Simple things amuse simple minds...

OK, something's been bothering me since the Superbowl. And no, not the fact that the normally clutch Patriots utterly failed to take over a very take-overable game about 14 times during the night...

Well, I am bothered by that.

But that's not the thing that was bothering me.

But now I'm thinking about it again.

Oh crap...

-- urp --

There, I just threw up in my mouth again, dammit...

Anyway, the thing that's been bothering me is Mike Campbell's doubleneck from the halftime show. Yes. I haven't been able to get out of my mind the argument I had with my brother- and mother-in-law about Campbell's guitar.

Campbell's Petty's longtime guitarist and he was the guy stationed on Petty's right hand (our left) who used a double-neck guitar for two of the three songs. When I saw the quick cut of Campbell and could've sworn that both of the heads were too small for twelve pegs. But they kept cutting back to under-bridge-dweller-looking Tom Petty (really, what's with the beard?).

Here's a screen cap from the show. Too blurry to tell:

Maybe that's six pegs on top, maybe not. But the head is really too small for a twelve string. Was it a bass? What the heck? I was told by my (guitar playing) mother-in-law, and (decidedly unmusical) brother-in-law that I was full of it and nobody would have a double six string, what would be the point?

So I googled various combinations of "doubleneck" and "superbowl" and "tom petty" etc etc until I found out that Mike indeed has a custom doubleneck that he's been using for years, but none of the posts I found about it mentioned it was a 2x6.

Learning that Campbell's been with Petty for a long time, I decided to look for a better live version of "Free Fallin'" and see if that came up with anything. Well, Jackpot!

Redemption! That's clearly six pegs on both those heads. It's a 2x6.

And the answer (which I suspected as I thought Campbell used two different keys in each of the songs he played with the doubleneck, although I wasn't thinking to see if he was strumming the lower neck during the other song) is that you'd use a 2x6 when you want to do songs that call for different tunings and you don't want to or can't just capo to get the effect you're looking for.

There. That was boring, no? Yup, Mr. Know-it-all is back. Sorry.

(could be wose, you could be married to someone who just spent 45 minutes on the internet in pursuit of this useless information...)