Update.

The new Strat neck arrived. It is a thing of great beauty, which I did not expect; a guitar neck is a guitar neck - a working part of an instrument.

Also the quality of the neck is remarkable. This is from Fender's Mexican factory and cost around £300. A Fender Custom Shop piece of similar quality would be five times that.

Computer-aided manufacturing is going to change things so much. When you can build exactly the same thing anywhere, you will build it where workforces are cheapest and exporting to the markets is also inexpensive. Pop-up factories to take advantage of temporary economic positions like most favoured trading nation status can move when that status changes.

The economic consequences are as yet opaque excepting it is likely that wages will equalise worldwide a lot quicker, and folk with capital will get richer.

Got to thinking about...

...Tommy Bolin, after a thread on the Gear Page.

As a kid I covered “Wild Dogs” in one of my school bands. At the time Billy Cobham’s “Spectrum” was a big player; right up until punk came along and we all claimed to love the Velvets and accepted that Bowie and Fripp were the only members of the previous generation worthy of not being critically reappraised in the light of the “new understanding of the cultural revolution" - in reality of course we needed a little red book and firing squads to complete our cultural dominance.

But some of us listened to Return to Forever and Weather Report as well as Zep and Purple and the Pistols and the Clash. (And Bach and Beethoven and Mozart and Bartok... etc.)

The punk thing ended even more quickly than Pol Pot’s regime. Johnny Rotten may as well have been Jan van Leiden.