One year ago today: September 23, 2015, ten Antarctican dollars.
Five years ago today: September 23, 2011, I get burned.
Nine years ago today: September 23, 2007, crosswords.
Random years ago today: September 23, 2012, 771 pounds of nails.
MORNING
Meet Chumley. That’s my nickname for this feral feline, patiently waiting for breakfast ‘neath the new birdfeeder. But it’s too high up to leap and too far away from the trees for an ambush. Sorry Chumley, you’ll have to go find some single mother whose kids come first and cannot figure how that relates to her not having a man second. I’ve got some cloves I’ll push in the ground to keep him away just the same. Being a bird is stressful enough without input from Chumley. Aw, but what an idyllic scene. Through my newly repaired screen window.
Explanation. The PVC pipe is the extended length of your average tree squirrel without the tail, that is, snout to snoot. I’ll try to get footage of this in action. No matter how the squirrel tries to cross it he must have either fore or aft paws on the plastic. Thus, his own weight will cause him to slip enough to hit the metal. At that point, to move further, he has to let go and it’s a free trip to the ground from there. My version of gravity assist.
I triple checked the instructions and they do say the squirrel plate has to be merely 18” in circumference. Mine is 37.7” and therefore I insist that the published version has to be some kind of consistent error. Possibly another Millennial copykey error that made its way into the system? Squirrel control by majority rule.
I got a promising call from an acoustic rhythm player in good old Mulberry. He’s late 60s, raising grandchildren, and knows a ton of the same music, although he tends toward certain ballad-like guitar tunes I’ve personally never heard. And like Eddie Monroe, he’s a John Prine fan. I’ve played John Prine and the guy is spastic.
Check in later, we have an audition/rehearsal set up for later this afternoon. A quarter hour chat on the phone is always necessary to get through the preliminaries, but I was right about his reply e-mail. He’s as frustrated with these big-shot guitar players as I am. And from his description of his playing, he does a lot of finger-picking. If so, he’ll find I’m one excellent bassist because I can fill in the diddley notes that the guitarist has to miss. Lordy knows, I’ve got the experience.
I clicked on the website to find several home edition vides of this guy, but you can’t really see him. You can hear enough though, the guy is definitely a finger-picker. I can work with this, please let us have compatible personalities. He surprised me by talking about a few of the band problems that so few new ventures even talk about and I surprised him right back with how I knew the slang expressions for these known difficulties. Playing in a band with a woman who is married or shacked up is what I call “babysitting”. And so on. He paged me back, it’s on for 3:30 this afternoon, tentative.
What? Oh, that’s easy to explain. Since I have no outgoing text messaging, I call incoming text “paging”. Think it through. Either way, come back for the news. I think you’re going to like this.
Nugget Point, New Zealand.
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NOON & NIGHT
From here on in, you get music, at least in the sense of the grim reality of putting a band together, a non-teen band. And over 30, you are stuck with people who can play what they play, take it or leave it. Like the rest of life after that age, nobody will blame you if you walk away, but you end up with nothing except sometimes a vague facsimile of what you set out for.
So I had the talk with this guy, the preliminaries that have to be settled before time is invested. Major point, it is a duo and always a duo, not the core of a bigger group. Second major point, we trade one for one. Once we learn our core group (tunes we both already know), I learn one of yours an you learn one of mine. It sounds fair, but you sometimes get the “bass is easy” argument, so that’s three. You can’t say that unless you can show me it’s easy and I hand you the bass.
He already owes me one over some dozy tune called “Long Black Train”, a direct rip-off of “Long Black Veil” or some similar tune I've heard before. This one is gospel. And I’ve got a whole bag of music with weak guitar lines to trade back. The guy’s story is he’s wasted the past several years trying to get together with chick singers who don’t play an instrument. I call that “babysitting”. Dudes, there is a reason why bands do not last with female singers who have husbands and kids.
See his practice rig. The lucky man has a real six-channel PA mixer, not one of those fake 4+2 stereo plug rip-offs. Good gear, but he is severely out of practice. Another downside is he has been playing with backing tracks and Karaoke lyrics, where you never really learn the song. And he has all manner of guitar-player foibles. Drops chords, leaves out intros, too much slow music, obscure guitar-centric song list, changes keys without regard to open string-work, plays everything at one volume, comps too much, thinks John Prine is great, talks shit about his brand of strings, loves to capo, thinks "drop tuning" is an advanced techinique, etc, etc. That's "included but not limited to".
I drove out 22 miles for the audition, I know, my limit is 15. Almost 19 of this was freeway, so let’s be sensible here. The guy is 67 so the competition element is gone. He has the right motives, that anything is better than sitting at home. He’s been doing things a certain way a long time, but that won’t save any guitarist from me. Yet, that is what we worked with and I’ve decided to push forward. The biggest obstacle immediately was he does not know the I-IV-V Rule. So when I begin playing, his guitar suddenly “comes alive” in his hands and he’ll ask what chord, I’ll give him the number and he’s lost.
Guys, you do not ask the bass player what chord. He probably knows, but it is not his job. Bassists don’t use chords, that’s your part. So we continually had to stop and figure out which chord matched my bass notes—made the more difficult that he capos a lot. I know the pattern, but not the chord so I’d say, “It’s the fourth.” And he stops. Huh? What?
Um, when he wrote he did a lot of finger-picking, I mistakenly thought he meant many styles, but he meant the same in every song.
On the plus side, he has played a lot. It was solo work mainly, so he has no idea how to come in off the fifth, or extend a tune if there are dancers. Likes it when people dance (but has no clue what foxtrot tempo is). I had him comp and he can do it—but it is exactly the same comp every time, and also the strum he uses for the majority of his songs. That’s no relation to the way the original is actually played. Yet he was repeatedly stunned by how the tune became obvious once the bass cut in. He’s sold on that point. (That’s the point where most guitarists won’t even try; they are afraid what I’m saying is true. Right, Ray? Eddie?)
While he knows the songs he knows, it was clearly the first time he’d really listened to any song in relation to what the bass does. I get that a lot. That’s kind of important-like when you have a bassist. So the bottom line here is the guy is acceptable but he is going to have to do a lot of work to catch me on bass. Unless he lights a real fire, I will handily be the stage darling again. Newbies should be aware that personalities change on stage. Mild-mannered Glen becomes the gig dictator. I become the gregarious audience-hound. Cowboy Mike forgets any song he hasn’t been playing for forty years. You know the drill.
The new guy we’ll call, oh, let’s say, “Steve”. Steve knows he has to wean himself from backing tracks, and fast. During the entire rehearsal, I could see he was giving it his best while I was consciously holding back. He feels his slow music “balances” my fast music, but all it does is lose the audience and negatively impact the tips. No matter how you arrange it, usually three songs each, the outcome is predictable. I will ignite the crowd and he’ll lose them in a hemi-demi-semiquaver with some murky ballad—and argue later because one drunk couple politely applauded. Here, Glen, why don’t you show him how that works.
But the alternative is being an audience schmeeb. From what I’ve seen of the area, we will certainly have no competition. There are at least a half dozen guitar duos and trios, but we’ve already gone over why they can’t keep a bass player. This bass/acoustic arrangement is new to this area. I also know it to be a combination that is nearly impossible to copycat, especially by guitar players. It’s fun to watch, though, as they quickly decide gee, we need a third, which makes it a trio and the whole project collapses when the two guitarists gang up on the bassist because his taste in music sucks. That has a familiar ring to it.
Bear in mind also that I have a complete stage act that is unheard of for most bassists. Certainly in this area, and I mean certainly. I’ve got years of experience at looking like I don’t have a clue what’s happening next and an equal amount of trade skill at “dumbing down” music that is hard to imagine. I know precisely how to deal with guitar players or entire bands that try to relegate bass to a supporting role. None of this will be necessary this time—from what I can see. But they are there to be called on should it come to that.
PS: There is also a secondary issue over which version do we play? I generally favor the one that became the first big hit in my lifetime, but very rarely remakes of the exact same tune. Thus, to just about any variation, you’ll hear me refer to it as the “Zydeco version”, which is intended to be derogatory. I use those tunes as “trading points”. I’ll play an oddball version I don’t like, but that means I get to choose a song that showcases the bass. And Steve has already noticed how I can play the livin’ shit out of those.
Choose your list carefully, my friends.
Last Laugh
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