One year ago today: March 28, 2017, isn’t that theft?
Five years ago today: March 28, 2013, so acceptable is better than right?
Nine years ago today: March 28, 2009, music, Karaoke, gold.
Random years ago today: March 28, 2016, lost my starter.
Here’s the ticket stub from my visit to the Johnny Cash museum around my last birthday. Finding that I’d kept a copy was the only notable event of today. The rest is editorial concerning the band. And some stark admissions about where that is going and at what velocity. I like to get on stage and be as carefree as possible. But that doesn’t happen unless you’ve got a band of fully trained people who can independently play their parts with or without hearing the rest of the band. The audience knows when that element isn’t present. And it wasn’t there last Sunday.
If this prediction turns out to be the case, I will once again find myself in a band where in addition to carrying the load, I have to continually prop things up. I stress this is not directed at my guitarist, but about a situation I am unfortunately familiar with. A band where the other members contribute nothing. It leaves me always with three choices. Stick with the situation and hope, join an existing band and have no hope, or no band at all.]
Everything centers on music today. It’s that important and some tough decisions lie ahead. We went over the gig and came to roughly the same conclusions about the music. My advice about structure from day one was not taken seriously enough, along with my warnings about learning the circle of fifths. To this day I am astonished by how mindlessly reluctant guitar players are about learning this theory. If they don’t care to learn it, put in the twenty minutes it takes to just memorize it. Instead, they waste countless hours of time fumbling with chords. And it goes on, year after year, senselessly, needlessly. And it is happening all over again. She absolutely will not learn the circle of fifths.
In my experience, once a guitarist refuses to learn this, you have two choices. Quit the band or go on dealing with it on every fucking song you will ever learn. I’ve always thought it was a bull-headed mental block that guitar players develop, a two-polar case of on one hand that learning theory will somehow dull the originality they fantasize they have and on the other hand they must hope the fewer people who know how simple guitar playing is, the better. It is also a nearly sure sign they will not learn any other music theory as well. “We don’t need no stinkin’ theory.”
I’ve got some facts to face. Top of the list is always the rejection to learn the circle. Nor is my guitar player learning the structure of the songs despite my emphasis on this. She is still comping to the extent the influence is there in most every tune we play. She does not intend to sing anything. And she seems incapable of playing a strong intro to any song. If we are to continue, I have to deal with these as semi-permanent handicaps and try to turn them into assets. Again, more extra work that amounts to spoon-feeding and no extra credit for me.
Longleat Maze.
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I’m going to elaborate a bit on the above, as this blog also serves as a placeholder and journal of the developmental process, you know, a behind the scenes peek at what is really going on. I once more insist you understand I am not pointing at my present guitarist, but at a much larger situation of which at times she fits into a pattern that I’ve seen before.
Without knowing the structure of a song, which takes maybe a few minutes to learn, it all too often means to go over one tiny spot (say) in the third verse, we have to repeatedly play the song over from the beginning. Like most guitarists, she can’t come in at a given spot and doesn’t realize that playing it over is not rehearsal, it is music lessons on my time.
And not learning the circle has already plagued us on every new song. It amazes me how many guitarists can play the same tunes for years and never spot there is a pattern to the chords that sound well together. It means they cannot transpose a tune without relearning the whole thing from scratch. (This has been the single biggest time-waster in this band so far.) It shows no sign of abating. It reminds me of that guitarist who told me it was my job to remind him of what key each song was in. The one that blew up when my answer was always, “The same key we played it in last week and the week before.”
No matter how many times we go over the guitar parts, it all comes out sounding nearly the same. I can’t play guitar, but I’m a pro at how a strum goes and believe if I show it to a guitar player once, they should be able to just crank it out in a manner that surpasses what I demonstrated. Still, she does a better job than the others, so I let it be. As long as each tune sounds reasonably unique, I have little choice but to let it go.
Singing. There’s a counter-balance on this one. While my ad did say singing was optional, she both wrote back and stated that she could sing. But the only singing I’ve heard is excuses, when I said just sing her favorite songs, the reply was that she had no favorites. Nonsense, she doesn’t want to sing and that is that. At the gig, people specifically asked her to sing and even that didn’t work.
And last, forget strong song intros. I’m big on those. Play a great intro to get them fired up. But that does not look promising. She always comes in too quiet and slightly off time for the first eight or ten measures, slowly working up to speed. The endings, she has always got those tight, and I know that doesn’t make sense. It also means every song has to be counted in, where in other bands I prefer to have non-verbal cues as an excellent stage effect. Yet some of the intros we have gone over as many as probably 50 times by now. She never gets any better at it, often making the same mistake repeatedly.
To me, the solution is always more practice. But is it? At my age, why am I still practicing beginner’s material whenever I meet a guitar player? This lady has surprised me before but that’s hardly a solid premise in this industry. I’m patient to an extent because many a time before I’ve encountered guitarists who honestly thought they were absolutely great until they tried chording along to my bass.
ADDENDUM
The major event was obviously the first post-gig rehearsal. The usual obstacle is the advice from friends and family who are not musicians, but are experts on what they like to hear. We should drop of some of the more obscure numbers, they say. Play more popular hits. It’s hard advice to reject under the circumstances. But that is our premise, to avoid the monstrously overplayed standards. I know the theories about copying success, but my objection remains the same. On what premise are these countless copycat bands rated a success?
Rehearsal 17 addressed many of these issues. Smile at these people, like you were going to take anything they said into consideration. Then stick with your original plan, don’t stray. I can almost confirm the situation that if we stick with this for a year, we’ll have something. A year at my age is not expendable.
So that made up my mind to snuggle in early and read this book by that retired military type. He’s always arguing the point that the weapons he has been handed are faulty, and the wonderful American system need only make a few changes. After that, the soldiers will be heroes. Let's see what else he has to say.
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