I paid 75 American for this B.C. Rich “Bronze” Mockingbird style guitar. The guy who sold it to me said it had been his nephews and he had probably played it once or twice, if that. And it was a real challenge to straighten it out but with the help of my daughter we stripped it down, adjusted the bridge, plated the electronics and re-stringed it. After some tweaking, we plugged it into my new home practice rig: A Line 6 30 Watt combo and a 4 channel foot pedal system with built in volume and wah.

I have a setting I like to call post industrial titanium, and it is pretty much the heaviest metal tone I can conjure up, with a little bit of phaser and a touch of phase echo. It is spacey enough to draw you down into it, and heavy enough to give you heart palpitations until you crawl back up.

The guitar sounds great clean and dirty, roots or post industrial. It rips and slides and has great sustain. Of course, thats the downside to digital modeling; everything comes out tits up regardless of your gear. It also looks real trippy when we use the delay filter in my digital camera to shoot action shots.

It almost pains me to do what I have to next. My daughter Karianna and I are stripping this one down and doing some art on it. I can think of a few ideas for a design motif that would fit the overall shape of the Mockingbird, and really tie it in as a distinctive piece, but am open to suggestions. I am nowhere near the artist Robert James Langenwalter is but I am pretty sure we can do a halfway decent homage.

Your thoughts?

What follows are transcribed excerpts of my interview with Orange County artist “Robert James”. Be sure to check out more of this fun and interesting interview in the first garbage culture podcast — to be released soon.
On file sharing, copyright and P2P:

I like to think it’s all good. Wow — great things can be done with this and look at all the possibilities…You know my mind doesn’t work that way, like oh how can I screw someone over with their art or music or whatever? I don’t think that way.

On the reactions of his family when he started sharing his art this past year:

I’ll tell you what I did because it was real recent… just this past Christmas, and it was partly because I was broke, but I really buckled down and I did a lot of paintings, and I spread them all out — to my nephews and nieces, and my brothers… I did a major painting for my little brother, and everyone just flipped out it was really rewarding, it was one of the most rewarding experiences with art in a long time.

On growing up in the OC:

I was real fortunate that the kids that I grew up with and the crew that I grew up with all really creative people, all of them — musicians and artists… and nuts and loners and comic book geeks… Just really interesting people, really creative people. Writing songs and listening to music and creating art and skateboarding. We were really cool kids who at a really young age were all doing really creative stuff and listening to a lot of great music. In fact most of my friends were musicians, and I think that art for me — that was a way for me to be involved.

On his favorite BBQ record:

There’s this record called East Autumn Grin by Mathew Ryan and it’s really just a great BBQ record.

Featuring the Art of Robert James; including 12 slides of his Rock ‘N Roll and other misc. portraits, and custom hand painted guitar art. An interview with Robert will be coming soon.