Meteor Mags: The Third Omnibus Conquers All!

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A HOMICIDAL SMUGGLER AND HER CALICO CAT JUST SAVED THE ENTIRE SOLAR SYSTEM.

NOW WHAT?!

Gear up for total revolution on the asteroid-mining frontier with Meteor Mags, Patches, and their hell-bound crew. After the events of The Second Omnibus, Mags and her allies on Ceres and Mars aim to create a space-based utopia, but powerful interests from a war-torn Earth would rather see them dead. In this conflict, the weapons of choice are genetics, gravity, grenades, and guns—and whatever else Mags has hidden up her sleeve.

Discover aliens, killer robots, another universe, giant mutated space lice, and trillions of dollars just waiting to be stolen. Grab your camera and go on a punk-rock tour with the teenage Dumpster Kittens to film their first movie. Witness the horrifying rituals of the lunar death cult that plots to destroy the Moon. Shoot Patches out of a bloody space cannon!

Science-fiction collides with crime and satire in a rock-and-roll apocalypse where octopuses read minds, cats get into gangsta rap, and dinosaurs fight the corporations controlling the System.

THE THIRD OMNIBUS COLLECTS Permanent Crescent AND Gods of Titan PLUS FIVE ALL-NEW EPISODES!

For sale on Amazon as a 532-page paperback and an ebook. Readers outside the USA, click here.

🏴‍☠️

If you hate reading but love tentacles,
then just get Mags and Patches on a t-shirt!

If you hate clothing but love dinosaurs,
then get the Legends of the Dracorex graphic novel prequel to the series!

my favorite discography: every sasquatch album ever

17 Sunday May 2026

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In the last Meteor Mags story I published, when faced with an insurmountable problem, Mags says, “This would be a good time to put on every Sasquatch album ever recorded, in chronological order.” It’s a nod to my favorite discography of all time, and a listening experience that everyone who loves heavy rock should indulge themselves in at least once.

We’ve already established that my favorite album is Fugazi’s absolute masterpiece In On The Kill Taker, with a close second being Clutch’s Blast Tyrant, a relentlessly rocking riff-fest that’s chock-full of memorable lines and fist-pumping moments. And for many years, my favorite song has been “Three Days” by Jane’s Addiction, because I can’t think of any situation where I would not be happy to hear that song thanks to its epic scope, its unusual lyric about personal loss and transcendent love, its melodic guitar solo, and the super-heavy riff it breaks into near the end. A close second would be “Gardenia” by Kyuss.

But what if I had to listen to every album a band ever recorded, back-to-back?

In that case, there’s only one choice for me: Sasquatch.

Every other band I love has some tracks that don’t quite do it for me and could be skipped. Other bands I love might even have one or more albums that don’t quite do it for me.

Not Sasquatch. Every album is an apex of heavy rock riffs and grooves. Every song is a banger. Sasquatch is all killer, no filler: gloriously fuzz-drenched guitars, chest-pounding bass, all-powerful drums, and a singer who cuts to the bone with every line. I don’t just “listen to” Sasquatch; I get completely caught up in them to be transported to a realm of rock-and-roll euphoria.

Plus, every album sounds enormous. Some of my favorite albums suffer from sub-par, low-budget recording, such as Buzz Factory by the Screaming Trees, which rocks my world to this day but sounds like it was recorded in a basement on a portable cassette machine. Even Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin sounds thin to my ears these days, despite being one of the albums that most influenced my taste in heavy rock. Sasquatch albums, on the other hand, all sound top-notch, like an atomic-powered bulldozer smashing everything in its path.

Yet along this merciless path of destruction is an uplifting, empowering quality — a strength and joy, a reveling in the power of amps cranked to the max, an unabashed celebration of bashing the hell out of a drum kit with precision and purpose. It’s music that lifts you up while beating down everything before you, one riff at a time.

If I ever meet god, I expect her to be listening to Sasquatch at a volume that would obliterate galaxies.

Collector’s Guide: Pick up every Sasquatch album from Bandcamp.

painting the desert blue

07 Thursday May 2026

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In late 1994, at the invitation of a bass-playing high-school friend I’d kept in touch with after graduation, in the days before the Internet became ubiquitous, when maintaining long-distance personal connections took a bit more effort, I drove from St. Louis to San Francisco in my beat-up Honda Civic with about $500 cash to my name and little else. I was young and naïve enough to think this was sufficient to begin a new life on the West Coast, and it was not the last time I would make such a foolhardy attempt.

My friend later wrote a fictionalized memoir about our time in San Fran aptly titled “On Anarchy, Travel, and Tragedy”. But like many of my reckless misadventures, it was mostly worth it. I got to wade into the surprisingly chilly waters of the Pacific Ocean at sunset, drive across the Golden Gate Bridge at sunrise screaming along with Nirvana’s “Oh the Guilt” from their split 7-inch with Jesus Lizard, frolic naked in the moonlight at Half Moon Bay, and stay up all night drinking and smoking in the kitchen with my old friend and the couple he was staying with, talking about life and art and society and everything in between.

On one of those nights, our hosts put on the album Talking Timbuktu, a collaboration between singer/guitarist Ali Farka Touré and Ry Cooder. They had heard the album featured on NPR (National Public Radio). When they discovered I was interested in blues, guitar, and African music thanks to my first stint as a volunteer DJ at a college radio station, they quite correctly thought I would dig these jams.

The album was—not just to me but possibly to everyone who heard it—a sonic and cultural revelation. It connected the uniquely American sound of twentieth-century blues to an even older musical tradition in Mali and other countries of Western Africa. It prompted an exploration into that connection, to explore both the histories and musical similarities behind this collaboration. The album’s commercial and critical success played a significant role in building a stateside audience for what would be marketed as “world music”. And though I’ve never cared for that label, it did a lot to expand musical horizons in the States beyond the limited spectrum of mainstream commercial radio.

As much as I loved the album and learned from it in the 90s, it took on a new depth for me when I relocated to the southwestern desert. Ali’s hometown in Mali might be an ocean away from Phoenix, and the economic and cultural differences are perhaps even vaster than the sea. But there is a vibe to living in the desert, a feeling that resists being put into words but is recognizable in the music. Western Africa is bounded on two sides by the Sahara, making it a hot and arid land. But because many of the countries are coastal, the desert experiences powerful monsoons—much like Phoenix.

On a typical day, the desert carries a sense of stillness, a quiet emptiness that is just as peaceful as it is oppressive in the hottest months. It’s a place that naturally suggests the hypnotic, repetitive grooves layered with guitar solos whose tone can be as spiky as a cactus or as soft as the rare flowers of that same plant. The overbearing heat suggests playing at a more laid-back tempo, to take your time. The wide-open spaces invite you to ride a groove for longer than your average three-minute pop song. Even the prevalence of five-note pentatonic scales in desert blues implies more space, more of a sense of openness and distance than found in your typical seven-note scales.

I hear these aspects of the desert not only in the desert blues of West Africa but in the heavier desert rock sound that came out of the American southwest in the late 80s to mid-90s from bands such as Kyuss, around the same time Ali Farka Touré was recording his first albums. Desert rock is perhaps better suited to expressing the violent energy of the monsoons and the way they unexpectedly roll in from the distant horizon to rage against once-cloudless skies, full of lightning and fury and power. But even then, there’s a slow, hypnotic heaviness to most desert rock that sets it apart from other forms.

Despite differences in tonality and rhythmic traditions, I hear that same kind of space and arid peacefulness in oud music from the desert areas of Egypt and the Middle East, such as Hamza el Din and Rahim Al Haj. Again, I loved this music before I ever set foot in the desert, but hearing it, learning some of it, and working on incorporating its feeling into my own playing while living in a similar climate and landscape made me feel more personally connected to it. The music became something that I wasn’t merely appreciating as an outsider; it expressed something about my own experience, too.

Ali’s stylistic influence lives on in other bands and artists from Western Africa. He was a musical ambassador whose son, Vieux Farka Touré, carries on his tradition. He laid the foundation for North American tours by Mdou Moctar, Bombino, and Tinariwen. He sang about kindness and community, about the need for compassionate and responsible leadership, and he lived by those principles. Last but not least, he sang about the landscape of his home, and even without a translation of his lyrics, you can hear that landscape in every note he played.

A Monstrous Mash-up of Horror, Sci-fi, and Pulp Detective with Bernie Wrightson

27 Monday Apr 2026

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I dove into this book without a clue about what to expect other than the fact that the legendary Bernie Wrightson illustrated it. I was fully on board from the first page, which appears to be merely the classic opening of a pulpy, noir crime story where our hard-boiled, hard-drinking protagonist narrates waking up with a hellacious hangover. But within a few gory pages, it becomes clear that he is not merely hungover but also gruesomely wounded… and dead! From there, it only gets weirder.

The Monstrous Collection consists of three stories, all collaborations by Bernie Wrightson and his author friend Steve Niles for IDW publishing, all of which were originally printed as separate limited series of three issues each. Dead, She Said is the first story, and it is my favorite for reasons which should be obvious to long-time readers of this blog. I imagine Niles sitting at his keyboard with a blank page before him, asking himself, “What would be the most awesome things I could ask Bernie to draw?”

For one, giant ants.

While we’re at it, let’s render a modern-day morgue in a Victorian, steampunk style complete with a sexy mortician lady in a nearly skin-tight outfit reminiscent of 1950s EC comics, embalming our mysteriously aware yet dead detective in a splash of blood and guts.

Hell, we can even throw in some dinosaur skeletons!

Bernie must have loved working from this script, and his artistic passion shines in every line and shadow of these incredibly detailed pages. Every story in this collection features cameos by characters from other stories, and though the second and third stories don’t rock my world quite as hard as Dead, She Said, they are impeccably rendered by Wrightson’s pen, funny and horrific at the same time, and so deliciously weird.

IDW deserves a round of applause for printing this collection from Bernie’s original black-and-white art instead of the colored versions of the single issues. Bernie’s inks have such depth and majesty to them, where his technique makes even the darkest shadows not completely blacked out, giving the overall effect of a vibrant, living world on the page. Even when the subjects are dead, his style produces a textural richness that makes even the most macabre depictions seem somehow sublime.

Compare the two panels below to see what I mean.

originally published color version
black-and-white version from the collected edition

To my eye, the colors do not in any way enhance Wrightson’s work but flatten it and cheapen it, making it look like any generic modern comic, annihilating the timelessly vintage depth of his shadows, and brightening things in a way that eliminates the visceral sense of classic horror Bernie brought to every detail. Maybe IDW thought color would make for a more commercially viable product, and maybe they were right. But Bernie was the absolute master of black-and-white horror illustration, and this collected edition should leave no doubt about that in anyone’s mind. It’s also one hell of a creepy good time!

Collector’s Guide: The Monstrous Collection in paperback or hardback might cost you an arm and a dismembered leg these days, unless you can find a used copy, but the inexpensive digital edition currently goes for $13 and is well worth every penny.

A Monster’s Quest to be Human: Frankenstein Alive, Alive! by Bernie Wrightson

27 Monday Apr 2026

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Bernie (formerly stylized as “Berni”) Wrightson rose to prominence in the world of comic books with his work on horror stories for Creepy and Eerie, both published in black-and-white magazine format by Warren Publishing. He co-created DC’s Swamp Thing with Len Wein for House of Secrets 92, and his artwork on the first thirteen issues of Swamp Thing is horrifically beautiful. He won critical acclaim for his lavishly illustrated edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where his designs for both Frankenstein and the monster seem to be based on his earlier short piece, The Muck Monster.

Bernie returned to Frankenstein’s monster with his friend and collaborator, author Steve Niles, in the four-issue Frankenstein Alive, Alive! Here, the monster is haunted by the specter of his creator and seeks peace for his tormented soul in the lava flow of a massive volcano, where he is encased in stone before being dug up years later.

He makes friends with another “scientist” who happens to be using dubious methods based on old-timey, bunk science to make some kind of elixir of eternal life. This guy has an impossibly massive house full of libraries, laboratories, specimens, and skulls, joined by castle-like cavernous tunnels of stone and wood—all deliciously rendered in exquisite detail as only Wrightson could do.

Eventually, the scientist’s methods bring the monster to a moral dilemma which pits his loyalty to his new friend against his developing sense of ethics, a choice that represents a situation many of us have experienced at least in spirit if not in the sense of the literal facts of this story. While Bernie died before completing the fourth issue, his hand-picked successor Kelley Jones did a marvelous job working from Bernie’s rough layouts and thumbnails to bring the final issue to life—not with as much intricate detail as Bernie, but certainly with the right mood and compositional style for the occasion.

This visually splendid work has two minor shortcomings. First, it begins with what appears to be a framing sequence set in 1930s America during the Great Depression before proceeding to tell the main tale as a flashback. But we never return to the framing sequence at the end, which feels a little off despite the emotionally satisfying ending to the central story. Second, external circumstances relieve the monster of the full duty of resolving his ethical dilemma. While the resolution is dynamic and well-told, I can’t help but feel that having the choice made for him does a disservice to the monster by robbing him of the responsibility of making a tough call on his own.

Regardless, Frankenstein Alive, Alive! is a great work that showcases the talents of an artistic master still working at peak ability right up until his final year, and it’s perhaps the most awesome of many horror collaborations between Wrightson and Niles. You can often find the original single issues or the collected paperback edition, though the digital edition has the advantage of displaying the double-page spreads without any gutter or staples interrupting the incredible artwork.

Collector’s Guide: Enjoy Frankenstein Alive, Alive! in the increasingly rare single-issue format, the more readily available paperback edition, or the inexpensive digital edition.

deluge: a poem

14 Tuesday Apr 2026

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i dreamed you and i were lost
in a nameless park whose roads
offered no escape

we abandoned our car
left it overturned
in gravel and dust

it could not save us
it could not find its way

we ventured out on foot
through anonymous desert
barren ravines

then came the flood
the deluge which destroyed
our only way out

still you followed
still you struggled
to remain by my side

still you braved the waters
their silt-brown rampage
their churning violence

to follow my voice
even when i called you
by another name

an older name
forgotten before you were born
my daughter’s name

i shouted
and i feared
and how my heart soared
when you reappeared

magic: a poem

06 Monday Apr 2026

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a neanderthal
ponders a stone
then strikes it
with another

until it sparks again
and again
and again
in a rhythm
then a blaze

the pile of grass
that catches fire
is no larger
than the moon

that tiny circle
that distant island
that light that touches
but can never be touched

tonight
four humans orbit luna
in a metal box

full of wires
spun from rocks
ripped from the ground

full of stones
we taught math
using lightning

and you wonder
why i still believe
in magic

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
—Arthur C. Clarke, 1968.

Fugazi Live Series Reviews

14 Saturday Mar 2026

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Live Series banner photo by Glen E. Friedman, from his book Keep Your Eyes Open: The Fugazi Photographs.

Below are a few thoughts on five concert recordings that Fugazi, my all-time favorite band, has made available as part of their Live Series. The five concerts here are ones I had the good fortune to attend in-person. (I’ve written more extensively about my experience with the two shows in Georgia.) Included are links to where you can download digital copies of each show for only five dollars — the same price we paid for concert tickets back in the day. Fugazi has made hundreds of these recordings available, beginning with a limited run of maybe thirty shows on compact disc about twenty years ago and gradually working through their massive archive of more than 800 recordings of their more than 1000 shows. You can now hear their first show in 1987 and their final show in 2002, and so much more in between. I currently have twenty-two of them, but here are the five I went to. I only wish I could have gone to more.      

Fugazi Live Series FLS0228
St. Louis, MO USA 6/13/1990
https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series/st-louis-mo-usa-61390

I went to this concert with a girlfriend and a bunch of friends from high school. Fugazi had not yet become my favorite band before this show, but there was no doubt in my mind afterward. A few songs in this recording sound a bit rough around the edges, but the in-person experience was transcendent and still comes across for the majority of this audio-only experience. The overall energy and performance captured in this recording are amazing and go a long way in demonstrating why the band built a loyal following in its early days. My teenage friends and I left this venue convinced we’d just heard the greatest band on Earth. We weren’t wrong.

A girlfriend and I used to go to this same venue for local punk shows from long-forgotten bands like Shortcut, and those shows were billed as being at “The Alley” because you’d enter the club from the literal back alley for the local daytime shows. It was called “1227” (pronounced “twelve twenty-seven”) due to its street address for the nighttime shows with nationally touring bands from out of town. Other bands that blew my mind here include TSOL who put on a stunningly hard-rockin’ show, and Trent Reznor back when he was just a sweaty, skinny, long-haired solo act with his keyboards as Nine Inch Nails on an early tour for the Pretty Hate Machine album.

Fugazi Live Series FLS0356
Columbia, MO USA 6/3/1991
https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series/columbia-mo-usa-60391

The mix on this recording is sub-par, with hardly any punch to the bass drum, and with guitar and vocals parts that often sound a bit muffled or distant. That’s a shame, because the performance is really tight. The band takes some noisy liberties with by-then familiar songs such as “Repeater”, while showcasing several choice numbers from the Steady Diet of Nothing album that would not be released until the following month. Having recently graduated from high school, a good friend drove us two hours west from suburban St. Louis to catch this show at the Blue Note, and we were completely stoked that Ian casually said hi to us outside the venue.

So, despite this not having top-tier sound quality, I’m grateful to the band for posting this show and bringing back memories of a musical adventure with a good friend when we were on that awkward cusp of becoming adults, when it meant more than anything to us to be in the same room with our favorite band singing about stuff that really mattered. We still carry that fire with us.

Fugazi Live Series FLS0774
Atlanta, GA USA 3/28/1996
https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series/atlanta-ga-usa-32896

Words cannot express how awesome it is to hear this concert again after thirty years, thanks to the band making this recording available. Sometimes I have wondered if it was merely nostalgia convincing me this was one of the very best concert nights of my life; but this recording leaves no doubt that it truly was. The sound is great, and the high-energy performances are absolutely thrilling.

Fugazi Live Series FLS0776
Savannah, GA USA 3/30/1996
https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series/savannah-ga-usa-33096

Solid recording of a great performance. I had just caught the band two nights prior in Atlanta and was so stoked to hear a totally different set that included several songs on my wish list that weren’t played at the previous concert. It is so great to read other commenters’ memories of this show, and I concur that it was indeed sweaty, loud, and absolutely awesome. Somehow, through the mass of bodies crammed into the club, I got close enough to the stage to reach up and get a handshake from Guy after the final number. It’s a moment I have treasured for thirty years, and to hear this concert again means a lot to me.

Sure, there was a jerk or two in the crowd trying to use the show as an excuse to physically abuse total strangers, but the way Ian calls them out and shuts them down is hilarious as always, and much appreciated. Most of us — approximately 698 of us out of 700 — understood that we could all be angry about what was happening in society without taking out that anger on each other, and instead unify around common causes and our shared love for the music. That attitude remains just as important today.

Fugazi Live Series FLS0857
Detroit, MI USA 5/9/1998
https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series/detroit-mi-usa-50998

A great high-energy show. I took a friend to this one, and the band played a lot of songs we hadn’t heard before because we’d not yet picked up the End Hits album which had been released hardly more than a week prior. What an amazing introduction to the new material! If I recall correctly, Jerry Busher had a second drum kit set up beside Brendan to create an extra-heavy percussive onslaught; although I don’t see that in the photos posted thus far, I believe I hear it in this recording. (Jerry is also largely responsible for the work that went into mixing and mastering the shows for the Live Series!)

This was the largest venue in which I had seen the band perform, and they rocked it. Even up in the balcony where my friend and I had seats — yes, actual seats at a Fugazi show! — the energy was palpable. The epic 16-minute closer of an extended “Promises” into a chaotic and ferocious “Glue Man” is by itself worth the price of admission.

a dramatic day in the life of a dinosaur

13 Friday Feb 2026

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Love: The Dinosaur is the fourth installment in a series of books that each explore one day in the life of an animal, and the first to feature a prehistoric protagonist. A small, feathery theropod known as a bambiraptor travels the landscape of the late Cretaceous on one of the oldest and most universal missions of all animals: to eat without being eaten.

The story, written by Frédéric Brrémaud, comes to life entirely through the painterly artwork of Federico Bertolucci without a single word of dialogue, captions, or sound effects. In doing so, it joins the pantheon of my favorite beautifully wordless dinosaur comics such as Ricardo Delgado’s Age of Reptiles and Tadd Galusha’s Cretaceous, and other wordless wonders such as the famous “silent issue” of G.I. Joe and Godzilla In Hell.

Bertolucci gorgeously renders the natural world and her inhabitants in their ceaseless struggles to survive on land, in the air, and beneath the water. What impressed me most upon my first reading was Bertolucci’s ability to convey a dramatic sense of scale and size, from the tiniest insects to the most gargantuan sauropods, all of whom are dwarfed by the epic vistas through which they travel.

In terms of plot, I did not find The Dinosaur as compelling as Age of Reptiles, where Delgado often told tales of tribal conflict and brutal quests for revenge that tapped into archetypal stories of human life while remaining wholly animalistic. But The Dinosaur works marvelously as an imaginary documentary showcasing the wonder and terror of the natural world, from its intricate details to its stunning scope, from the darkest shadows of the forest floor to the brightest lights in the sky.

With a palpable sense of perpetual danger and plenty of dinosaur fights to satisfy readers of any age, Love: The Dinosaur is an awesome addition to the world of dino comics. After reading it, I devoured the first three books in the series, and the book about the fox easily became my favorite of the bunch, one of the most amazing graphic novels I have ever seen. Check out that one, too.

Collector’s Guide: Available on Amazon in a $9 Kindle ebook edition or more expensive hardcover printing. At the time of this writing, a boxed set of all five hardcover books in the Love series is available directly from the publisher, Magnetic Press.

the westcreek 333

07 Saturday Feb 2026

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The WestCreek 333 is a semi-hollow-body electric guitar based on classic Gibson designs, a bit of a cross between the Gibson ES-333 and the ES-335, with the output jack and the pickup selector switch relocated to where you might expect them on a Gibson Les Paul. You could get a similar model from Epiphone for about $1500, or from Gibson for about $3500, or you could buy Alex Lifeson’s guitar with the fancy tailpiece and whammy bar for $384,000 at an auction. But why do that, when you could get this lovely WestCreek at a fraction of the cost for only $300?

The last white one in stock on Amazon at the time, mine played great right out of the box after a quick tune-up. Action was nice and low, just how I like it. The two humbucking pickups produced a nice range of tones. The neck pickup with the treble rolled back and zero effects delivered a warm, round jazz tone that would please fans of Joe Pass and Pat Martino. The bridge pickup through a Big-Muff-style fuzz distortion created bright, glassy chords with a fat low end that brought to mind the Reverend Horton Heat. Between those extremes, you can dial in a wide range of tones that could suit any hard-rockin’ style from 1980s-era Cult to 2010s-era Swans, or softer and prettier finger-style tunes.

We’re in a strange period of history for guitarists, where the market is flooded with cheap Chinese knock-offs that often look great in photos but have serious physical problems and defects once they arrive. But this 333 is my second WestCreek, with the first being my Racer (in black) that is based on a Gibson SG with the sloped lower bout of the Guild double-cutaways like the one Kim Thayil of Soundgarden plays. The Racer is an astounding ass-kicker I love playing as much or even more than my old Epiphone SG G-400 — at a lower price today than I paid for my Epiphone thirty years ago. So even though I tried to keep my expectations in check about the 333, I had hopes that WestCreek would deliver an equally awesome semi-hollow.

They absolutely did. Based on my experience with two different models, WestCreek is consistently putting out electric guitars that any beginner could aspire to afford for around $300, but delivering a high level of quality suitable for a professional or performing musician. WestCreek’s guitars are just as gorgeous in-person as they are in the company’s promotional photos, and they play and sound as great as guitars that might run you ten times the price.

See WestCreek Guitars.

The WestCreek 333 is also currently available in black, though who can say for how long. Grab one while you can.

…Savage, Unthinking Brute Force!

06 Friday Feb 2026

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…Savage, Unthinking Brute Force!
A Painted Tribute to Jack Kirby by Iain Carstairs

These are a few notes about this one-of-a-kind Silver Surfer painting by the late Iain Carstairs, a painter and fresco artist in the UK. I believe, perhaps incorrectly, that it is primarily oil paint on canvas. Iain might have also incorporated acrylic and various inks in this painting, but we never discussed that. It’s approximately 51 inches wide by 29 inches tall. I suspect the frame and canvas were constructed by hand in his studio.

The painting, with often thick layers of textured paint that reflect Iain’s love for fresco applications, is based on a panel from Fantastic Four 55 as originally drawn by Jack Kirby. Iain created this art around 2012 or 2013 and shipped it overseas to me as a gift because of our shared interest in Jack Kirby comic books and art.

The bare edges of the canvas have a slightly yellow tint to them, emulating the aged newsprint of old comics. Some of the black text in the speech balloons has slightly faded. In some places of the text, when examined up close, you can see faint shadows of the original text sketching where Iain was working out the placement.

On the back of the canvas, Iain made an ink drawing of Kirby’s Devil Dinosaur reading dinosaur comics, with a volcano and a spaceship in the background. The inscription wishes me luck with my own dino comic, which Iain did not live to see in print as my Legends of the Dracorex graphic novel in 2024.

Cancer took Iain from us far too soon, in 2016. I first began corresponding with him after discovering a post about Kirby on Iain’s now-defunct blog about the intersections of science and religion. Iain did not see science and religion as competing with each other but rather addressing different facets of humanity’s relationship with the world and the universe. Iain and I did not always agree, but our discussions were always lively, respectful, and thought-provoking—the kind of dialogue where you might learn something new and also examine your own ideas more deeply and critically, building bridges instead of walls, and growing as a person.

Iain and I shared a love of Jack Kirby’s artwork and stories, and he kindly sent me many scans of old and now extremely expensive Kirby comics. I got the idea to do a series of acrylic paintings based on images from Kirby’s comics, enlarging them to a 16 x 20 size, and I sold at least one of them on eBay. Iain, a more skilled and accomplished painter than I, loved this idea and produced this Silver Surfer painting as a gift for me.

Iain’s painting on display with some of my earliest comic-book inspired acrylics. At the bottom center is “Behold The Awesomizer” which I painted based on a double-splash panel from Kirby’s Captain Victory, and later sold on eBay.

You can see one of Iain’s large-scale frescoes from 2013 at: https://www.patrickcomerford.com/2024/07/the-fresco-at-frescoes-brings.html

This is a solid painting that has a few dings around the edges after having survived half a dozen moves or more between 2017 and 2025. I hope that finding a new home for it in 2026 will bring some fun and inspiration to others, maybe introduce more people to the wonderful and influential work of Jack Kirby, and maybe even generate more interest in my favorite non-musical art form: comic books.

I know Iain would have liked that.

Surfer in his new home, 2026-02-13
The original page from Fantastic Four 55, recolored for a digital reprint.

the heaviest guitar on earth

30 Friday Jan 2026

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When my father died, I inherited a $350 acoustic Alvarez that was a solid workhorse with a punchy sound and easy to play. But I already had multiple guitars for that job, some of which did it better, so I sold the Alvarez. I put the funds toward the guitar I really wanted, an axe that could bring to life all the ultra-heavy down-tuned sounds I was hearing in my head after a few years of listening to bands such as Kyuss, Wo Fat, Bongripper, Nebula, and Dozer.

That axe was the ESP LTD Viper 200B baritone electric guitar. ESP is a brand you might associate with shredders, stunt guitarists, and hair metal from the 1980s. I always did, and honestly that kind of turned me off from them. But when I needed a guitar to play the heaviest rock imaginable, it should come as no surprise when I say the 200B was absolutely metal as fuck.

A baritone guitar is designed to be tuned down a fourth lower than your standard guitar tuning. So, instead of the fattest string being an E, it’s an A. This means you need a fatter set of strings for those pitches, and a longer neck to handle those lower pitches, the longer vibrations. The result is an instrument that feels halfway between an electric guitar like an SG and a Fender jazz bass in terms of weight.

Plug her in and throw on some distortion, and you’ll immediately realize it sounds even heavier than its physical presence. The long-scale neck weighs more than a standard guitar’s, and it will always want to dive on you, which is why I replaced the factory’s strap buttons with StapLoks to prevent this beast from ever getting away from me.

I often played her through a Logan Square Destroyer distortion pedal to emulate tones from early QOTSA.

Despite the overall heft, the neck was stunningly easy to play: comfortable in the hand, action low, and even the intonation was solid right out of the box—though I had to adjust it after a few months. I tried tuning the whole thing down a fourth to A, but that didn’t inspire me, so instead I tuned her to C. In other words just like standard tuning, but if the low E were instead a C.

That tuning was a revelation. While A sounded a little muddy to me, C maintained all the crisp clarity of standard tuning while producing lower tones with a punch you could feel in your guts, the whole instrument vibrating in resonance, the heaviness of the first album by Queens of the Stone Age ripping out of this piece of wood with hardly any effort. And when I would take that tuning and lower the fattest string to B flat for a “Drop D” vibe that was really Drop B flat, I got the heaviest sounds I’d ever made with a guitar.

None of that was ever recorded, so you just have to take my word for it. That’s my only regret about the Viper. Yes, her metal hardware did slightly tarnish in the ten years I had her, and one of the screws from one of the string saddles somehow fell out and disappeared so that I had to replace it before I sold her, but she was an absolute joy to play. Both in terms of tone and physical presence, of monumental vibration and sheer good looks, she was truly the heaviest guitar on Earth.

Long may she run.

As far as I know, ESP doesn’t make these any more. They still have a Viper series, but none of them are baritones. It’s hard to believe I got this axe for under $500 when even the standard Vipers are going for three times that now.

my pretty purple fender

30 Friday Jan 2026

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Circa 2015, I enjoyed a brief reprieve from the financial downturn that had forced me to sell all my guitars except for my old Epiphone acoustic, and I was entertaining the idea of writing songs for the characters in the Meteor Mags series to perform. As much as I loved my beat-up Epi, I had the whimsical notion that Mags needed a prettier guitar to bang on, so I went looking for an acoustic/electric with a gorgeous top that wouldn’t break the bank.

The winning candidate was a Fender T-Bucket 300CE, part of a “Hot Rod” series Fender began selling in 2013. I chose one with a quilted ash top that was as pretty as any figured maple top I’ve ever seen, finished in transparent violet with shimmering “holographic” inlays around the sound hole, and she’s the axe on which I composed songs for the series beginning with the title track from the story Whipping Boy.

I paid around $350 including shipping, and she was a good guitar for the price, super easy to play right out of the box, without my ever having made any adjustments or any kind of set-up. The chromatic tuner built into the electronics, combined with high-quality tuning knobs that felt as good as my preferred Grover brand, made tuning a breeze. The action was nice and low, the neck was comfortable in my fretboard hand, and she was a joy to look at.

But I was never in love with her, because despite being a dreadnought with mahogany sides, back, and neck, she never punched as hard as she should have. The tone always sounded thin to me. The bass didn’t punch me in the gut like my favorite mahogany dreadnoughts do, and the mids and trebles never projected that full, crisp, ringing clarity I crave. She was a work of art that would have looked amazing on stage, but she was lacking the substantial heaviness that would have made her truly worthy of a guitar for Mags.

That being said, she never got a fair chance to show what she could do plugged into an amp on stage, because I had stopped performing in public by the time I got her. That’s a bit of a tragedy, because I now believe she was designed specifically to be a stage guitar, where the thinness of her purely unplugged sound would be irrelevant. After all, she had Fishman electronics, and the Fishman pickup system in my old Wechter Pathmaker sounded bloody amazing when plugged in.

I’ve often wondered if the thin sound was the result of being primarily made of laminate woods instead of solid woods, but I suppose I will never know for sure. In fact, the guy I sold her to on eBay posted a rave review of how great she sounded in addition to her good looks, so it’s possible I was unfairly comparing her to the absolute beast that was my 1944 Gibson J-45—a guitar that set an impossibly high standard for awesome acoustic sound.

Either way, I regret never giving this beautiful axe a chance to shine in her true element as a performance guitar rather than a songwriting-at-home guitar, but I am so glad that she found a new home with someone who truly appreciates her. She was a solid companion through many years of triumph and tragedy, and almost every original song by Meteor Mags, the Psycho 78s, and the Dumpster Kittens came to life on her up until the title track of Permanent Crescent, which was composed on my ESP LTD Viper 200B, a baritone electric.

Here are a few more photos of her.

Below is the photo and review from the guy who bought her from me through eBay. He obviously loved this guitar and everything about the transaction, and the only thing that could make me happier about that is if he would cut off those damn string ends sticking out from the headstock. Rock on, my friend.

“Beautiful guitar! Looks new, and (after I went to lighter gauge strings) it plays and sounds amazing! The hard case was just icing on the cake — easily worth at least $100!!! The seller responded IMMEDIATELY — almost too fast as I was out of the country and had to ask my neighbor to secure it as it was delivered while I was traveling home. This is easily the best buying experience I’ve ever had on eBay! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ a solid 5 stars!” — eBay buyer.

pieces: a poem

08 Thursday Jan 2026

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PIECES

you and i have seen
the ends of so many planets

stood on their precipices
until they were destroyed
and vanished at our feet
leaving only us

to celebrate their existence
and mourn their passing

below they burst into flame
like wicks on a dying candle
taking with them
all our stories and songs

little pieces of us
we can never recover
but hold their memories
close

fifteen years on mars: the charts

06 Tuesday Jan 2026

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total credits of $3,763.02 in fifteen years

It’s been fifteen years of Mars Will Send No More on WordPress, ever since the very first post about a man in his panties petting his big-ass kittycat and rampaging with dinosaurs — activities this blog has continued to heartily endorse. On past anniversaries, I’ve talked at length about the fun and connections this modest little hobby has brought me, such as the fact that just yesterday I got an email from a Senior Museum Director in charge of the Fossil Plant Collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City because of my post about the book Archelon and the Sea Dragon — a post that also brought me some wonderful correspondence with the book’s original artist, and even connected me with some folks who loved the book as much as I did and bought my last remaining copies at a generous price.

But for this anniversary, let’s look at the numbers. For 180 months, I’ve tracked monthly visitors and the monthly store credit I’ve earned via my affiliate relationship with MyComicShop.com. There are two inaccuracies to consider. One is that for ten months in 2019, I didn’t record my credits. I believe it was because they had tapered off to the point where I was wondering why I was bothering to keep track, but then the credit earnings ramped up unexpectedly and made me think they were worth tracking after all. In 2020, I was earning at least $20 credit per month, usually $50 or more, and hit an all time high of $360. (Thank you, readers! That’s a lot of free comics for me!)

The other inaccuracy is that sometimes MyComicShop doesn’t promptly credit me with a month’s earnings and instead aggregates two or three months of credit at a time. I don’t know why, and it doesn’t especially bother me — I have had only two minor grading complaints on orders with them in nearly 20 years and thousands of great comics they’ve sent me — but it means my “monthly” breakdown of credits doesn’t always correspond to the actual month in which credits were earned, just the months when those credits for one or more months at a time were applied to my account.

Even considering these two facts, I don’t think the graphs show any obvious correlation between page views and credits earned. In fact, my peak earnings took place after my page views had been in a slight but steady decline for multiple years. And when my views were at their highest ever for a couple of years, I was earning hardly any credits at all!

Earnings declined after the first three or four years where the blog was ramping up in popularity and visibility, when lots of people must have been dropping by for the first time ever and possibly have been discovering not only the blog but also MyComicShop. Then the blog entered a few years of peak viewing activity but a drop off in earnings. Then views began to drop off, but earnings suddenly reappeared and topped all previous records!

What does all this tell me? It justifies my original blogging philosophy that I would post about whatever I thought was awesome, whenever I felt like it or got inspired, and not worry about whether the rest of the Internet discovered my post that day, or that month, or even that decade. My approach was to build an archive of stuff I liked or found interesting; and, over the years, sometimes a random post that was completely ignored for a damn long time gets on someone’s radar because it is exactly the thing they were searching for, and they share it, and suddenly it is getting thousands of views and people are sending me emails about it and sharing their scans, PhD dissertations, and memories with me. I love that.

So, I have never worried about popularity or trending topics when I post. I have, over the years, spent a lot of time cleaning up and streamlining earlier posts so it’s more clear what links will take you to a place where you can buy something, and cleaning up a lot of the chaotic formatting from the formative years where I barely had a clue about HTML or mobile devices. I’ve spent a lot of time updating old posts so they don’t go stale, updating the text and images and especially the links to stay relevant, useful, and somewhat consistent with the overall tone I’ve established in fifteen years, and direct readers to new editions and reprints that have come out since the original date of posting.

But the main focus has always been on compiling a body of work about art I love and my own artistic obsessions which have been influenced by others before me, and linking it all together in such a way that it’s like a library whose hallways anyone could wander for hours without ever seeing everything there is to read but still discover a lot of cool stuff along the way. I think that’s why the blog sees such random spikes in viewership and affiliate credits: Every now and then, someone stumbles upon this library for the first time and wanders into the stacks. And maybe they tell their friends about it, too.

May the goddess have mercy on their souls.

scenes from an art house

02 Friday Jan 2026

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Like I’ve said before, I rented a room in a house full of art and records and awesome people in the mid-90s. If I tried to tell you all my memories of that time, we’d be here forever. Most of the records and paintings and art collages were the result of poet and performance artist Arwulf — though sometimes we would add our own bits and baubles to the mix — and they made a completely unique environment for a bunch of us starving artist types to explore new tunes and come up with wild art adventures.

The biggest plywood painting in the living room was the result of, according to his own account, Arwulf eating 18 peyote buttons on his 18th birthday and filling in all the shapes with color, and it was an epic backdrop for the many listening sessions and spontaneous jams we had in that massive library of jazz and other wondrous musics.

All of us loved and cared for Wally Kitty, a big, scrappy ball of fluff and cuddles and laid-back but punk-rock attitude who embodied the spirit of the house for everyone who ever met him.

After a while, noticing my enthusiasm for jazz and my involvement with WCBN, Arwulf asked me to substitute for a few of his radio shows there, and he gave me carte blanche to transport any of his records to the radio station and play them. This gave rise to some of the most amazing listening sessions of my life, but hanging out and blowing our minds with new music was just what I and the people I knew did back then. We either watched weird art movies, or talked for hours, or jammed, or listened to records.

Anyway, let’s have a look at these photos I took with a disposable panoramic camera back in 1996. And if “disposable panoramic camera” sounds like crazy vintage tech to you, then consider that we used to play old 78 RPM records on a wind-up Victrola inside this crazy splash of color and sensation. We loved it.

ashes: a poem

31 Wednesday Dec 2025

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ASHES

at the end of the road
you discover
who will leave
and who will stay

a fire never considers
the lives it consumes
on its reckless quest
nor the ashes it abandons

it never asks for thanks
for the warmth it gave
nor forgiveness
for all it destroyed

it simply burns and leaps
from one fuel to another
until everything is exhausted
regardless of consequence

we should be better than flame
more thoughtful than the inferno
but we rarely are

the light we seek
burns too brightly
an incandescent sun
a fragment of the moon

casting shadows
whose darkness
we cannot perceive
until they are upon us

On her last full night on Earth, Brenna Kitty the yard cat who never wanted anything to do with me even when I fed her came inside to enjoy cuddles and petting and warmth by the electric heater in my little room, which was easily fifty degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the brutal winter night outside, which had long ago left behind freezing and plummeted to inhuman depths. I knew the situation was grim when she came to me for comfort. But I treasure that one rare night we spent together. It comforted me to be there to comfort her. She was a good cat.

caverns: a poem

25 Thursday Dec 2025

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la jolla, 2000

CAVERNS

one afternoon
we drove to see the lions
in la jolla california

they covered the beach
and flopped around
like legless dogs

we had never
seen anything
like it

the tide was out
revealing caverns

all the places
you’d never go

we climbed down rocks
embraced in a cove

unveiled by the sea
at sunset

we stood below the tide
until the lions departed
until the water came in

coronado island, 2000

me and my SG: 1998 photo shoot

14 Sunday Dec 2025

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In 1998, Brian Srock took a series of photos of me and my Epiphone SG guitar. Brian was a friend and former housemate from the days when we both rented rooms in the mid-90s at the home of poet and performance artist Arwulf Arwulf in Ann Arbor. We shared many adventures in the realms of art, poetry and music, once attended the Sunday service of a weird cult on the outskirts of town, and participated in a sweat lodge together. Brian asked if I would pose for him to help build his portfolio, as he was seeking work as a professional photographer. I grabbed my electric guitar and donned my leather pants, and we made a fun afternoon of the project.

Here’s a photo of Brian I took at the Blind Pig in the late 90s.

Here are some other photos of me and my SG in concert in 1999. I don’t remember who took them. They come from when I was in a band with Erin Elvis, who sang and also played an SG. She eventually got out of singing and played guitar in the ultra-heavy band Chapstik, whom you should check out. The current incarnation of the band is still performing and has a Facebook page.

This month, I got an mp4 copy of the band’s brief performance at the 1999 feminist rally on the Diag at University of Michigan. A friend shot this with a handheld VHS camcorder, so the lens is smudged and the sound is not great, but you can see we had some fun and rocked out. More details about the event are in the video description on YouTube.

Thanks to our good friend Wendy for shooting the video and letting us practice at an unreasonable volume in her house every week!

miscellaneous: demos and stuff

14 Sunday Dec 2025

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Here’s a new addition to the free albums you can download from my Music Page.

Miscellaneous: Demos and Stuff by Matthew Howard.

105 minutes, 19 tracks.

DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE MP3 ALBUM PLUS THE ALBUM BOOKLET AS A ZIP FILE.

Miscellaneous song demos recorded over the years, either previously unreleased or only appearing on limited-edition promotional CDs. The sound quality is usually sub-standard, but each recording has a special place in my heart, and many of the pieces were eventually performed with various bands and small combos. These recordings span the years 1995 to 2025, from the time I got my first four-track recorder, through my stint with my first rock band in Michigan, my two decades in Phoenix, and more.

Uncle Freddy’s Happy Fun Time Feel Good Band

22 Saturday Nov 2025

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Here’s the latest addition to the free albums you can download from my Music Page. It’s a blast from the past, recorded in 2008 and pressed as a limited-edition CD for a huge party the singer and I threw at our favorite bar and pool hall for all our friends and the locals in Phoenix, AZ—now available online for the first time.

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Uncle Freddy’s Happy Fun Time Feel Good Band: Tyrannosaurus Poon by Kristian Berg and Matthew Howard.

43 minutes, 10 tracks

DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE MP3 ALBUM PLUS THE ALBUM BOOKLET AS A ZIP FILE.

The 2025 edition of this album features the songs composed and sung by my old friend Kristian Berg, to which I added guitar tracks and solos both live and in the home studio. I’ve omitted songs of my own that have since appeared on other albums and, for legal reasons, the many covers we performed. Kristian and I always had a great time playing together, and I think you’ll have a great time listening.

What I Learned from Egberto Gismonti

13 Thursday Nov 2025

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Egberto Gismonti is probably the most adventurous acoustic guitarist you’ve never heard of, and he’s been blowing my mind for decades. Born in Brazil, he’s incorporated a lot of ideas from Brazilian music into his compositions, but you could listen for hours and not hear anything you’d immediately identify as a Latin groove. And you certainly wouldn’t consider him a classical guitarist, though he often invokes what sounds like the atonality or twelve-tone approach you’d associate with composers such as Webern and Schoenberg—fitting, since he studied music with a teacher who was a student of both those composers.

You might file Egberto in jazz, since he recorded so many albums on the ECM record label and performed with John McLaughlin, Charlie Haden, and Jan Garbarek. But his take on jazz ranges from sonorous to the utterly outside playing of pianist Cecil Taylor’s later solo albums, and you won’t find him playing familiar standards or basic rhythm changes. Egberto absolutely blazes on piano, too. In fact, he can make music on a plastic tube, and I don’t doubt that he could create music with any random object you put in front of him.

His technique on acoustic guitar goes beyond playing the standard notes on the fretboard. He delves into percussive sounds by striking the strings and the body, hammering the fretboard with both hands, and bringing out nearly every possible sound you could imagine making with a piece of wood and strands of metal. If you are into Michael Hedges as a guitarist who explored the edges of what’s possible on an acoustic, then check out Egberto to go even farther.

And he doesn’t just play a regular old guitar. No, that would be too easy. He’s most famous for playing a ten-string guitar—which I believe he designed—but the credits on his albums often list a vast variety of non-standard guitars with seemingly random numbers of strings.

I first heard Egberto when I was filling in for late-night broadcasting slots as a volunteer DJ at WCBN 88.3 FM, in Ann Arbor in the 1990s. The station had an amazing collection of vinyl records in every genre and style imaginable. Since I got my start as the go-to late-night fill-in guy because I am such a night owl, I would often get a call at two minutes to midnight to cover the next six hours of airtime. I’d throw on some clothes and a winter coat, and speed walk to the station in the dead of night. Not because I was in a hurry, but just to keep warm. I’d arrive without a plan or playlist and start grabbing records off the shelves—not records I knew, but anything that looked interesting! That was my chaotic introduction to so much music and so many artists I still love to this day, and Egberto Gismonti was a musician and composer I might never have discovered any other way.

Do I understand everything he’s doing? Ha! I should be so lucky. Even three decades after hearing him for the first time, with all the music theory I have learned in the intervening years, I wouldn’t know where to start with trying to analyze Egberto. But his music makes me feel something, or combinations of feelings I don’t have names for, or think of something in a different way. It can take me on a journey to somewhere strange and beautiful I have never visited before.

What I learned from Egberto is that I was under no obligation to make the guitar sound like anything people expected it to sound like. He showed me absolute freedom to explore not only any idea or groove that came to mind, but to explore every possible sound the instrument could make, along with every possible sound any object on Earth could make.

While there’s nothing in my recorded catalog that you could point to and say was obviously influenced by Gismonti, his music came to me at a formative time in my development, showing me that there were no limits to style, genre, sound, or technique. To stop thinking about playing guitar and instead think about how I could make music with any object I encountered, then come back to the guitar with that same spirit of freedom and exploration.

If you’re looking for a starting place to discover Egberto, you can’t go wrong with his catalog on ECM Records. I’d start with his Rarum album, which is a compilation of recordings from various albums he made for ECM over the course of twenty years. ECM’s entire Rarum series of compilations is brilliant and will introduce you to so much great music that is off the beaten path. And I don’t know about you, but even after all these years, I love wandering into unexplored territory.

stars and stripes

11 Tuesday Nov 2025

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Pictured is my WestCreek Racer, which is an amazing guitar I got new for $230. It plays and feels just as nice as more expensive guitars I’ve had, such as the Epiphone SG, the Halo Invert, and the Ibanez Iceman. All I had to do was lower the bridge a little bit and adjust the intonation on the lower three strings, and she was good to go: instantly comfortable with everything where my hands expect it to be when I want it. The more I play her, the more I love her. You could easily spend ten or twenty times as much on a Gibson SG, but it definitely wouldn’t play ten or twenty times better. This little beauty can hold her own against any slab of wood out there!

Guitar 8: Semi-Abstract Painting

17 Friday Oct 2025

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My original post about this painting from 2013 disappeared, so here it is again! Guitar 8 is part of a series of around two-dozen acrylic paintings where I began with purely abstract messes of color and texture, then outlined them with guitar shapes to ground them in reality. Most of them appear in my art studio archive.

Here are a few of my other favorites from this series.

kalaratri

12 Sunday Oct 2025

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Click here to listen or download the reading as an MP3.

KALARATRI

time’s endless night
destroys all those she makes
her acolytes

we build honeycombs in carrion
not even ravens will scavenge
we sleep in cities where birds refuse to roost

back alleys where the concrete wind
blows one implacable song
then collapses

in refuse we find refuge
what was cast off we repurpose
to make it new

my sweet everything
this continent belongs to you
by virtue of your villainy

you own it because it cannot escape you
nor restrain you
your power here is absolute

the essence of impermanence and solitude
embracing all and drawing them
to your breast

suckle your disciple
so i might outlive gods
and kings and treachery

outlive words and paper and the
bonfires where they will be burned
and then
forgotten

This poem appears in the book Inner Planets: 50 Poems.

Take Five in E minor for Looping – lead sheet

05 Sunday Oct 2025

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Tablature created with MuseScore.

When I told my tenor sax buddy that I had transposed Take Five into the key of E minor, he looked at me like I was crazy and said, “Why would you do that?!” It’s a fair question, coming from a horn player—especially since the composer Paul Desmond played alto sax in Dave Brubeck’s classic quartet. For reasons I won’t go into here, horn players love keys with a lot of flats, which is why so much jazz is composed in those keys. So what I have done here surely seems to be some kind of sacrilege to jazz purists.

But as a guitar player coming from a rock background, I found the original key of E flat minor made this rather sophisticated piece torturously hard to learn and pointlessly difficult to improvise solos over. Raising the whole thing a half step into E minor opened up countless possibilities for me, for several reasons.

Just about every amateur rock guitar player you meet will tell you that the first scale they learned was E pentatonic minor, a five-note scale that any beginner can use to play some tasty blues licks. It’s easy to learn because all of the open strings in standard tuning are part of that scale: E, G, A, B, and D. Being able to use all the open strings when you are improvising solos creates a vast realm of possibilities that a key such as E flat minor, which uses none of the open strings, can never give you.

Transposing Take Five into E minor also makes the chord progression much easier to comprehend and play on a guitar. It transforms this complicated composition into something you could jam with your beginning and intermediate guitar buddies who might only know a handful of basic “campfire chords” they like to strum when playing pop or folk songs. They don’t need to scratch their heads and ponder what Paul Desmond meant by a “C flat Major seven”, because now they can just play a regular old C Major chord. I’ve notated the seventh chords on my lead sheet; but if you simplify things by ignoring the sevenths, then you have an easy set of chords that are right out of the Mel Bay book for beginners.

Jazz purists might hate what I’ve done to this tune, but in my thirty-five years of playing music, I’ve enjoyed countless jams at back-yard barbecues and informal gatherings with great friends who didn’t have a background in jazz “theory” but were super fun to hang out with, and I wanted to be able to play some jazz with them without reinventing the wheel when it comes to chords. Plus, I can solo all damn day in E minor without hardly thinking about it, so Take Five has always felt more natural to me in this key that favors guitars rather than horns.

So let’s pound one final nail into my coffin of jazz sacrilege, because when I performed this tune as a solo act with my looper pedal, I completely threw out all the chords from the B Section. Instead, I would just loop a vamp based on the E minor and B minor chords from the beginning of the tune—exactly like what Brubeck’s band would do for the entire duration of the drum solo. I’ve notated all those chords on this lead sheet because I find it helpful to remember that Desmond’s horn melody basically consists of arpeggios of those chords, which he links together with some very hip chromatic runs.

Remembering these chords when soloing opens up some other colors to play with. For example, I can grab a C Major triad at anytime, and it will sound consonant over the E minor vamp. Adding an F sharp to that gives a “C Lydian” vibe which sounds adventurous but is still entirely within the home key of E minor.

Finally, in the interest of simplicity, I have only notated a very basic two-chord vamp to loop for this jam. But in performance, I often add an improvised bassline and layer a few different chord voicings for extra color. This lead sheet is only meant to lay a basic foundation upon which anyone can build their own interpretation. In fact, the guitar melody shown here has already modified Desmond’s melody by replacing some of his trills with a few “octave” chords in the style of Wes Montgomery—not because I think Desmond needs my help improving anything, but just because that’s how I like to play the tune.

This lead sheet is not authoritative but a personal record of how I approach this tune, and another guitarist could undoubtedly find a fretboard fingering that better suits their style of playing than mine. Make it your own. The whole point of this arrangement was to take a piece of beautiful music that, at first, seemed to be in a foreign language and adapt it to my own style, and along the way learn some endlessly useful things about odd time signatures, arpeggios, and chromaticism that I still tap into nearly every time I pick up a guitar to improvise.