One year ago today: April 10, 2017, nothing illegal about it.
Five years ago today: April 10, 2013, new sidecar trunk.
Nine years ago today: April 10, 2009, why not a smart mailbox?
Random years ago today: April 10, 2012, the impossible dream?
I’ve started two new books. The tale of the coffee trader is a rare unique topic. I’ll center on that one first. The tale begins without giving much clue as to what and when, but you quickly find out it is in the world’s first stock exchange, probably in Holland. It seems to center around a young man whose father made a fortune on tulipmania who lost it speculating on sugar. Now he either has to go to work the rest of his life just to pay off his creditors or place everything on a strange new commodity called “coffee”.
Once those take root, it is a major task to turn back around. Have you seen the libtard arguments that American businesses can’t find workers to hire because of low immigration? What a joke. The real reason is illegal immigration has allowed huge segments of American business to adapt to underpaying the workers. That’s the real reason Americans won’t take the job. It’s true that Americans won’t take the job because the pay is too low—but true for the opposite reason they want you to think.
The car battery was dead. I pumped it up, but once it goes completely flat, they will progressively get worse until they strand you somewhere. Note that, non-mechanics, if your car battery (unless it is a special deep cycle marine model) drops below 11.7 volts for more than a few minutes, the writing is on the wall. I was on the roof again and got blasted with rain again. More joys of home ownership, you know. The rain brings cooler daytime weather so that kept me outside until the storm hit. And the radio says it stays like this until the weekend. So expect that I’ll write more, a better habit that watching TV from what I understand.
I also poked in on Karaoke but the place was mostly empty and except for two ladies, obvious Karaoke hounds, it was all men. They show up when happy hour is over at the $2 saloons downtown. Brad, the guitar player who jams, was there, and asked me to please not sing “Tequila”. I wouldn’t, because I demand a high mix of women in the audience for that. But I could assure him (when you think about it) that I have never sung “Tequila”. That’s true, I hold the mic up in the air and let the audience do the honors.
And them two women could not sing. The one, with a brush cut, could hit the odd note but the other one, what is she even thinking? I know the three foremost reasons a single woman over 30 goes to Karaoke, but that one is chasing them away. She’d get more baking a cake and handing out the slices. What? No, I’m not telling you the reasons. If you don’t know, then consider it a trade secret. But I’ll give you a hint. Ready? Most men have no clue how basically simple-minded women are about sex. It is this men’s lack of understanding that leads to fantastical theories that females are mysterious. I have no such illusions, unless, of course, I choose to do so when appropriate. And I’ll compare my imagination to anybody’s who isn’t tripping.
I stopped in to the club to scribble out the next set list of tunes. These are divided into three groups, those I can have ready in one week, two weeks, or three weeks. It never takes three weeks for me to learn most anything, so the volume of work is the primary constraint. I’ve got a full fifteen tunes, all of which I have played at some time. If what I say next seems cruel, read this afternoon’s entry and come back. I could probably mess these tunes up royally and the audience would blame it on my guitarist. Guys, that is also a form of working with what I’ve got. The band-formation process is no place for coyness. Or greenhorns.
For clarity, I’m revealing my most skeptical observations of what is going on. It boils down to the familiar situation where the other musician(s) can’t do the work. I emphasize that this is my opinion only and it is about a situation, not about my guitarist. Her and I have already gone over what went wrong and taken remedial steps.
Before & after quitting drugs.
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So we are clear on this, I repeat these are my personal judgments and doubts about what is for me a very common circumstance. Got that? This is not about my current guitar player, it is about the frustrations I have repeatedly met with trying to get a guitar player, any guitar player, to play strictly a rhythm part according to an easy but strict set of rules. Matters are heightened by the fact there is now solid proof I was right about forming this brand of duo. Nobody has any intention of quitting now, we know, her family knows, a tipping audience knows, and now a lucky night club knows we are on to a damn good thing.
The problems with this band are entirely due to insufficient time put in. And it is to be expected I would feel that to be irksome, it is my nature. Think of it this way. If somebody came along and said I could be in a band if all I did was learn to play the bass parts as simply as musically possible. They handed me the recordings, the music sheets, they added I didn’t have to memorize any lyrics, I didn’t even have to buy gas to get to rehearsal, I did not even have to go out and find gigs, because everything would be provided free. Why I would put in 25/8 to get those bass parts learned. And it is incredulous to me how anybody who really wanted to be in a band could think differently.
I put in some extra hours looking at the band situation. More tough decisions lie ahead. It may outwardly look like a band is a distinct situation—you do the practicing, you go out and play. Au contraire, it is a constant balancing act and as time goes by (age-wise I mean), even that balance gets harder to achieve. There, I’ve just killed two Bs with one S. I inadvertently described marriage. There always seems to be an extra burden on me to keep things going and no, I do not think the others experience the same. This is the aspect I considered this afternoon. Fasten your seatbelts, I’m not actually making any decisions, but I’m defining which decisions must be made.
Top of the list is my guitarist still doesn’t know the material well enough to be good at it. There has been enough time to have learned it from scratch and yet she did not get one song entirely right start to finish on stage last Sunday. This isn’t a requirement, but it [playing a song completely right] should be quite usual for us by now. There is nothing inherently difficult in the guitar parts. I often like to play tunes back to back, while the audience is still applauding the last one. So why am I waiting on stage for her to flip through pages to find the two chords to “Jambalaya”, a tune we’ve rehearsed at least 30 times? Is that any different than the guitar player who declared it was my job to remind him of the chords to every song?
The planned stage presentation isn’t happening either. The duo was supposed to be her out front as the headliner, with me filling in the missing pieces. It was meant to be a subtle ease into my long-planned duo arrangements, giving the effect of “Gee, that lady has a really good bass player”. Instead, it’s coming across the other way around. She is sitting in the background, struggling to barely keep up. The whole room watches her lose her place whenever I stop singing. And scratch subtlety out of the formula entirely, people are already making comments.
There is also the aspect that I should be getting support from the rhythm section. Instead I feel that I’m dragging things along. Hopefully this will improve, but I tell you right now you cannot base a band on the hope of things to come. The majority of the mistakes are the same as were made back when we started. She is reverting to comping at times and trying to follow my left hand, which never works. And on several tunes she was copying the line I was playing which a sorry waste of the duo concept. So, here are the things to consider. They overlap, so it could be one big decision, but let’s consider the small ones.
a) Practicing the material is not working. There is no improvement from practicing.
b) The benefits of stage work are so slow this could easily take another year.
c) Image is suffering. My struggle to keep things going dominating the presentation.
d) We must move on to new material. This means I no longer help with the old.
So, do I continue with this band, or admit defeat? I suspect this band is as good as it might ever be. I recognize it could be stage fright, so don’t panic over what I say next. She never comes in on cue and flubs up every instrumental break. She does not sing, as semi-promised, and lapses into bad music habits regularly. On the plus side, we are out there, people have fun, and any band is better than no band (in the sense most bands never make it to stage). Do I stay on to see if she gets into gear? After all, she knows she is doing a third-rate job of it. (As you know, I’ve already decided to stay.)
What do I think is going to happen? As usual, I will continue on, learning new material and making it clear to my guitarist that we are no longer going to run over what we’ve already done. It is entirely up to each person to learn the material or look goofy on stage. I have enough to do singing and playing so when I’m on stage I want to focus on that. This was the situation that many years ago forced me to learn to play my material solo on the bass. This reverses the condition where it looked like it was me failing to “follow” the guitar player when he messed up. By now, I have a long history of playing tunes the right way and to blazes with how that makes the other person look.
Tough? Yes, but that’s show biz. The market is saturated. If I allow the band to sink to the level of the guitar player, we will become the laughing stock and relegated to playing the C rooms, where your feet stick to the floor. That is the equivalent of failure. I could always make the decision to work with what I’ve got—but that is the point here. Why am I always the one making all the decisions? How are others able to compel me into that situation by doing nothing? There’s no credit for the extra work. This newest guitarist has surprised me before, that much is so. But it is taking so much time that I undeniably get the impression that all progress is at my expense.
Is there an alternative. Yes, several. I could keep on looking for a better guitarist. Consider this. The best way to find one is to be on stage and have somebody chance along who can learn the material. I’ve done this with a half dozen bands. Jot down what they play, learn one full set, then show up ready to play. With the low caliber of professionalism in Florida, you can pretty much count on getting that opportunity. But it involves doing one (just one) of the major things I set out to avoid. That is, reverting to my solo bass act with a rookie guitar player scarcely chunking along behind me.
My viewpoint remains that a guitarist should recognize this is a once-in-a-lifetime situation and do whatever it takes to learn the guitar parts. My formula obviously works so there is no reason to fall behind. We rehearse again tomorrow.
ADDENDUM
Gals, the surest way to never get a second date with me is to ask for a loan on the first date. That was the end of band date number one. There is a singular exception and that is if you are so young you either pay for your own cell phone or get rid of it.
I also finished the book, “Orbit”. Not a good choice, so don’t read it. The ending reverts to the tired old Hollywood focus on ex-lovers, bad parenting skills, and corruption at the highest level. Except for the concept of the guy’s blog going viral the plot is entirely mechanical. It is better written than average but borrows from too many sources to be tagged original.
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