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I “met” Rich 10 years ago in the old Harmony Central Guitar Forum. Rich was a character – his stories of the road, playing clubs in the late 70′s and 80′s, and his sense of humor were unmatched. Rich was also one hell of a guitar player and just a real nice guy. He’s probably best known for his “Friday stories”, where he would post about some crazy thing that happened on the road. NOBODY could weave a tale like Rich. I had a hard time telling how much of this stuff actually happened, and how much was made up. Given how his life seemed to go, I’d say that at least 90% was true, and the other 10% wasn’t embellished a whole lot.

Like a lot of creative people, Rich seemed to be a magnet for chaos and his life was in constant turmoil. He referred to this as “being hit by anvils”, as in Wile E. Coyote in the old road runner cartoons.

Rich dropped out of sight a few years ago and I hadn’t exchanged emails or spoken to him in a few years. He will be missed – not only by his immediate family and friends, but also by the online community that he helped build.

STAUNTON — Richard Earl Knuckalls, 53, of Staunton, passed away April 20, 2010. He was born Oct. 2, 1956, to parents, Laura Harris and Garland E. Knuckalls, who preceded him in death.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that memorial contributions be made to the Virginia Department for the Blind and Vision Impaired Endowment Fund, ATTN: Eva Ampey, 397 Azalea Ave., Richmond, VA 23227.

Lizzie Hale is fucking HAWT. Don’t take my word for it, just look at this:

And she can sing. In fact, I haven’t heard a singer who manages to exude so much attitude and shear sex on a major label release in years.

But a fantastic singer teamed with a band that quite frankly, SUCKS, does not a great record make.

This album starts off strong with “It’s Not You” and “I Get Off” – the hardest rockers on the entire album, both featuring very strong vocal performances from Ms. Hale. With these two songs, there is so much attitude in the lead vocal that you can almost ignore the problems lurking underneath.

But then we hit the third song, which is the first of several tender jams on the album – “Bet U Wish U Had Me Back” – and the album goes limp, diving headlong into the Murky Realm of Gutlessness – alongside Nickelback, Shinedown, and so many other faux hard rock bands of the last decade or so.

Lizzie does her best to try and pull this thing out of the screaming dive by continuing to sing her hot little ass off and being the dangerous rock and roll queen bitch that you know she is, but it just isn’t enough. Even with some great hooks, this album just falls flat.

So what’s the problem?

1. Production: this album has been tweaked, analyzed, quantized, time aligned, brick wall limited, and produced to death. It doesn’t breathe at all. The songs almost sound like they were cut to a drum machine. The feel is stiff and mechanical. Which brings us to problem #2 -
2. The Drummer: yeah Lizzie, I know he’s your bro and all, but he SUCKS. It’s pretty obvious from listening to this disk that all the drums were replaced with samples and that the performances were edited to fix timing issues. There’s NO FEEL or dynamics in his playing. With a singer this good, and with her lyrics and persona being primarily about sex, the drummer HAS to make it happen. And this guy plays like a virgin. There’s no “I wanna fuck you ’til you pass out” in this guy’s playing. It’s more like “girls scare me, especially my hot sister. Please don’t hurt me.”
3. Where’s the Lead Guitar? In many ways, this band is a throwback to the 80′s, when just about all the women were this hot, and just about all the songs were about sex. But, there’s no hot guitar playing to take it to the next level. I’m not talking virtuoso shred here, because that wouldn’t fit. But I keep thinking how much better this record would be with John Sykes playing on it. Or even the guys from Skid Row.

Halestorm comes off here like Shinedown’s little sister – another band with a fantastic lead singer and nothing for him to work off of. I would LOVE to hear Lizzie fronting a band with players that are as good as she is. In fact, that would easily be the hard rock album of the year and would probably be outlawed in many countries. But this album is largely a huge letdown.

Overall, in spite of the fact that I really wanted to like this record, I ended up being disappointed. Buy the two singles on iTunes and ignore the rest of it.

2 horns out of 5, in spite of a solid 5 horns vocal performance by Lizzie.

Band website: www.halestormrocks.com

Buy “I Get Off” on iTunes here:

Buy “It’s Not You” on iTunes here:

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He was at Dan’s Silverleaf, which is a VERY small club up in Denton, about 30 minutes from my house.

Gear was interesting: his old white original Steinberger from the 80′s with Seymour Duncans in it, two Hughes and Keltner combos (they might have been Switchblades) and a table with three or four pedals that all had the same four switch configuration.  I never could tell what these were.  On the floor he had a volume pedal and a think a channel switch for the amps.

I’ve never seen him play before although I have heard him a few times.  He’s so different as to be impossible to relate to what a traditional guitar player does. He plays like a horn player. Once you figure that out and kind of go with it, you can sort of understand it.

The band (Chad Wackerman and Jimmy Johnson) were equally awesome.

I still really crave more structure when I’m listening, and I know there’s some structure there somewhere, but my ears can’t find it.  Still, seeing him live was worth it.  His sound is much bigger in person than on his records, much warmer, and the drums and bass are huge sounding as well.  His technique is really unorthodox – when you watch him, what’s coming out and the hand movements don’t line up, like Jeff Beck.  He’s also not as dour an individual as his reputation would lead you to believe.

The whole band stuck around for autographs, but since I was feeling pretty crappy (bad cold) I left as soon as the set was over.  It would’ve been interesting to chat with Allan for a bit.

I saw a LOT of guitarists in the crowd.

Overall I’d give it 4 stars out of 5.

The Death of Mistakes Means the Death of Rock