Where are the tourists? I’ve had a record good month for this year, but I could be the only one. Minding the shop on what should be the busiest day was a little boring. In a unique move in this town, I warranty my lessons, that is, I teach until the lesson is learned. I had a former student come in and it took two hours out of my Saturday. How many times do I have to tell the world, get a completely anonymous email address that gives out zero personal information. An address like “sandra23” has already given the bad people all they need to know to target you.Back to the musical drawing board. The gung-ho guitarist I had lined up to counter-insure Eddie has disappeared. To demonstrate that outcome was expected, I’ll rehash the matter. I placed an ad on Craigslist. Any misunderstanding of my ad is deliberate, so I have methods to combat the whankers who answer every ad. Remember 2007? To be considered, the respondent must acknowledge he is joining an existing situation, a country-based duo.
The problem is, after examining my song list, the guitarist starts into what he wants to play. At this point he is already fired, but I continue to listen. In every instance to date, these “suggestions” are not tunes chosen for their beneficial effect on the crowd (as are 100% of my choices), but music the self-centered guitarist can already play. Wrong motive. This is where democracy breaks down. If you want to play your own song list, you start your own band. You don’t join mine and commence your weird-music sales pitch on me.
Craigslist. It has imitators and I am quick to recognize when somebody new has been inspired or frustrated by what the original site was doing wrong. Biggest problems with Craigslist are: flagging abuse, miscategorization, spam. It is too early to tell, but over the next few days I will test-drive a new product called “Findiit.com”. I ran some preliminary checks which may have impressed the owner, as he personally wrote back to me the same day. I’ll refer to him as “Rankin”. He vows to keep the site free from the parrot-heads on Craigslist. More importantly, he says he is not a programmer, but learned to create the site by reading Google results. Interesting. Check back, particularly those who remember I was the third user of Craigslist in all of Florida. And the two people ahead of me could not spell.
On the way to Bingo, I stopped for coffee again at the bakery on Harrison. The Hippie was there, so we played a few tunes along with a sax man. Biggest change would be that I’ve been playing the music every week (instead of twice a year), so I can focus on presentation and add things like light background vocals. That made for some respectable music, but the act still lacks the essential “work-together” quality for club work and instead each of us was playing one part. It goes without saying, if you are going to do covers, you must do the originals and do them right. The coffee was really bad.
My music class is at the half-way point. The assimilation of the rules as introduced over the previous month is producing results. I wish it was possible to write these down. Fact is, music is too complicated for that and anything published will fall short. I’ll offer a guess that performing means doing around 30 things at once. It is amazing now to randomly pick a tune and watch five people play it through, in some cases without ever having heard it before. (Random is not exactly the word, as I am working off a list of known simple music that follows the formula. Still, for just six hours of group lessons it is a huge accomplishment for these people.) I haven’t told them they are booked at Jimbos on October 9. Just kidding, already. Or am I?
Return Home
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
