Las Vegas Live Comments Thread

[RaceFanStan]

Now a guitar, that is cool !!!
I remember Randy LaJoie winning one of them at Nashville.
(I don't know if Randy can "play" it or not, lol)

[Ax Slinger]

I seem to remember Biffle saying he couldn't play and that since he probably wouldn't ever have time to learn that he was going to put his Les Paul "Trophy" into a glass trophy case. I don't know if you play or not, but I do, and that tells me that guitar is gonna be worth some major bucks someday... If he should ever decide to sell it, that is.

If he did, and the buyer is a NASCAR fan too, since it will have been kept in a glass case, it's never been played, it is a genuine Gibson Les Paul Custom, and it was won in a NASCAR race, all add up to a selling price of $50,000.00 or more.

[RaceFanStan]

I don't play. (sigh)
My father does.
Some of my fondest memories from my childhood are of me sitting in the floor at my dad's feet listening to him strum and sing the "old" country songs.
Sadly, I didn't seem to inhereit his talent.
But I do love the sound of a guitar.

[Ax Slinger]

I can dig that. I picked up playing guitar from watching my Dad. He used to sit on the front porch with my Grandfather who played the Banjo, and they would get drunk and play bluegrass for hours. I guess I had a natural ability for it, because by the time I was 8 years old, I was a better player than him. Unfortunately, he never really forgave me for that, so maybe it's a good thing you didn't pick it up from your Dad.

[RaceFanStan]

Yeah Tim, I see what you are saying there,
My dad is very proud and I can see how it could have caused "friction".
It seems that our dads want us to "succeed" but resent us if we do better than they did, (it happened to me with my job vs his job) kinda odd isn't it ?
They want us to do good, yet with "limits" I guess, lol.

[Ax Slinger]

Yeah... My Dad was very vocal about my guitar playing until I was about 16, when I dropped out of high school to play full time. All of a sudden I was making in a day what took him a week of 10 hour workdays to make, and he was a skilled electrical worker, a Supervisor, and President of the local IBEW union.

One day he sat down and figured it all out. I was making $125.00 an hour for playing guitar, and he was making $15.00 an hour for working his butt off. I was paying the equivelent of his entire paycheck in taxes. I worked 4 hours a day, and after a week I grossed $2,500.00. He worked 10 hours a day, and after a week he grossed $750.00. (Or $900.00 if he worked 6 days in a week.)

Of course, in reality, anyone who was making $15.00 an hour in the early 1970's was actually doing pretty well. That was almost 10 times minimum wage back then, which if I recall was $1.85 an hour. But he didn't see it that way. He saw that I was making almost 10 times what he was, for doing something I loved to do, and he didn't like it at all.

If I worked 10 hours, I got $1,250.00, and if he worked 10 hours, he got $150.00. After he figured that out, he just stopped talking to me. Almost 10 years went by, and I was 25 years old or so before he spoke to me again, and then it was basically because I forced him to. After a little yelling and getting in his face about it, he saw how stupid it was to be jealous of me for doing well at something he had taught me to do. Even if he didn't actually "teach" me to play guitar, I just watched him and figured it out on my own. But by then it was almost too late. He died about 5 years later, but at least we made our peace before it happened.

[RaceFanStan]

It seems very hard to be "friends" with your parents,
I guess no matter how old we get, they still look at us as "kids".