Drove to work this morning with the sound of Greg Douglass' guitar echoing off the escarpment walls. The new (Lost Masters) CD is awesome. The canyons of the Illawarra never heard rock-n-roll like this before... In comparison to the FreeFlyte release which had a British invasion flavour to it, this one was a step back to the days when guitar heroes ruled the earth. If anybody wants a copy, you'll have to look up Brian (Kilcourse) and ask him. I think these were duplicated on his home PC.

Thanks to Joe for letting me know - Haight-Ashbury Music in Sunnyvale seems to be the latest victim of the music industry fallout, closing today. That's funny in a twisted kind of way. It was almost exactly two years ago that I shut down Sonica Music for good. You can't run a viable business when you've got no customers. It's easy to say that both of these businesses failed to compete and deserved to die; but what you're seeing isn't isolated. It's more an indictment of the industry behind it; with their arrogant licensing terms - which had as much involvement in the death of these institutions as the changing tastes of the customers. 

Lots has happened in those two years, but the guys at Sunnyvale Music World (what Haight-Ashbury used to be called) were all friends, even if we were competitors for several years. Sad to see them go. It's only a matter of time before it all hits here in Australia. You can see the local music stores slowly dying, both of them. It's the same story all over again. There's just nothing anybody can do about it. One guy who had a NSW music shop almost begged me - you ran a music store? Please buy my store from me. You know you want to. I'll give you good terms.

Funny thing though, I don't want to. Watching a music store die is not enjoyable for anybody concerned.

Coincidentally, Intel also closed down its last Silicon Valley fab plant.

Now this is cool. I got an email from Brian Kilcourse, who played in a rock band called Mistress with Greg Douglass (Hot Tuna, Country Weather, Van Morrison, Steve Miller, Greg Kihn, yada, yada) some years back. Before the microprocessor, folks. They made one album and disbanded. "I noticed that you were one of the folks who bought FreeFlyte". (Yeah I did - This was a demo CD that popped up on an obscure German label [Taxim] about 4-5 years ago). "We just found some more unreleased Mistress studio masters and wondered if you'd be interested in a CD". What is interesting is that I bought the FreeFlyte CD through an internet distributor in Oregon - so how my name showed up on any purchaser list that Brian has is beyond me - but hey this is the age of data collection. 

Unreleased Greg Douglass you say? Absolutely! Sign me up.