Dae Jun – McDonald’s Superstar

After conducting a show I stopped by McDonald’s and got my meal wrapped in the coolest Mickey D bag. One side featured Mr. Dae Jun of South Korea – a university student, orchestra cellist and “McDonald’s crew and Global Casting Star”.

So this is a shout out to Dae Jun. The top photo featuring our official Dae Jun McDonald’s bag shows Joe Bischel (left – principle cellist for the Seattle Philharmonic) and Sharon Sparling (right – also cellist with the Seattle Phil and a regular in my pit orchestras). Our official prop mistress holding the bag is Rebecca Wright (middle), my first call bass clarinet, oboe and bari sax player.

Below is a high quality scan of my official Dae Jun McDonald’s bag, complete with french fry stains. Don’t doubt for a minute that I bring you the highest quality news reports from around the world folks.

To my fashion friendly friends in LA:  please note the dual hairstyles on the bag. That’s right. ONE bag – TWO  hairstyles. How can you just not totally love McDonald’s?.

Smashing Guitars

I had posted a YouTube video of a banned Mastercard commercial where a kid smashes a guitar. (Click Here for YouTube Video). Just for the record, I did in fact once have a comedian in the recording studio who did a video taping of himself smashing a brand new electric guitar just for the fun of it. He bought the guitar (I think it was a Made in Mexico Fender Strat electric) and took it right out to the parking lot to smash.

He almost broke his hand. Those guitars are very solid. I don’t know how they do it for stage dramatics, but in the real world don’t try it if you care about keeping your hands.

It looks cool when Garth Brooks does it on stage with acoustic guitars – anyone have any info on the prep they do for that? After the comedian made about fifteen jabs into the cement, and still didn’t get the explosive effect he wanted – concensus was it was kind of lame and he wasted his money.

Have a good guitar smashing story?