Mojos was a classy, roomy, atmospheric blues bar and restaurant tucked away off one of Bangkok’s raunchier back streets. It was early one Sunday evening and the weekly blues jam there was just shuffling off to a cautious start, with the usual suspects and wannabes hanging and waiting to perform.

The gig always attracted some good players, some local expats and some from around the world – just passing through mostly – Bangkok being one of the hedonistic capitals of the world and a magnet for musicians with that recurring dream that somehow Bangkok had it all – the gigs and the chicks on tap.

Chicks on tap were not a problem and the Mojo’s Sunday Jam eventually played an integral part in itinerant musicians getting their name out there in the hope of nailing that essential residency or gigging band.

Occasionally we got the odd star or name came through, and this Sunday about 7, the big wooden doors swung open and in came a lean, lanky 40-something with a guitar and gritty determination writ all over his face.

Ignoring the crowd and the bar, he came right up to the stage, handed me a business card and asked if it was an open floor and could he play. Sure I said, eyeing his card as he spoke. ‘Mason Ruffner – Guitarist’ it said. Name didn’t mean a thing to me at the time and I welcomed him and asked him to wait his turn, “You’ll be up soon enough” and he headed to the bar and quietly waited his moment.

Took a while if I recall correctly, and he seemed a tad miffed once he did get up on stage having waited patiently to follow the less-than-awesome players who had already strutted their stuff. There was a house bass and a house drummer waiting any front man. Mason called his tunes, got the groove in place and set about showing the room just what Texas blues was really all about. Little doubt this guy was the real deal and he pulled out all the stops gifting his audience the licks and lines those Texas kids are brought up on, while at the same time remembering he was a showman who took his craft seriously.

By the middle of the second number, I was somehow embarrassed I had never heard of him, so impressed we were with his 24-carat blues chops and in-your-face stage charisma.

Texas was in town – no shit!

Of course later we discovered he’d been playing with Dylan and had his own record deal and albums and stuff. The real deal right enough.

Soon it transpired Mason was on the Dylan ‘Oh Mercy’ album made in 1989 with the Bono-recommended Daniel Lanois producing. Mason was a feature in blues clubs in New Orleans where the album was conceived and recorded, and Lanois called Ruffner in knowing he could write as well as play.

In Dylan’s best-selling autobiography ‘Chronicles’, he says of Ruffner: “Mason had bags of explosive licks with funky edges, rockabilly, tremolo-influenced. Mason had some fine songs.”

Turned out making the record was a stormy project with Dylan and Canadian Lanois taking a while to get acquainted before finally working off the same page.

Lanois recalls the album was  to be done his way. Or else.

“I operated with Bob the same way I always operate…I’m completely honest and clear about what I think is the best. And if anything gets in the way of that, then they’re gonna have to deal with The Lanois!”

During the making of this album, one of Dylan’s finest, sparks famously did fly, but Ruffner took the storms in his stride.

“For me Bob was easy to work for. But I think he was a pain in the ass for some people. Sometimes he’d argue with Lanois, looked like just for the sake of arguing. After reading ‘Chronicles’ though, it seems that was a crucial time. It was shit or get off the pot. I think he was a little apprehensive, didn’t really know who Daniel (Lanois) was and if he could make a good record. But, after he realized they were going to make a good record there, I think Dylan softened up. By the end he was a lot different. I remember he (even) did a drawing of Daniel.”

“Whatever happened, this album was different – aside from all the personalities involved. We were recording in an old house, just sitting around the living room. Bob had his little stand with his lyrics, and we’d cut off into something. Seems we were cutting these songs all kinds of ways. Rock groove, slow, funk, or folk groove, trying different grooves and tempos. Bob would put his head down and start playing, and we’d tag along. It was all a big experiment, try the song 20 different ways. We were doodling with half the songs that wound up on his next record,  Under The Red Sky,” Ruffner smiles.

“Bob was (also) doodling a lot with the lyrics. He used a pencil. He didn’t use no ink pen. Always making changes and additions and subtractions. An elephant could’ve walked in and he wouldn’t have seen it. His concentration is unbelievable.”

These days Ruffner has set up shop in Stockholm servicing a demand from there for quality blues in Scandinavia and Europe, with the occasional trip to Asia.

His musical roots go back to the mid-sixties, when the lanky teenager from Ft. Worth, Texas fell victim to the supernatural guitar prowess of Jimi Hendrix and the lyrical genius of Bob Dylan. He began tracing the lineage of modern rock back to its post-war origins, digging the sounds of Jimmy Reed, B.B. King and Robert Johnson.

In the late sixties, Mason tried his hand at modern rock and folk music, but the blues bug would not let him be. Eventually, blues singer Robert Ealey invited Mason to join his Five Careless Lovers, the house band at Ealey’s own Bluebird Lounge in Ft. Worth. This was Mason’s formative period as a guitarist and stage performer. Departing Ft. Worth, Mason spent time in California and New York before settling down in New Orleans in the late ’70′s.

After a few years of playing on Bourbon St., Mason started his own band, The Blues Rockers. They landed a steady gig at Club 544 and played more than 200 live gigs a year. In time, The Blues Rockers became one of the most popular bands in the Crescent City backing blues legends like Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim, while counting Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Page, Carlos Santana, and Stevie Ray Vaughan among the stars who dropped in to listen or sit in.

In 1985, Mason was signed to CBS Records. His debut LP was produced by Rick Derringer and issued in October of that year. When Mason hit the road, headlining clubs and opening for Jimmy Page & The Firm’s U.S. Tour, some of America’s top critics started to notice. “What makes a record with so few surprises so satisfying?” asked Rolling Stone’s David Gates, who continued, “mostly it’s the joy and the unselfconscious conviction with which Ruffner recreates and recombines the sounds he obviously loves.” In the New York Times, Jon Preles said, “when it comes to rock-n-roll basics, Mason Ruffner never makes a false step.”

In 1987 Ruffner released Gypsy Blood, which was produced by Dave Edmunds. A natural for the job, Edmunds complemented Ruffner perfectly. The spontaneous combustion of the sessions leaps from the grooves of Gypsy Blood. In support of Gypsy Blood, Ruffner toured with U2, Crosby, Stills, and Nash and Jimmy Page; and The Firm. The title track was included in the movie Steel Magnolias.

Ringo Starr personally chose Ruffner to open his summer tour of 1989, the same year that also found Mason contributing in the studio to Daniel Lanois’ debut LP Acadie and Bob Dylan’s highly acclaimed release, Oh Mercy. Mason can also be heard on Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. III.

The dynamic originality and articulate fretwork of Ruffner’s work captured the attention of superstar Carlos Santana, who has incorporated “Angel Love” off of Ruffner’s Evolution album into his live shows and Mason has made several guest appearances with Santana.

His latest CD, You Can’t Win, is on the Burnside Record Label and was recorded in Memphis. “You Can’t Win” is a return to the roots, to the bluesy stuff that rocks, he says.

Catch Mason live at Saxophone Bangkok in September…..

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They come around with the simplest questions kids do…but sometimes you are stumped because you know but you don’t know how to condense it for the ten-year-old instant answer…get him a laptop and tell him to go here with any guitar questions.

If you’ve been down to your local blues bar recently and seen some young gun playing a beat-up 1959 Stratocaster, your eyes may have been fooling you. What looks like a vintage Strat is probably a “relic,” a modern-day copy that’s been artificially aged by master artisans: carefully worn, tarnished, rubbed, beaten and otherwise altered to look like it’s seen 50 years of sweat, smoke and back-room jam sessions.

Relic guitars first became popular in the 1990s when Keith Richards encouraged two guys from the Fender Custom Shop — John Page and Jay Black — to build a couple of custom guitars and artificially age them. To actually “de-evolve” the instruments, they hired their friend Vince Cunetto, a guitar maker who had developed a few techniques for realistically aging wood, paint and metal.

The first Fender Relics, a blonde ’50s Mary Kaye Stratocaster and a ’50s Nocaster, arrived in retail stores a few months later. Page purposely chose the Relic brand name for its pious connotations. “Guitar playing is a religious experience to people,” he says.

The guitars were a huge hit. For one thing, they were easy on the wallet. Serious players dream of owning a vintage Stratocaster, but a guitar actually built in the 1950s or ’60s could set you back between $15,000 and $25,000. Fender Relic guitars, which the company still produces, start at $2,000.

But the mojo resonates deeper than the price point.

“It’s like buying pre-worn jeans,” Page says. “What’s the appeal of a worn pair of jeans? They’re more comfortable — not only do they look cooler, they feel better.”

Cunetto and John Page recall kick-starting the relic guitar market when they began producing “pre-aged” instruments for Fender in the 1990s.

At first, there was some backlash from collectors who were afraid Fender was polluting the vintage market. The team put those worries to rest by stamping the Fender Custom Shop logo onto each guitar so it wouldn’t be confused with the real deal.

Besides, they never set out to create exact replicas.

“We were trying to imitate them, not nail them,” says Page. “We made modernized versions that were very close to the old designs. They had the same vibe, but they played better.”

The guitars were recognized for their superior build quality and became collectors’ pieces anyway. A decade later, the first Fender Relics — especially the guitars bearing Cunetto’s name and Page’s signature — sell for more than twice their original value.

Neither of the guys work for Fender anymore (Page builds guitars and furniture in his rural Oregon shop, and Cunetto builds both new-looking and old-looking instruments in his shop in Missouri). But their two heads together created what is now commonplace in guitar-building. Gibson, the other industry biggie, has a line of aged guitars. Smaller shops like Bill Nash Guitars, Big Tex Guitars and RS Guitarworks are producing superb artificial artifacts. Check out photos from SMK Music Works’ factory, where they do custom-order aging.

The concept has also seeped into other areas of music nerdery — you can find relic amplifiers, cases and guitar straps.

Cunetto says musicians feel an instant connection to a well-weathered guitar.

“You pick one up and it felt much better and more familiar much faster than a shiny new guitar,” he says. “Players tell us they sounded better, but it was probably because they felt better.”

Cunetto has spent countless hours doing R&D to find the right techniques.

To make the finger-wear marks on the fret board, he uses a architect’s powered drafting eraser. A few select screwdrivers and metal tools put chips in the guitar’s paint and dings in the wood.

“Every guy has his own little toolbox,” Cunetto says. “It’s like two painters using different brushes for the same thing.”

The colorful finishes on the guitars are done with old-school lacquers. Page says he always uses nitrocellulose instead of modern polyurethane. He says nitro is “more spiritual” to him.

To accelerate the aging of the finish, you speed up the cycles of hot and cold the instrument would naturally go through. Cunetto keeps freezers in the shop, and after a few rounds of cooling and warming, the nitrocellulose lacquer begins to disintegrate. The effect is a beautiful spider web of tiny checkered cracks in the finish that make a new guitar look like it’s 50 years old.

But there’s more to making a relic than screwdrivers, ovens, erasers and sandpaper. It has as much to do with art as it does with science.

“It’s not just about making it look beat-up,” says Page. “The thing I always admired about Vince is that he aged it in the right way, in the right wear patterns. If this was a country player or a blues player, what specific parts of the neck would be more worn? Where would the chips be?”

Cunetto says he tells his aging apprentices to dream up a back story for every guitar they work on, and to apply that story to the instrument. Every guitar ends up with its own personality, its own emotional resonance.

“Was this guy a country player? He’s going to have a lot of wear in the first position on the neck,” Cunetto says. “There’s probably a burn mark between the pegs from where he always sticks his cigarette. And he’s going to have a lot of buckle wear, because he’s wearing a big rodeo buckle.”

Both men readily admit that the relic thing has gotten out of hand. What used to be a niche product is now part of the mainstream marketplace, and the quality and mystique have faded. Both Nash and Cunetto have started to move away from making aged guitars.

After all, it doesn’t matter what your guitar looks like. What matters most is how it feels in your hands.

“It’s about creating the right guitarma,” Cunetto says. “The more humanity you put into it, the more comes out of it.”

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Read More http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/07/relic-guitars#ixzz0vH3Lu5cH

Sticks and stones, you may have been told, can break your bones, but names can never hurt you. True, perhaps, in everyday life; not so in pop music. Names can do serious damage. There’s one very good reason why Parisian baggy revivalists Shit Browne may struggle to make it on to daytime radio playlists, for instance. But at least they’re trying. Better than hedging your bets like the increasing number of bands, or individual artists, who’ve removed the traditional “The” from their name to become vague, indefinite articles – something, yet nothing. Klaxons, Liars, Foals, Editors, Villagers, Hurts, Battles … the list goes on. In their desire to sound fashionably vague, I fear these acts are selling themselves short.

Villagers – what? Just “villagers”? Any old random villagers who happen to be wandering round a non-specific village? Editors? Just some stray editors who happen to be loitering in a corridor after being recently made redundant? Surely they should have the self-confidence to be The Villagers, the only residents of a small settlement that we need to be concerning ourselves with, or The Editors, go-getting decision makers who say, “HOLD THE FRONT PAGE OF ROCK’N'ROLL!” But no: instead they’re just a vague, noncommital noun, reluctant to offend, inspire or pin its colours to any discernible mast.

And what are we to make of Liars, some people who may have told a lie at some point? That narrows it down. Whereas if they were The Liars we would glean that they are no ordinary fibbers, truth-economists or mere white liars, but noteworthy falsehood-merchants whose duplicity is worthy of our respect, even fear, if not admiration.

Then there’s Hurts. Impressively monochrome synth-pop duo they may be, but the name sounds like the class drip who’s fallen over in the playground and can only bleat “hurts” while pointing to a slight graze on his knee. What hurts? He hurts? It hurts? Hitting your thumb with a hammer hurts? Thirty years of hurts? How are we supposed to identify with your pain?

All told, as naming policies go, it’s pretty poor. Would we have got the same punchy first impression from classic bands down the ages if they had been called Jam, Who, or Strokes, or even Bob Marley And Wailers?

Still, there’s nothing wrong with leaving something to the imagination. So I hereby announce the soft launch of the soon-to-be-”trending” practice of calling your band “A _______” Indie fans of a ripe vintage will remember a band called A House, even if they don’t remember their music. So how about A Villager, or A Liar, or A Boy With A Thorn In His Side (any post-emo milksops out there? You can have that one) A Crystal Castle? A Scissor Sister? A Klaxon?

What feelings do such names conjure up? Intrigue? Mystery? Fascination? Excitement even?

Figures.