-600 has blown all of my bass speakers. Yes, even the new ones. Tops 10's are a farty mess, bottom 15's only produce a "click-click, click-click" when hitting a note. Unfucking believable. Had I started this blog Jan of 2008 y'all would know of how much gear related bad luck I've been dealing with. But anyway, the Eden 4x10 cab that JT Coldfire's band uses was there so I commandeered it, making sure to check the power handling first...

Sets went great, knocked the place dead. But of course the Jager shots started to appear onstage bout 1/3 the way in. Last clear memory I have is being onstage holding one in each hand, so I did what anyone would do and poured one into the other and drank them both. Ouch. After the show (reports were that we were all pretty tipsy but still tight as a band, heh!) went to Scott H. Birham and The Beaumonts (old friends from the band Hognose). Had a good time tho was kind of a blur. Caught up with Shane and Todd for a long time so that was cool.

Called Austin Speaker service and told the guy what happened. He said warranty doesn't cover blowing them, but he felt really bad for me and is giving me a bro deal on rebuilding top speakers and a set of new bottoms. Need to ask if I can increase the power handling of my Isovent by using higher-wattage speakers (and letting me keep the TB-600), that and if I gave him a quad of blown Celestion G-75's if he'd knock anything off the price...

So for the Maggie Mae's Gibson Room show Saturday I used my roommate's cab. It belonged to Baxter, who played bass for Brewtality Inc, Teabag, Bound and who knows who else who else, they had been together for a year and a half. He was killed after a motorcycle wreck April of 2008. Big loss to the local community tho I didn't really know him personally. So I felt honored to use his old cabinet as he was probably the last one to have played it. But I also took no chances and used my Marshall JCM800 2203 as a bass amp (100w into a 200w cab... my SVT is 300w). Sounded dirty as hell in a cool way, awesome tone.

Gig sucked tho (we were isolated from rest of bar so little crowd). But it paid good, so it is all good. Will be using the same rig tonight at Friends, have not been able to grab my stricken cab to harvest the speakers and will do that tonight. Austin Speaker guy said he could have everything rebuilt by end of the week.

Now I need to see if I can run that TB-600 on a lower power setting. Mah.