David Lee Roth famously quipped that the reason he wanted to be the lead singer is because guitar players spend most of their lives alone in their rooms. As usual, he was right. The often sisyphean effort required to master the abstrusities of virtuoso guitar is at dead odds with the desire to have a life. But now that spring is here, and the ladies of the F train are wearing dresses with boots again, I figured I'd inject a little social networking into the mix. So I finally broke down and joined The Place For Friends™. That's right, y'all, the MySpace page is up.

The good news is, it tastes just like chicken. Using my vast web engineering abilities, I've managed to transfer the look and feel of troygrady.com over to Rupert Murdoch's sprawling coral reef of music and porn. Although I am an aficionado of clean lines (and cool footwear), the one concession I made to the Williamsburgian so-tacky-it's-trendy MySpace aesthetic is the ubiquitous fixed-image background. One part kaleidoscope, one part graphic design acid trip, the particular vertigo created by scrolling text over a stationary and often grotesquely graphical background is as emblematic of shabby chic as aviator shades on the L train. For my money, I went with a tiled version of the mirrored patchwork indian bedspread you see in the headers and footers at troygrady.com. Once I got the tile size dialed in, it was time to crack open the PBRs and pump up the Cold War Kids.

I'm also happy to report that the video quality on MySpace is among the best I've seen on the free web hosts. Where YouTube is reliably fuzzy, MySpace's video host is higher resolution, reasonably well synchronized, handles widescreen video more gracefully, and has noticeably wider audio bandwidth -- the sort of thing that's critical to features like Amp Shopping. In fact, too bad I hadn't known this a month ago, or it might have spared me the eight hundred-dollar internet bill I earned with the apparently very popular 500MB Amp Shopping download. Ouch. Never fear, I've since upgraded to a bigger hosting plan, and more video content is sure to come. (Once someone busts me out of debtor's prison, that is.)

Now that I've upgrade my cafeteria table, I promise to stop typing in alternating LoWeRcAse and *cApItAlS*, taking overhead phone cam shots of my imposing jawline, and speaking in acronyms. LOL. It's really all about making connections. I was admittedly a little late to the LinkedIn party as well -- surprising, given the networky nature of my business -- but it has quickly become a staple of our recruiting efforts. Similarly, in the few short hours the MySpace page has been live, I've already noticed a more definitively communitarian vibe than any single-ended artist web site can provide.

I'd like to thank Dave Bishea and Rusty Cooley for being the first to comment my new page, and Michael Angelo Batio / Deb Mikesch, Stephane Wrembel, Adam Prato, Conrad Simon, and Cornford Amps for responding to my newbie friend requests in a matter of minutes. To the rest of you, whom I may or may not know as well, it's time to get a little more personal:

Come on and friend me -- you know you wanna!