Finally, things may have picked up for the season. That still means a 70% drop in revenues over the last three years, so don’t start partying yet. The last summer has been the leanest since I was a college student. I’m probably the only person you know who had to stand in the ditch and hitchhike to college, so when I say lean, don’t second-guess me. Let me make a quick calculation here. How about that? When adjusted for inflation, my monthly rent in college was $261 higher than today. I still sometimes wonder what I might have done in college if I’d lived in a quiet decent part of town instead of renting a $90 attic on 17th. (The average rent was around $385 back then.)My big faux pas, I ran into Laura, the Karaoke lady last evening and could not place her name. All my life I remember people positionally, and she was not supposed to be in Jimbos. It also turns out a few minutes after I sang and left, that English guitar guy walked in. He’s met Jackie and the gang. The evening was a benefit for Ron, who passed away last year. I hope the Englishman doesn’t think it is that full in Jimbos all the time. He phoned to say he’ll be back tonight with his guitar.
One thing I needed was a day to normalize all my music files and it was today. Cancel all other plans. My burn lists for the show are only around a quarter of all the files which have now become exceedingly valuable for all the work done. My note here says two years ago I was to keep track of the durability of CD-RW disks. I still do not know the maximum, as I rotate the disks for backup security but I can tell you my top disk (FarmerAB) has survived 28 rewrites. However, these disks suffer reburn problems unless deep-erased at slow speed (around 20 minutes per disk). A simple overwrite or fast erase causes a host of strange errors, some of which appear on your disk player later.
It is mid-afternoon and Eddie called. I had to deliver my standard speech about the need for speed. If he wants to keep up the momentum, he is going to have to get a stand and make up some cheat sheets. Whereas I know how to keep flights of imagination in check, he still subconsciously sees a duo as an interim step to starting a “real” band. That is a Florida musical delusion spread, it can be shown, by people too cheap to turn their air conditioning quite all the way up. Eddie is excused because he is totally Left Coast from a bygone era. Really bygone.
By evening, it was clear the Jimbos crowd had spent all their money y’day. But I played the gig anyway, partially because I knew that Eddie has not been practicing. Fewer people would be there to notice. The notable part was the Englishman showed up and unintentionally provided the comic relief. First of all, he could not understand how we knew what music to play when there was no “lead” guitarist to provide us with the proper guidance. We asked him how he figured that and he replied that he is a musician and he plays such and such a song. Since we don’t play it, there must be some question as to whether we are really musicians. Even weirder, when people began to sing along, he failed to understand why we played quieter instead of louder. We’ve decided should he become a patron, to keep him around as an example. Of the classic “guitar-think” profile.
There was one thing he did not imagine, however. Eddie was indeed dropping chords. Guitarists rarely realize they do it and get away by demanding proof, which is always so expensive they know most people won’t try. Slimy, but it works. I did several times tape such errors only to have the guitarist refuse to view them and even insinuate they were fakes, or worse, that I was just being nasty. I’ll tell you the real motive. Most interesting bass lines are a full measure long, and often walk to the next chord change. When a guitarist fails to complete the measure, the bass line is left hanging. This forces the bass player to stick to simplistic half-measure patterns that can accommodate said drop-chord errors. Then you get a bad attitude from the guitarist who thinks you are not being innovative enough.
Say, doesn’t that remind us all of you-know-who?
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