Eric Bogle in San Jose

The concert was, as expected, wonderful. Eric Bogle is, as I mentioned earlier, one of the best living songwriters -- the Espresso Garden's flier described him as "the Australian Tom Paxton", which is pretty accurate. (Woody Guthrie, who Eric mentioned as one of his early inspirations, is dead, as are Stan Rogers and Phil Ochs. It's not clear that Bob Dylan is much of a songwriter anymore.)

Unfortunately, although our two friends who are traveling with him (and by the way run his website, linked above) came over for dinner and a bit of singing (and are now flaked out on our futons), Eric ended up spending the afternoon at the San Francisco airport waiting for his music partner John Munro. He was delayed by visa problems -- yet another unfortunate side-effect of 9/11. Grumble.

He sang several songs from his new CD, The Colour of Dreams, including "Elizabeth's Song", a very moving song about a little girl who died at the age of four months. Anyone who knows about Amethyst Rose will understand how that hit home.

My evil deed for the day

It started out when I was talking about last night's Eric Bogle concert with one of my coworkers, and mentioned his guitar (a gorgeous left-handed Martin). Brad said that he had once played guitar and was considering getting back into it. He expressed an interest in travel guitars, so I showed him my little review of my Vagabond.

Finally I mentioned that we were located dangerously close to Gryphon Stringed Instruments, one of the best guitar stores in the Bay Area and, since it was on my mind anyway from having received their flyer recently, suggested going there over lunchtime.

He bought an Alvarez RF20. Nice little starter guitar.

Of course, I completely forgot about the Petersen music stand I'd seen in their flyer; only remembered it when I got home and looked there for their URL. Some other day... I did get a couple of free picks, out of their "this machine takes all credit cards" punch and last year's ATM card.