Yeah, it's been a while. Apologies for the extended absence...

We had a good rehearsal tonight, adding new tunes for O'Reilly's on Saturday. We did these:

Mess Of Me - Switchfoot
E-Pro - Beck
I Want You To - Weezer
Symphony Of Destruction - Megadeth

Also on the radar - 'Between The Lines' from the forthcoming STP album and 'I Hate Everyone' by Say Anything.

I'm so glad there's some rock stuff still left to play.

Happy New Year! Hope y'all dig the new site.

We're kicking off the new year of gigs this Saturday at our home away from home, O'Reilly's Pub. Here's hoping y'all can come out and support.

We have some new stuff to play for you - but it's not 'new' new, as we've come to the conclusion that most new rock sucks pretty hard. So we've got some 'old' new stuff for you this time.

And there may be an addition coming to the band that you might want to know about. Once that starts rolling, we'll clue you in.

That's it for now. Stay tuned.

TD and I just got back from Thatch Meadow Farm in St. James, where we'll be playing on Saturday night. We had been under the impression that there was a private party going on, but we just learned it's open to the public! There are only two conditions to be met:

1. That you come in costume - after all, it is Halloween, and

2. That you come ready to make a donation to the entertainment.

The venue itself is pretty cool - 20 acres nestled at the headwaters of the Nissequogue River. It's a collection of buildings forming a court yard, and we'll be playing on the outdoor stage. The band Forensics will be in the smaller inside venue.

The crew at the farm was hard at work today making the place as spooky as possible for the party. So if you guys are up to it, come on out on Saturday and party with us at one of the most unusual venues we've ever been booked into.

So, we had our last rehearsal before Saturday's party, and we had Tommy O'Reilly in to finalize the stuff he's going to be doing with us. He'll be doing about half the second set with us, and we even added a couple more tunes to his segment.

And no, we're not telling you everything he's doing. you have to come out and see for yourself.

We were joined last night at rehearsal by Tommy O'Reilly, who ran down a bunch of new tunes to sing with us. We worked on some Alice In chains, Rollins Band, Velvet Revolver, and a couple of songs that will drop your jaw. Trust me.

October 24, O'Reilly's Pub
Anthony Gordon's Birthday Party
Featuring Nurse Diesel

When my birthday came up in august, my wife told me she wanted to buy me a guitar but wasn't sure of what to buy because she didn't want to get me something I didn't like.

So I went to the Guitar Fetish site and ordered all the parts needed to build a Tele-style guitar. Here's the result:





This Tele is loaded up with GFS Fatbody pickups (recommended!), a Wilkinson compensated bridge, Wilkinson true mechanical lock tuners and heavy-duty strap locks. And it wails. Happy birthday to me!

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When I bought the Ibanez Artist I mentioned in the last post, the guy selling it also had a Line 6 Spider I combo amp that he insisted he wanted to sell with the guitar. Since I wanted the guitar, I paid the extra dough and got the amp as well.

I tried the amp on a couple of gigs, and it was just horrible. Probably the worst idea Line 6 ever had. So I put the amp up for sale or trade on craig's List, and I got a response from a guy who had one of the most unusual guitars I've ever seen.





This guitar is made by a Korean company named Spear, and it's an odd one in a few respects. First off, the body isn't wood, it's a dense plastic compound called luthite. It was developed by Cort guitars for use in bass bodies, and Ibanez also used it for some Jem models and the Joe Satriani 'Silver Surfer' guitar. It's heavier than a comparable wood body would be, and it's got pretty nice resonance. Spear has been winning awards for a couple of years in Europe, and while this guitar is on the lower end of their catalog, it's still pretty cool. The molded design on the top of the body is just pretty cool, although the bronze color isn't among my favorites. A paint job may be necessary, but probably not for a while.

I don't have many shredder guitars in my collection, but I grabbed this one just for the novelty of it all.

The last 'Gear' entry on this blog was back in April, when i posted my Gibson Les Paul Special. Since then, I've gotten more stuff, and I modded one of my old guitars.

This used to be a black and white Squier Strat, which I bought new in 1995. I decided to mod the guitar after (briefly) considering buying a Les Paul body and putting together my own LP replica, but then finding out that there were QC problems with the kit I was going to buy. Instead, I ended up refinishing the Strat in a retro color and setting it up with a pair of P-90 pickups.





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During the summer, I started gigging with a Clapton tribute band, and my old Ibanez Artist is the #1 for that gig. I was looking at Craig's one day and saw an ad for another '80 Artist, and I bought it to be the Clapton backup guitar. It needed a little TLC, but it's a rock-solid guitar. Ibanez sure knew how to build them in the day.




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More to come.

since we last updated, we've put together a few videos from our shows at O'Reilly's, and posted them to YouTube. In order to show them all, we've added a Video page.

Just click the 'Video' link at the top of the page. It used to just bring up the 'Blue Sky Blue' video, but now it'll bring up all of our YouTube vids. Enjoy...

Back in August (in the post below this one), I mentioned that the server our site was on was a massive pain in the ass, and that we'd be moving the site soon.

Well, soon is now. We moved to a spiffy new server today, and this one should work a whole lot better than the old one. Hell, even this blog is on the same server as the rest of the site, because things just work better with this hosting company.

So... we have some catching up to do. Lots of new gear, gigs in the works, the whole bit. Check back, because now that the site is working right, I no longer have a sense of dread about posting here.

I've been toying with the idea of moving the diesel site off of its current server and to a different hosting company.

I know that some of you find the site to be very slow, and I've got issues with the communications tools that the current host offers - for instance, it takes me 3 hours to send out our mailing list because I have to break it into thirds so I don't violate the hosting company's spam policies.

So... it won't happen today and definitely not tomorrow, but we will be moving to a newer, faster, more spacious home that will let us set up software that will contact everyone at once but won't get us accused of being spammers.

Stay tuned.