Today, I finally tackled that revamping of the database to account for the different colors of doggie wigs. It is one of those things that didn’t get done early on that kept getting put off. Nobody really realized at first that the product number has to include the color. Nobody wants to carry around a separate list of what colors exist for each model, yet nobody knew that three months ago.
You know I love database technology. This color code is an interesting study in how things can slip past the best planning. The blame is entirely pilot error. Color was not an issue at first. Almost all wigs were the same color and you just looked at the small inventory to see what was there. Nobody cared and everyone just remembered. Well, I caught it soon enough and fixed the tables for $137.50, which is all I made today.
Allan, some new guy, showed up with Cowboy Mike for rehearsal. He is woefully out of practice, but catches on quickly. He has to learn our set list, since we are likely to un-do anything we’ve learned. The drum box quickly proved its worth and we’ll be using it (at first he thought I was playing a recording of the real drums). These guys had a band and imported a song list, of which I had heard only one song before, “Good-Hearted Woman”.
The personalities have emerged and this band sounds pretty good. They are not used to a band being professionally managed, but instantly latched on to all the benefits. We talked finances and agreed that the PA owner gets 10% of the gate, tips are split equally. The personalities? Okay, Mike would play every song as the 12-bar Blues, even Proud Mary if you’d let him. I would play only songs that have super-interesting bass lines with a loud drum box. And Allan, the new guy, would play only three chord ballads, the kind made big by the Eagles.
These ballads, I call them, mean a style, not a song that tells a story. They are neither country nor blues, and I always associate this style with middle-grade guitarists who begin to “write their own songs”. They tend to do so, like the Eagles, in a relatively fast chord-changing pattern that is extremely difficult to fit a novel drum beat or bass line into – exactly the things I must try to accomplish. I would venture to say guitarists who write such music do so in total disregard to a bass line. Thus, I was not surprised to learn that neither Mike or Allan knows what the Circle of Fifths is or what it is used for. Switching a song from G to A requires telling them what the “other” chords are.
Now this is true and I’m serious; I have never heard or listened through completely to any music by Grateful Dead. That is because of this “ballad” style of guitaring. After the first three or four measures, I am so bored I pick up something to read. Yes, I know they had hits (although I could not name even one), I know they had that fat guy guitar player who died when he was 57, but still, it was all a cult following and cults don’t attract many original thinkers. Nonetheless, I am familiar with the rules and instantly knew that Allan listened to a lot of Grateful Dead. (I was right.) My conclusion on that is if I can learn to tell Blues tunes apart, I should be able to do the same with Grateful Dead music. Whether I can stay awake is a different question.
They tried to slip a couple of “originals” past me. But real songs don’t have riffs 9-3/7ths measures long. They ‘fessed up and I learned the songs anyway, including my addition of three completely original bass lines, one of which Mike just can’t get over. (It is a piano riff called a rolling tenth, I jazzed it up to a Johnny Cash type beat.) We got through a good eight songs, but the new guy puts another two to three week delay on performing. Also, the fact he's even there without consulting me is one more worrying sign about the attitude of local guitarists that I'm really beginning to dislike.
Which is why I kept up with my own act. Mike has asked about tunes we could incorporate with the Blue Crows set, he was really impressed with my show. I’d rather leave those till later, because I think we have a long ways still to go with the (exceedingly) simple stuff we are already learning. (That’s a figure of speech, I have not learned one new thing playing the Blues.) For comparison, Blue Crows is still trying to work up 24 tunes, while on a given evening myself, I play over twice as many, and at a greater sustained rate (less than 30 seconds between tunes).
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