wednesday may 11, 2005 – used cows, seale’s keyworks & the exit/in

some activity on the castle property in the morning, various workers doing various things to rebuild the house within the castle walls. “used cows” sign on the road back to nashville, not sure exactly what that means.
called bill to find out if he knew of any place in nashville where i could get a wurly reed, he came back a bit later with seale’s keyworks, which turned out to be perhaps the greatest keyboard repair shop in the history of mankind. amidst wurly guts and rhodes under repair, pianos pulled apart and lavishly painted vintage keyboards sits nikki, nashville’s greatest keyboard tech. vintage keyboards, in case you haven’t discovered from the nearly constant maintenance described in this blog, are beasts. finding someone who knows how to fix them in a way that keeps them close to their original state is extremely difficult, as the original companies no longer make them and offer no support.
nikki is one of these people, however, and in addition to knowing everything there is to know about wurlys, rhodes, pianos, hammond organs, clavinets, and every other vintage keyboard, he’s a jovial & energetic dude.
anyway, nikki found me the right reed and tuned it perfectly for me, then showed me a thing or two to make the wurly more road-worthy, namely adding lead weights to the action. wishing there was a place like seale’s in l.a., but at least i’ve got nikki’s number when i’ve got issues...
then on to the exit/in, one of nashville’s famous venues, and our last show with glenn tilbrook and the fluffers. glenn’s regular drummer (he’s been playing with marco for a few weeks while simon was home with a newborn baby) rejoined the band for this show, which featured both marco and simon on double drums for parts of the show. at soundcheck simon went nuts and hit the drums so hard he fell backward into the curtain. with both of them going at it the band sounded like a freight train. our last show with glenn was a great time, steve large, glenn’s keys player joined in for a wicked organ solo on “over the world” which was awesome. somewhere over the course of the evening in nashville i went across the street for a philly steak sandwich made by a moscow native. apparently i had to go around the world and wind up in nashville with a russian cook to get one of the best philly sandwiches i’ve ever had, after having spent four years going to school in philadelphia.