We are maybe about 10% done. But what price glory? If anybody feels like quitting, there’s the door. I can think of several people out there ready to welcome you back into the fold. The sheep fold.
Wow, talk about hard work for music. But it is to be expected in this part of the world. The other guy wants to form a band, but has no copies of his music, lyrics or chords and absolutely no method of procuring them. Even the Hippie never touched a computer until 2005 and couldn’t burn disks until 2008. But they swear they want to start a band. Remember the Turkish girl who always wanted to go partners didn’t even own a computer printer?
I just spent six hours painstakingly downloading youTube videos encountering every crack junkie with a camcorder in the process. Some people seriously think you are really going to watch them play Charlie Daniels on their bongos. Nine time out of then, for the other guy to learn my material, I have to hand it to him on a silver platter, but his material, well, I have to hunt that down myself because he needs his handwritten books and can’t afford to make copies.
The trouble is, my copies are written out for the bass, and although anybody with any musical experience could easily follow them, it rarely happens that way. For example, I’ll often write in passing notes that are out of key or scale. This confuses the hell out of guitar players who don’t seem to know you don’t really play a D# in the key of A. It is written there so I’ll remember it—and I always flag the passing notes with a single quote mark. As in A—‘B—‘C#— ‘D#—E . Now is that so difficult?
Nor is making copies always the answer. I’ve had people who cannot play the other verses unless you painstakingly write out the identical chords for them as the first verse. I’ve met people who will play a chord change wrong because it is written over the second syllable rather than the first. Or they will consistently play a simple transcription error fifty times after you tell them until you stop, find a pen, walk over, cross it out, and watch that dull grin of finally getting it come over their faces. I’m also suspicious of non-computer people who play tunes in other than the original key, you just know they don’t do a very faithful rendition.
Wait, here’s another good one. For about 25 years, long before most people heard of the Internet, I used to indicate a change of key by the “@” sign. People think they are the Einstein that found that symbol the day their kid showed them how to set up an account. For example, if the original key was Folsom Prison Blues in F, when I changed it to the key of E, I wrote the title “FolsomPrison@E”. Blithering morons who then take it upon themselves to “inform” me what the sign is used for, you know, to help me forward into the modern era.
Now the good news. I’ve won my 2009 government appeal. The letter arrived this morning. Now for the 2010, which is the final chapter and they are now likely to rubberstamp it. They know that I’ve completely memorized the rulebook. What a pity that some people didn’t keep their bargains for they are the real losers here. Theresa, remember her? At one point she said she thought I loved her. I guess in her version of love, she stops paying her rent, starts calling you a homosexual, and expects to get paid for wiping her own ass. In the end she hated me, I guess. I couldn’t tell the difference.
Today’s trivia comes from Dan Lewis’ “Now You Know”. To control rats in Indochina, the French offered a bounty for their pelts. The locals soon started rat breeding farms. Whether that says more about the French or the natives is still an unresolved issue. Mind you, it was not the rats who capitulated at Dien Bien Phu.
Giving a listen to several hours of indie music on the net radios, I don’t think I’ll be their biggest fans. Tune after tune of claptrap, almost as if somebody sat down and analyzed every line and hook that made up the great hits of the past, then strung them together in a fashion designed to target audience segments. It’s like every song is trying to cover all the bases. The result is entirely predictable swill. But I follow their logic, “Let’s see, 43.72% of hit songs that had a C9dim after the chorus had 1.0006% higher sales in the disco Latino market, so we’ll put it in even if it doesn’t really fit. . . .”
