It took me years to decide on a main guitar amplifier. I had a few Fenders and Marshalls over the years, and a Vox that I liked a lot, but I needed one workhorse tube amp that was a virtual tone factory – truly inspiring to play in any style, with any guitar, and small enough to throw in the back of the car without slipping a disc. I wanted an amp that would let me play around with gain staging, power tube distortion at low volumes, and radical EQ to get different types of sounds… but without sacrificing those great, rootsy amp tones you hear on Black Crowes records.

I finally decided on the Mesa Lonestar Special. I had a few moments messing around with them in music stores over the course of a year or so, and it was hard to tear myself away from the amp every time… so when the moment came, I found a really special one with gorgeous mahogany on the front and did the deal. I can honestly say I’ve played a lot more electric guitar since buying this amp; the hours just fly by. It seems to flatter all my guitars, bringing out their individual personalities almost to the point of exaggeration, and it loves pedals, like the Fulltone Soul-Bender and the Keeley compressor – though most of the time I just want to hear it by itself. With a bit of its own saucy spring reverb hovering in the background.

I wasn’t drawn to Mesa amps that much over the years because I associated them with ultra-saturated Metallica type tones, and even though we recorded Santana through his main Boogie many times and heard it on lots of gigs where it sounded great, I was looking for more of a mid-gain, juicy sound with old-school attitude. Maybe what I was looking for was Class A power, like an old Matchless. Anyway, the Lonestar Special gives up the Class A grease in globs, and I can easily smooth out the top end to get those coveted Cream-era Clapton type sounds or goose the power tubes into straight Fuzz pedal territory. Messing with the gain stages has taught me a lot about amplification and the differences between types of distortion, and I find the EQ accesses a lot of different kinds of dirt in there too.

I’m using the stock speaker, a 12″ Black Shadow, and the original Mesa tubes. I’ve heard of people doing all kinds of swaps and little mods on these amps, but I really feel like Mesa nailed it for me ‘as-is’ with this design. The only modification I’ve had done on it is something that should have been there in the first place: the ‘Drive’ switch on channel 2 is now foot-switchable, effectively making it into a 3-channel amp (or eliminating the need for an overdrive pedal). The guys at the Mesa store on Sunset Blvd. did this mod for me, and I use it all the time because it’s right there on a standard footswitch.

I feel like I’m still discovering what this amp can do. The clean sounds were a little too transparent for me at first, but I’m finding that it can get a lot funkier and ‘amp-y’ if you ease off the Presence quite a bit and crank the Treble control. Turning the mids down adds a bit of ‘squish’ to the feel of it as well. Power-wise, 30 watts seems like more than enough headroom for the kind of sounds I like, and I generally run it all the way down to 5 watts anyway unless I’m on a louder gig.

Any complaints? Well… no tremolo on the Lonestar… that’s about it. And it doesn’t make espresso, though I haven’t called the factory yet to see if they can’t add it as an option…

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The Badasht Project is dedicated to the development of the arts as envisioned in the Bahá’í Writings, particularly music, which is described as ‘a ladder for the soul’. The project’s first endeavor was a series of public devotional gatherings centered around various art forms, and this CD was born from that experience. A lot of blessings have come from it in its first few months, and among them is that it’s brought me together with the perfect musical brother-in-arms.

Eric Dozier and I have known each other for awhile. We met in Atlanta in 1995, and ran into each other every few years after that, but we never had a chance to do any music together because we lived on opposite coasts. I was always blown away by his songwriting talent and his ability to motivate large groups of people to sing. Eric is like the Johnny Appleseed of Gospel choirs; they sort of spring up in his wake.

In 2005, a twist of fate landed us both on Vancouver Island. We figured there was a reason we were in that corner of the world at the same time, and eventually Eric and I started working on the songs for a devotional CD called Badasht vol. 1 – While the City Sleeps. It was partly a compilation of songs that each of us had already written, but by the end of the project we found a groove as a writing team and started collaborating on new music from the ground up.

The purpose of the Badasht CD was to present the Bahá’í Writings in a musical context unlike other projects we were aware of, and to combine our different backgrounds – musical and cultural – as an expression of the central Bahá’í principle of unity. The music itself is on the mellower side of what each of us does, as we were going for a meditative tone in general, but we couldn’t help ourselves – the Gospel and rock tendencies rear their heads at a few points, and inject a little bit of adrenaline into the proceedings.

It’s a pleasure to work with Eric, because he has a natural way of taking religious texts and making them sound fresh, relaxed and natural in a musical setting. His is a rare gift, and I’m learning a lot from Eric in that regard. One of the central purposes of music and art in history has been to illuminate the meaning and beauty of Sacred teachings, and we’ll always be looking for ways to contribute to that process in our work.

The odd song out here is the title track, ‘While the City Sleeps.’ It doesn’t quote the Writings, but instead tries to capture the moment when a burst of Divine Revelation hits the earth without anyone noticing but the most spiritually attuned. The song opens with the sound of the Persian ney, a flute used in Sufi whirling-Dervish music, and the lyric describes how every new spiritual Message is rejected when it doesn’t conform to our literal, physical interpretation of prophecy.

We’ve been playing this music at concerts more and more over the past year, and have noticed that some of the songs are becoming well-known enough by audiences for them to sing along note for note. People have contacted us from all over the world describing the different ways they use the Badasht CD in their devotional lives, and we’ll be doing more of this sort of thing in the near future – hence the ‘Vol. 1′…

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

I was on a bus from Saskatchewan to Belize one time – don’t ask – and somewhere in the middle of the journey I looked out the window and said: ‘This is it: the perfect time to break out the Lotus tape.”

In addition to packing a few extra bottles of Pepto, I had prepared as well as possible for this trip by bringing a ton of music I hadn’t heard before, partially to break up the monotony of endless bus travel, but also to partner each moment with its ultimate soundtrack on my Walkman (remember those?). And this moment was, without question, the Lotus moment.

Outside the bus, it was night time in Mexico City. Mexico City will blow almost anyone’s mind; the sheer density and size of it, the endless layers of humanity, life and death, construction and decay, are striking even from inside a jumbo jet flying over it at hundreds of miles per hour… never mind from a groaning bus as it lurches its way through the smallest side streets at what seemed like several hours per mile. And the amount of street life so late at night! I was transfixed. The driver’s area of the bus, a veritable shrine to the Virgín de Guadalupe, was blinking with random colored lights like a Christmas tree. Ahead, people – so many people – would step out of the bus’ path mere inches from being hit, and the driver’s foot wouldn’t even graze the brake pedal. A yellow-haired, blue-eyed image of Jesus looked on.

My relationship with Carlos Santana’s music was already intense. Having heard some of it in childhood, I rediscovered it upon falling in love with the electric guitar, and for several years had been immersing myself in it like a type of meditation. The first time I had lived in Mexico as a teenager, there was no other music that spoke to both the rock & roll of my Canadian background and things I was experiencing around me in this foreign place. I couldn’t imagine understanding a song like ‘Europa’ until I heard it pouring out of the doorway of an all-night cantina as I stumbled through San Miguel’s cobblestone streets at night, high on youth and romance. But as I grew into a more spiritual curiosity about life, Santana’s music grew with me. I was now graduating from the acid-addled abandon of his Woodstock freak-out days to the introspective, earnest Coltrane-isms of the man who wore a white suit and called himself Devadip.

For whatever reason, the albums Caravanserai and Lotus had escaped me up to this point, and they represented the peak of this crucial part of Carlos’ journey as a person and a musician. I bought fresh copies of both before my trip and vowed to wait until the right time. Because of this, for the rest of my life I will associate the sound of these two records with the sights and smells that washed over that smoke-spewing bus to Belize. I felt like I was the sound of that electric guitar, piercing through the heavy night air as a battery of percussionists throbbed in time with the crazy Christmas lights and the pulse of an impossibly huge city.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _