No Guinness at Sunway Hotel : stupid Beer Wars in Malaysia

Dammit I’m sooooooooooo angry!!

 

Beer drinkers in Malaysia have a very limited selection : Tiger and Carlsberg dominate the scene,with Heineken, Anchor and a few other beers sometimes available.

Stout drinkers have Guinness,though the Guinness in Malaysia is not the same as the Guinness in Ireland, over here it’s “Foreign Extra Stout”, whatever that may mean.  And then there’s the “poor man’s stout”, Royal Stout, which imho is a truly shite drink.

So anyway, go into a pub and you just have a limited choice of beers.

But Guinness lovers could always get their fix, for even the crappiest little hole-in-the-wall bar would sell Guinness. And the truly-veteran Malaysian way to drink it would be “warm”, i.e. at room temperature.

So it came as a complete shock to me when last weekend, at the Seberang Jaya Sunway Hotel’s pub I ordered a Guinness only to be told they only have Royal Stout! And no Tiger beer either, it would have to be Carlsberg….

wtf???

Folks,this is Malaysian marketing stupidity at it’s height. Seems that Carlsberg and Guinness-Anchor are having a Beer War, so each company pays pubs/outlets to discontinue selling their rival’s beer…..

And so some pubs will only sell Carlsberg-Royal Stout, whicle other pubs will sell only Tiger and Guinness. The pub owners get payoffs from the marketing companies, and you and I are suckered into a limited choice.

I say: BOYCOTT THESE OUTLETS!!!  They are restricting our freedom to choose what we want.

For now, I am boycotting all Sunway Hotel outlets, and will refuse to attend any functions there, and also refuse to perform there. Until they give me back my right to choose.

*hic*

and so the year endeth

but some events of significance make other events  insignificant.

A big part of my world came to an end on Dec 5th when Grenville Pereira died following a massive heart attack. It was a totally unexpected,  sudden event.

 

Gren was my musical mentor and friend.  He’s been guiding me for the past 10 years or so, always there to share his incredibly vast knowledge of music and the industry.

In his time, Gren was the keyboardist for the best Malaysian bands, the Falcons and the Alleycats.  From playing stadiums and clubs and pubs and Japan and Hong Kong to doing concerts for the GI’s in Vietnam during the war there, he’d done it all.

RIP, buddy. Miss you terribly.

Congratulations, the U.S.A. !!!

The news is just in, Americans have voted in their first non-white President. Is he Black or black-ish? Really, for isn’t Obama of some mixed parentage, but for me the fact that he isn’t White and yet got voted into what is arguably the most powerful seat in the world makes this a stupendous day.

Will he make a good President? I don’t know, and don’t really care. That’s for the Americans to hope for and for the rest of the world to find out in time.

So what’s the big deal about it for me? Well, the fact that someone from a non-mainstream, non-ruling-”class” segment of the population can make it to the very top of the mountain there is really stunning.

In my own country, Malaysia, it matters little if you are capable, you will never rise to the very top unless you are one of the ruling race. Which allows all manner of idiots and assholes to rule the country, and incompetent people to proclaim themselves Masters over the rest, which makes for a not-too-bright future for us.

You will therefore forgive my unadulteraed envy for minorities in the USA, and my heartfelt admiration for all the millions of Americans who chose to ignore racism and instead voted on issues.

Funny, as I type this I wonder if I will be arrested for airing my views in this blog. You will know if you don’t hear from me. That’s the reality in Malaysia

A Wonderful Night To Treasure

Saturday, 19th October 2008,  Jam Session at Frenz Fun Pub, Penang.

I struggle to describe this one. This night was more, much more than a jam session…..it was a wonderful moment in time that just happened to happen the way it happened….. it would take a much better scribe than me to put it to words, but I’ll still log this in my own inadequate way.

Jam sessions are always a bit of a hit-or-miss thing, since so many factors influence the outcome of events, but this night everything just fell into place.

A good crowd had filled Frenz pub, and the night got off to a good start when a bunch of young guys  started  rocking and rolling : Ming had brought along his friends, a drummer and a singer, and they had everyone tapping their feet with their infectious music.

Panic Disorder

I have been chasing Penang island’s reclusive guitar guru, Sivam, for many weeks, and tonight he turned up with his band, Panic Disorder, and they hit the house with some top class Rock…from classics like Led Zep’s “Rock & Roll” to virtuoso stuff like Eric Johnson’s “Cliffs of Dover”, these guys were fantastic, and you could see a lot of jaw-dropping from the other guitarists around when Sivam started doing some fancy double-handed tapping runs and all….pure genius, the guy, and a wonderful, humble personality too.

It was then the turn to invite Sam Ponnudurai to entertain us all.  Ahhhh, Sam P. The great Sam Ponnudurai. The undisputed King Of The Blues in the region, he is a master craftsman of the art of solo acoustic blues: his trusty acoustic guitar in hand, Sam will mesmerize the most critial of audiences with his fantastic guitaring and his rich, versatile vocals…..delivered with a generous spread of good humor and spontaneous improvisations.

They don’t make them like Sam anymore. He doesn’t just play the Blues,though. Many years spent on the road with his guitar, including some years spent busking in Europe, Sam sings you songs and tells you stories using music as a medium, and he’ll do it with the Blues as well as Folk and other styles if need be.

Sam Ponnudurai, the King Of The Blues

And this night, Sam was in fine form and itching to share some music with us all. And what a performance! He had the crowd spellbound as he weaved his way through a series of songs, from a totally-improvised off-the-cuff tongue-in-cheek bluesy piece to some stunning displays of vocals and guitar prowess.

Enjoy the hour, folks, you’re not likely to see such a  craftsman again. As with Elvira’s performance  2 weeks ago, the mobile phones and cameras were going crazy as everyone was trying to record moments for posterity.

Sam Tells You A Bluesy Story!

Sam Ponnudurai. The King Of The Blues. And the Emperor of the solo-artist genre.

After Sam’s act, timeout had to be called, and the night could have been over, but I bravely gathered the boys for one last set, and we played some light, relaxed Blues to just allow folks to chat and mix around and of course share a drink with Sam.

Yek came up and joined us with his Blues harp, another bit of jamming started and we must have triggered some itch in Sam, for he came up and with Ming’s Gibson he led the band in a fantastic jam session. Trading guitar licks with Sam, I was in Heaven (who says sinners like me don’t go to heaven?).

2.00 am and mandatory closing time, the house lights came on, but Sam insisted we do one more song and he played Carole King’s “You’ve Got A Friend” and asked me to sing it as a duet with him….ha! what a joke, Sam and his rich, fantastically expressive voice and me with my gutter vocals, but Sam has enough heart to make anyone feel great, and sing with him I did, in a wonderful, wonderful goospimples-erupting bluesy version of the song.

Big hugs from Sam at the end of the song, euphoric faces from everyone in the house……

and how was YOUR weekend?

She’s Screwed Again

They had to haul her out in full view of my snickering neighbours. That old bitch of a Volvo wouldn’t start this afternoon, and the mechanic seems to think it’s something wrong with her fuel pump or something, but he had to tow it to the workshop.

Shit happens, but when it happens to a Volvo, then it’s SHIT happening, ‘cos you’re basically on you own with your local mechanic, ‘cos God only gave us 2 kidneys and we’d need to sell both to be able to pay the bill if we took it to the official Volvo dealers.

Why do I drive a Volvo, I keep asking myself. For the safety. Very safe these Swedish bricks. Stands to reason, after all how many accidents can you get involved in when you’re unable to go anywhere ‘cos your car’s in the workshop (again) ?

World’s Best Athletes Stoned In China?

Seriously. Do you think they just started fiddling with their milk last week?

They take their development seriously in China. Nothing matters but the development of their bank accounts’ balances.

But you and me are to blame too. We’ll happily buy shitty products built in dangerous factories using dangerous chemicals and tools,  just as long as they’re cheaper than something made where the cost of proper quality and safety regulations/inspections/enforcement gets added to the product price.

I’m just waiting for that Jamaican sprinter fellow to slow down next year cos he had to stop after 50 metres to piss out a stone.

Or do you think the athletes brought their own cows to Beijing? (And their own cow feed?)

The million-dollar-question : just what ISN’T poisoned there, does anybody really know?

How I wasted 2 months

I keep telling myself I need to manage my time properly. What with the beard mostly white and the brain leastly grey, I need to ensure I’m spending quality time on whatever it is that I’m spending time on.

Which is all nice, but then I decided I needed to build one of these things to manage my guitar effects:

 

Schematic for Raggy

 

Hey, I’m no electrician and I’m no technician, but boys will be boys even when they’re men and more so when they’re kicking the wrong side of 40, and so I plunged into this crazy business. The fact that I could not get the product ready-built anywhere in Malaysia sort of justified the adventure.

And from that diagram (which took a couple of weeks of research to come up with), a frantic search for components across Malaysia and Singapore (why do they always have the stuff you need in that tiny island instead of over here), I built this:

Inside Raggy

 

Which, when completed and connected would be like this:

Loopbox connections

In the greater scheme of things, I had also been collecting various other guitar effects, got a custom-build case for all the stuff, then had lots of fun velcro-ing all things in unimaginably kinky ways, a whole bunch of cables to connect everything built by my long-suffering friend Eisubius….and everything now resides as so:

Pedalboard Top View

Which could have been it, really, but apart from getting all of this done I also had my old Fender Twin Reverb amp cut up, it was just wayyyyyyy too heavy to carry around so I had it seperated into a head and a speaker-cab, and now I use the Fender cab with my Marshall TSL100 head or the Fender head…..

Fender Twin Reverb Head

 

My Fender Cab

 

The best of the best of 2 worlds:

Marshall-Fender

Boys and their toys, indeed!

My Friend M…..

The mind is a strange thing. You can not think of a person for years and then something out of the blue triggers a memory and then you remember everything as if it was yesterday and you just must know everything about him now.  Last week  I thought of M,just out of the blue. Haven’t seen him for about 20 years now, but I called up another friend, Y, who says he’s well and married with kids and all. (Funny how some folks equate being married with being well, I’ve often observed it to be some kind of a stiff sentence with little option for parole…)

M is a guy I knew from my hometown,  Seremban. We were a hockey-crazy town, and I played for my school as well as a local club. Heck, I even made it into the State’s junior squad. Mid-70’s was a long time ago, in years and kilograms  

Seremban had this beautiful large field in the centre of town, 3 hockey pitches and 1 football pitch in one field….all of which became a giant cricket field every once in a while too. Evenings would see the field crowded with players of all ages, and at least one of the pitches would be having a “serious” hockey game in progress: on any given day you’d be able to see anything from primary-schoolkids’ games to inter-state games.

We schoolkids would always hang around the field in the evenings,looking for any opportunity to join in a “friendly” game with the senior state players, it was a fantastic nurturing ground and the senior players would always encourage the juniors to join them.

A bunch of us schoolkids were also playing for the local clubs, so we were sort of like at the border of adulthood, so to speak.

M was an adult already, even way back then. I guess he must have been in his late 20’s ( I was 16 or 17). And he was a “superman”. Absolutely tireless, he could play for hours,game after game, and never showed signs of fatigue. And he was a jovial character, full of laughs and a ready smile and good humor…which he also brought into the field. Playing with him was fun, he was a tireless teammate and would be up and down the field, and his gameplay was a combination of crafty fox and incorrigible comedian…woe to any naieve opponent, M would run rings around him.

We became good friends, and along with some other guys we formed an alliance of non-conformist hockey players calling ourselves the “Paul Street Gang”, Paul St being the street beside the field, and most of the gang living along the street.

Apart from hockey, music was our other common interest. I knew a few chords on the guitar,  and a couple of others were game to strum too, chords and tuning be dammned,  everyone sang in various shades of unprofessionalism (though S was the real vocal talent, he could sing with such gusto one was advised to sit a fair distance away), and M was the percussionist, he’d play with his hands on table tops and boxes and empty cans and what not, peppering each song with indian-afro-rock grooves.

Our favourite jamming spot was Y’s room on the 2nd floor of an old shophouse building. 5 of us could barely cram into that room, but his window overlooked the Catholic Church grounds, and sometimes there’s be pretty girls there….

Looking back, I think that was about the best time of my life. School was great, though I was technically a dropout and attending classes only at nights but this also allowed me to play a lot of hockey during the day, and we had numerous Paul St gang “meetings”. Interestingly, there was no booze, no cigarettes, no drugs and such ever used when we were together. I guess we were just small-town kids and anyway we all needed to be fit for our hockey.

Sorry about the rambling. But I’m writing from memory and not any script, and I’m just writing as the memories come.

It didn’t take long to learn that M was the poorest guy I knew. He lived with his old mother upstairs in an old and crumbling shoplot, and they didn’t even have any furniture. Not even a chair, if I remember rightly. M’s only luxuries were a hockey stick and an old tattered pair of canvas shoes. He had no fixed job, just running minor errands I think, and when I think about it I really don’t know how they survived.

But he was a happy bloke. Despite living an extremely frugal life, he never complained or moaned, and took his lot as his karma, being a devout Hindu.

So it came as a bit of a surprise when one day he gave me an invitation :”I’m having a party in my house. Saturday afternoon. Must come.” huh?

Turns out his mother has died. The appropriate prayers and funeral rites had been done at the temple with minimal fuss (also along Paul St, we had the main Catholic Church, Sikh temple, Hindu temple all within walking distance on the same street, and the State Mosque was on the hillside nearby. It is as close to cosmopolitan utopia as you could get).

So what’s this party for? Death,  was something we youngsters had little experience of. And you don’t call it a party, do you?

“Don’t forget to bring the guitars, we’re going to have a great party.” HUH? Just wtf was M thinking, this sounded so totally crazy, his mother’s ashes still warm so to speak and him planning a party.

But he was the adult in our little group, and it was his mother, and his furniture-less place, so that Saturday we all went there, through the narrow corridor of the tiny downstairs shop selling Hindu incense and stuff, up a rickety wooden staircase and into M’s home, bare wooden floor, single lightbulb…..there was a mat on the floor if I remember rightly, and some simple vegetarian food, and some Coca Cola.

It didn’t take long for the gang to start the music. M on some old bongos, me and probably another guy on guitar…some food, some cola, and for the next few hours if you happened to be walking along Paul Street you would have heard some mighty singing and drumming and a whole pile of voices.

It was one of the best jam sessions ever. Everyone was just in top form. Great party!

I felt somewhat guilty as we were leaving. “Hey, M, we had so much fun, but shouldn’t we have had a quiet day, man, after all your mother just died, we should all be sad.”

 But M refused to see things that way. “Hey man, my mother loved me very much and she never liked to see me cry, so now she’s gone but still looking at me from Heaven. She’ll be so sad she can’t look after me, so I want to let her see I can still be happy and have fun and she does not have to worry about me. Understand?”

Understand?

Much Work, Slow Progress 2

So now that I have collected a bunch of effects to bring out the full glory of analmost-entirely analog guitar sound, all I needed to do was to connect everything together.

Guitar ,cable into an effect, connect to next effect, connect to next effect,etc,and connect last effect to my Marshall TSL100 all-valve amp,for glorious sound. Yes!

No! Dammit it isn’t that easy   Cuss and swear, cuss and cuss some more. Really. The whole thing sounds like a horrible mess. Something’s wrong. All sorts of unwanted sounds and hum and feedback, and loss of clarity of guitar signal. WTF!

A number of technical issues now have to be addressed, and I’m forced to have to research all sorts of science mumbo-jumbo to get a grasp of the situation.

Each effect in a chain, even when not being used, still has an effect on the chain, it’s inherent circuitry/electromagnetics affecting the chain and so the guitar tone.

So? So I need to ensure I can bypass an effect when it’s not being used, and a really True Bypass often requires another bypass-switching control, which is the subject of a long story, but let’s just say I’m probably going to have to build my own True Bypass  Loop box.

To build the True  Bypass Loop box, I need some special switches, called 3PDT switches, which are NOT available in Malaysia. Tough, but I managed to source them online from Singapore.

But guitar signal tone will probably still be sucked by the series of effects and switches, and all that cabling before the signal finally reaches the amp …. due to the nature of guitar pickups’ signals, issues related to Impedance of the cabling/chain come into play.

WTF is Impedance? Ha! and double-Ha! Impedance is the sum of all things impeding the flow of an electrical signal, it seems, and this means factors like Resistance, Capacitance and Inductance need to be analysed and understood.

So WTF is Inductance? Ha! Capacitance? Ha!

It then seems that I probably need to make a bypass-buffer gizmo, which in effect would take my fragile guitar signal and enable it to cross the tone-sucking roadway of effects and cables and reach the amp mostly unscathed.

How to make the bypass-buffer? How to make the True-bypass loops?

That’s what the whole bloody month has been spent finding out!

Poor Little Rich People, Poor Little Poor People

Something is definitely wrong here.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading, guess I’m stupid but I thought you only made bombs and huge armies and fought with everybody in school if you had excess resources.

Poor Little Poor People

One expects volunteerism (is that a real word? Looks funny but wtf it’s my blog) to be needed only in circumstances like this, really.