Daron’s Guitar Chronicles tells the story of Daron Marks, a young gay guitar player, from about the time he is eighteen onward. He arrives at RIMCon (Rhode Island Musical Conservatory) in the mid-1980s, desperate to leave behind a dysfunctional fami...
Daron here. Time for a liner note and I needed a break from the angst. (It's OK, you can laugh about it.) ctan's here, too, though, to talk about some site stuff.
ctan: I wanted to point out one weird thing about our website stats. Every year there is a dip in readership in July. The overall trend since 2009 is that stuff goes up basically every month, but there's this noticeable dip in July... and then it rebounds in August to be higher than June.
Daron: More people going on vacation and not keeping up with their web reading?
ctan: I always thought August was the big month for vacations, but yeah, that's the only explanation I can come up with, too. And then in August they all catch up, I guess? So what's on your mind this month?
Daron: I wanted to show some photos first of all, of fake amps.
ctan: Fake amps?
Daron: You see these setups at a lot of shows. They're to make it look like there's a big sound system when there actually isn't. This week a photo from the Warped Tour made the rounds on the Internet. But a quick Google search turns up many more, like the one below from Black Veil Brides. Sorry I can't attribute these to their original sources–they were on so many blogs I could not figure out who took them originally.
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ctan: Wait. I just had a thought. That amp stack that Ziggy climbed in New York...
Daron: I don't know. It's possible it wasn't as sturdy as expected because it wasn't real. And that would explain why no one was killed by the falling amps. But I honestly don't know. My memory isn't that good and no one I asked knew for sure. I don't think they were fake, though, because one reason to have fake amps is because you're actually plugged into the house sound system, and then you use real amps when you have to play somewhere you need them. But at that ballroom, I don't know what the deal was.
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ctan: In the chapter you said the venue had rented the stuff.
Daron: Right. Huh. Who knows. Maybe they wanted to make it look like they had rented more than they had. I don't know. I can't know everything, though I try.
