![]() Ukulele virtuosi have learned to keep it simple get toointense and you really ought to move onto another instrument.Musically, it's a cheap fix-a great ukulele will cost you the same as a bad guitar. In fact,the better you play it, the more wrong it sounds. There's never any guitar-hero wincing or straining or gritting teeth when playing a ukulele. For another, everybody who plays it makes it lookeasy. For one thing, the Guinness Book of World Records hasdeemed it the easiest musical instrument to learn. But I was supremelyconfident that I could master the ukulele. Feeling those tough nylon strings sproing and churn under the savage swipes offingernails, holding on while the hollow reverberations shake that vulnerable little wooden body, hearingthe chords bend out of tune and into their own realm of acoustic feedback.I got my first ukulele a year ago, thinking I could entertain my newborn daughter with stuff like \"Turkeyin the Straw\" and \"Polly Wolly Doodle.\" But in the back of my mind I hoped I'd be able to stretch theuke's capabilities enough to hack out a recognizable version of Lou Reed's \"Walk on the Wild Side,\"which has become little Mabel's favorite lullabye.I'd never played a stringed instrument and can't even hold a guitar properly. The riot-uke or uke-punk contingent is the nextobvious step in a dishonorable but highly entertaining tradition.Adapting rock and punk songs to the ukulele is not so much a deconstruction as it is wantondestruction. The ukulele's Hawaiian origins asan ornate small guitar to accompany beautiful island warblings was long ago warped by the Americanand British desire to use it to play drinking songs. It splits the quaint, strum-and-patter realmof the uke wide open by depicting dozens of musicians using the uke punkishly and experimentally, aseverything from neo-Dada to electronic innovations to potty-mouthed punk.These forward-thinking, far-out four-string-axe acts-found everywhere from Massachusetts to Kentuckyand especially (no surprise) California-include the distortion exercises of Williwaw, the ensembleaugmenters Steven Swartz and Alan Drogin of Songs from a Random House, uke modernists Uke Til UPuke and Ukefink, and skewed traditionalists like underground cartoonist Robert Armstrong, a co-founding member of R. There was a how-to-play-uke instructionfilm.And then there was the recent documentary Rock That Uke. The Expo also showed a British comedy starring George Formby, a goofy uke-strumming1930s British naughty-naïf predecessor of Pee Wee Herman. ![]() 8-10 at Rhode IslandCollege in Providence, screened several films that cut to the heart of the debate.Stanley's Gig is a nostalgic tale of a sad little man whose life is redeemed by the enjoyment of theukulele. A new breed of punks has brought revolution, raw roots andcultural controversy to the uke community.The third annual Ukulele Expo 2003, hosted by the Ukulele Hall of Fame Aug. ![]() Now that punk itself is theĢprovince of hit-making conglomerates and prefab teen sensations, where can we turn for some gutsy,unadulterated chords that don't remind us of the crap on the radio?I say it's the ukulele, and I'm not alone. That's what punk rock was supposed to be doing when it reduced disco to rubble in the late 1970s by bypassing studio savvy in favor of rootsy strumming and hoarse vocals. But even without that sort of overkill, it's possible to take this seminal '60s psychedelic rave-up and turn it, using a laughable instrument no bigger than your forearm, into something savagely sparse, stirring and psychotic. This doesn't take into account the awesome keyboard riff, which I'm now trying to work out on harmonica for a truly disturbing one-man-band rendition. Playing the song on a ukulele-that rinky-tink toy instrument beloved by Hawaiians and music hall maniacs with bad teeth-you can wake this restless monster up gently with a quaint strum, then by the second verse start slamming the strings with more abandon, until by the end of the song you're scraping and scratching the barest and brashest notes out of the instrument like a demented Dashboard Confessional car crash. In the original 1966 recording by ? and the Mysterians, the song gets its menace from a driving organ riff and psychedelic Tex-Mex guitar swirls. Augby Christopher Arnott New Haven Advocate The guitar part to the garage classic \"96 Tears\" has four chords: two for the verse and two for the revenge-rant \"when the sun comes out, I'll be on top\" bridge. Their volunteers have spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours putting this music together and they were generous enough to share it with us.Bill Beckett This 1993 photo captures notable New Haven hardcore stalwart Jim Martin, of Broken and Malachi Punk Uke The four-string Underdog rudely rocks. Queen City Ukes Songbook | UkeGeek's Scriptasaurus Queen City Ukes SongbookĪ huge debt of gratitude goes out to the great folks in the Bytown Ukulele Group.
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