Cancel the Goodwill on 441, their prices have tripled in the past three months. It was an astounding morning for a scooter trip. All on bingo, plus a few new shirts and a history book on Bin Laden by some German author. I’m only at chapter two, but I can see for all the evil things we’ve been told about Bin Laden, he was certainly neither alone nor crazy. He did the unforgivable by attacking civilians, although it seems to me there was a precedent on that set by the Allied air forces back in 1943. As for surprise attacks, today I learned (TIL) Bin Laden formally declared war on the USA well in advance. The State Department failed to take him seriously.Guitar player fiasco number 17; total disasters now 21. I held another audition today that went straight down the tubes, and it was one that held so much promise. We aced the rhythm-bass segment that local audiences are crying for, but not the “people” side of music. This was a guitarist who stated he played excellent rhythm and wanted to play music that pleased people. Instead, he was a “noodler”, the type that picked a semi-melodic riff along to backing tracks. The very type of backing tracks we originally agreed not to use.
I see now that he was just another guitar player pretending to join a band but really wants obsequious backup. When it came to actual chording, I was better than he was. He could not follow basic chops and was thrown every time I did an intermediate bass run. He did have a very expensive set of jamtrax, if you know what those are. (It’s an English company that sells accurate repros ostensibly for Karaoke, but they can be used as backing tracks.)
The guy probably had something like $2,000 worth of these recordings, and I understand why he would want therefore to play them. If he had been honest and told me about these tracks, I would not have called back. It was not just the music, but how unfamiliar the guy was with stage work. If you spend time on stage, even standing next to a performer, you will learn and accept certain mannerisms produce better results than others.
He had not even seen the basics. For example, when I began to sing, he protested that it made me the “star of the show”. This is guitar-think at its finest, the disbelief that something could be more important than guitar. A non-singing third-rate rhythm player was stunned that he was not the luminary. I realize now that he’d never heard a bass player sing and was expecting me to be another flunky playing to his backing tracks, which included such country favorites as “Before You ‘Cuse Me”, “Born Under A Bad Sign” and “Love Me Two Times”.
Yes, I’m angry that yet another good day was wasted. For example, he didn’t like the way that, once I got him started chording (no easy task), I turned away as if there was an audience present. He was expecting me to face him and call out each chord change—while I’m singing and playing. I know this is familiar territory to every musician who has encountered guitar-think, but I’m spelling it out here for the record. This is also the first time I’ve ever met a guitar player who could not play “Folsom Prison Blues”.
Last, relating back to the coffee shop this morning. I’ve told you about the lady that talks to me because she thinks we are the same age? I’ve never complained but it seems other customers have. She uses the place to hang out a little too much. She isn’t barred, but there is talk. She is just plain boring, the one quality in a woman I cannot abide.
