Squint a little and you can see less obvious parts of the show. Note the laptop on the music stand. I hesitate to place such expensive gear on stage, something I am about to get over when my live Karoke show is turned up. Where Arnel has his backing tracks on a hard drive, I burn mine to CDs and use a disk player on stage. If it disappears, I’m only out a hundred bucks and I am the world’s top backup copy magician. I can’t set up playlists (I switch disks) but I can get the next tune platformed a lot faster without any covering stage chatter.That is no ordinary guitar. Much of the upper body has been routed out to make room for special effects gear. You won’t see a brace of foot pedals cluttering up the work area. This allows Arnel to move about the room while playing. Not visible is a series of control switches along the top edge, including an ingenious equalizer that works only with the effects. All this is in moderation, but I remember a west coast show that was not. Rory. Let me tell you about Rory.
He was the epitome of the one man show. He busted into a room and took over. They used to fly him to Barbados for New Year’s. If you already heard of Rory, it stands repeating. He did everything “live” including the drums. This was accomplished by what today would be called a bio-suit. He had a vest and boots equipped with midi triggers. He played the drums by stomping along while playing and could do a major drum solo by pounding his chest. This was the days before MP3 and it is likely he was lugging 15 pounds of radio tackle. As part of the show, he would run into the men’s and you could hear him flush all the toilets with his toe.
These people are my influences. If musical ability was more important than presence, there would be no Johnny Cash’s. I respect talent and ability but I’ve never been a fan of the staid stage act. I prefer a boisterous crowd that loves a good laugh as much as the music. My background is lounges, not pubs, so don’t confuse what I said with a loud or rowdy bunch. I rarely play at high volume and even then I use a compressor. Come to think of it, I lost my compressor six years ago. Left it behind at the Ugly Tuna Saloona in south Miami.
Ridiculist is history. That was the first interactive computer game I ever played, it began on WebTV. That’s the game where the computer asks a question and two teams type hard and fast to get in as many answers as one minute allows. Then, the top ten correct answers, if any, are awarded a point each. I use “correct” with a smile, since the categories are submitted by other players and some of the material hasn’t landed yet. But it shows you how long ago I was on-line, in case any more whiz kids have cropped up around here. Dang, they’re everywhere!
Well, Ridiculist was finally cancelled by TalkCity and has been replaced by a less suitable spread of six non-team games. Since there are no teams, I can’t switch to the losing side and perform miracles. No teams also means a small group of fanatics can dominate the scoreboard. I won’t mention names, but the ones I know have already infested the new system. For example, in a week, I’ve accumulated 61 points and rank 12th in the world. But the people ahead of me are well over 2,000 points and the gap is widening. It takes an average of 30 seconds to make one point. These people live at the keyboard. (Glad you asked. I play mostly while waiting for disks to finish burning.)
Also, the questions repeat. Even people with bad memories can recall most state abbreviations. I may drop this recreation anyway because of the dominance of what I call “youTube questions”. The wording of the questions themselves says a lot. They no longer as for the names of “stars”, but substitute the term “chart toppers”. That was okay when there were only eight charts. Every farmer and his dog are on youTube, and I’ve already described the odds of finding something meaningful in there. I cannot name the top ten “demure” or “freewheel” bands of 2004.
That’s youTube. Get a computer. Make an indie. Seem to forget that most indies are as lackluster as your own, but with an infinitely larger budget. Become lost in the muddle.
