What A Load Of Tolkien

I was perusing my audiobooks in iTunes to see what I'd like to listen to or listen to again before the release of the next Harry Potter book.
I have quite a few audiobooks now and as I was scrolling though and I was surprised at just how much Tolkien I had. In total I have 4:15:51:41 of Tolkien. That's 4 days, 15 hours, 51 minutes, and 41 seconds of Middle Earth goodness. I had forgotten that I had Radio Dramatizations of the books as well as the audio versions of the books.

The Silmarillion (unabridged audiobook) : 14 hours, 49 minutes, 53 seconds.
Martin Shaw's reading is grave and resonant, conveying all the powerful events and emotions that shaped elven/men/dwarf history and Middle Earth itself.

The Hobbit (unabridged audiobook) : 11 hours, 4 minutes, 51 seconds.
The Fellowship Of The Ring (unabridged audiobook) : 19 hours, 9 minutes, 54 seconds.
The Two Towers (unabridged audiobook) : 16 hours, 43 minutes, 18 seconds.
The Return Of The King (unabridged audiobook) : 18 hours, 22 minutes, 57 seconds.
All read by Rob Inglis in 1990. Inglis has performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and his old-school English voice is a perfect match for the books. He shines with comedy, but he's also good at conveying solemnity, and his reading of the madness of Denethor was genuinely frightening. His voice of Gollum is the most distinctive, and clearly the one he had the most fun with: cackling, gurgling, whining, and hissing, simultaneously hilarious and pathetic. Even if you've read the books many times yourself, hearing them aloud is different. You are forced to listen to passages you might have otherwise skipped or hurried over, and many of them yield up unexpected treasures, a turn of phrase or simile that you never noticed before. We can never again read them for the first time; but this is the next best thing.

American Dramatizations
The Hobbit : 4 hours, 42 minutes, 51 seconds.
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy : 10 hours, 26 minutes, 50 seconds.
A 1979 dramatization of The Lord of the Rings was broadcast in the USA. No cast or credits appear on the audio packaging. Each of the actors was apparently recorded separately and then the various parts were edited together. There is an old-school charm to these old analog recordings. This version is chalked full of fun songs. There is a charming renascence style to the instrumentation. The Dwarf songs are catchy and some what hypnotic.

BBC Dramatization
The Hobbit : 3 hours, 42 minutes, 51 seconds.
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy : 13 hours, 15 minutes, 13 seconds.
In 1981 the BBC broadcast The Lord of the Rings, a new, ambitious dramatisation in 26 half-hour installments. It stared Ian Holm as Frodo Baggins, who played Bilbo Baggins, his character's cousin/uncle, in the live-action trilogy.

Yes, that's Leonard Nimoy a.k.a. Mr. Spock crooning about Bilbo in the video below.

What's Crackalackin

I recently purchased a new snare off of ebay.
It's a beautiful 5" x 14" 8-play maple Pork Pie with a honey-amber finish.

A little over a decade ago I used to own a 5" x 10" power piccolo snare by Pork Pie.
That was the loudest, highest, ear-drum shattering crack I had ever heard. I loved that thing.
I was really into Tim "Herb" Alexander (Laundry, Attention Deficit, Uberschall, The Blue Man Group, A Perfect Circle) back then, he was mostly known for his insanely wacky and mind-blowing drumming for the band Primus. I was never one of those guys who worshiped the Neil Pearts, the Terry Bozzios, or the Carter Beaufords of the drumming world. Those flashy, showy, bajillion piece drum set, drum stick twirling kind of guys have never been my cup of tea. I was more into the guys like Keith Moon, John Bonham, Chad Smith, and of course Tim Alexander. The thunderous-loud rock drummers who threw down the beats that made you bob your head and throw your rock fist into the air.
Tim Alexander was in Modern Drummer Magazine, back in 1991 when Primus released the album Sailing the Seas of Cheese. In the article Tim mentioned he was playing drums by a company called Pork Pie.
I loved the sounds of Tim's drums and wanted to find out more about the company with the funny name. It wasn't that easy to do back then. It wasn't like now where everyone has access to the Internet. I had to deal with the pot-smoking-neanderthals who worked at Guitar Center.
I also didn't know anybody who was playing them or, for the most part, had heard of them.
I ordered it on blind faith and I could not have been happier. It made buying the new one much easier.

The snare was hand-made and signed by Bill Detamore, creator of Pork Pie.



In 1987, Bill started making drums as a hobby. This hobby quickly evolved into a full service drum company. Each drum is signed by Bill Detamore with the date it was made. Pork Pie drums are made by hand in Canoga Park California. Bill still is a hands on owner. He still cuts every bearing edge and does all of the paint jobs on the drums.

I stripped the snare down, polished it up, put it back together, gave it some new heads, and tuned it up. The snare has a nice beefy crack. I'm very happy with it!

The Sam Keenan Collaboration

Some exciting news for Crash Effect.
We will be collaborating with Twin Cities local music legend Sam Keenan.

I've known Sam for somewhere in the ballpark of 22/23 years?
When you were a kid, do you remember when you were friends with a someone and you thought their older sibling was the coolest person in the world? For me that was Sam.
He was one of those music prodigy kids who could sing, play guitar, piano, cello, and pretty much anything he got his hands on in a skilled and precise way. He is one of those guys where you are like "you're so talented that you suck!"

I spent my adolescence following Sam like a little puppy through the Twin Cities music scene during the nineties. Sam was always cool. He'd say I was with the band (Liquid Ernie) to the door guy or bartender so I could catch them and other local bands at venues I wasn't old enough to get into at the time. Now that I think about it, in the beginning of Liquid Ernie, Sam probably wasn't old enough to get into some of the venues they'd play either. I lost contact with Sam for quite a few years after they broke up.

A little over a year ago I was introduced to this phenomenon known as myspace.com. During a family get together my sister-in-law mentioned she had a profile on there and that it was a great tool to get into contact with people you've lost contact with. She told me about a bunch of people that we both knew that were on there. So I figured meh... why not look into it. I punched in my sister-in-law's myspace URL and I saw one of her friends was this guy:

Whoa! Sam's gotta myspace page! I saw that he had a show that night at Lee's. (landmark hole-in-the-wall in Minneapolis)
I went his show and was blown away by his music and spent sometime catching up with him. We started corresponding through myspace and I've caught a few of his shows over the last year, fast-forward to now, Sam will be engineering, mixing, and performing on the upcoming Crash Effect album. He may sit in on a few of our shows while we are in the studio with him.