Why is it that if you are involved in two bands, those bands will somehow manage to book practices and gigs for the same time? That's what happened to me this past weekend. It left me with a "good" tired feeling, but tired all the same.
Friday night I had a final practice at the Old Town School with Little Queens, a Heart tribute band with Andrea Bunch, Aerin Tedesco, John Mead, Debbie Kaszinsky, and Greg Nergaard. We were fortunate enough to get a gig at the City Winery, a place on West Randolph that makes their own wine and has an eye-catching menu as well. The practice in itself wouldn't have been so bad, but the Twangdogs, the country-Americana outfit that I'm in, had a gig two hours later.
I loaded up the drums and dropped them off at the Horseshoe Tavern on Lincoln Avenue, then drove to the Old Town School. I sat down and started playing during "Love Alive" and immediately spilled my Starbucks grande mocha. Okay, not a great start to the practice. Rather annoyed, I cleaned up as best as I could. (I also left a big brown mocha stain on the rug underneath the drums - to the Old Town administration, please take it out of my membership fee.) We did the run-through of the songs, and I would have liked to play some more, but it was time to hop in the car and head down to the Horseshoe. John Mead was nice enough to head back to Starbucks and buy another mocha for me.
Thankfully it was a short drive from the Old Town School to the Horseshoe - only half a mile. I was feeling a bit rushed at that time, and having King Crimson's "Sailor's Tale" on the car stereo didn't help my sense of calm any. ("Sailor's Tale" is not a song to listen to if you're in need of calm or finding your "happy place" - it's a darkly intense instrumental that pulls me in every time I hear it.)
So, the Horseshoe (http://www.myspace.com/horseshoechicago). I had reservations about that bar from an experience I had some seven years ago. I was in a band with some others, and after a year of practicing we got a gig at the Horseshoe. We ran a practice at my church before leaving, then we all packed up and got to the Horseshoe. I set up my drums and sat while the others set up their guitars and amps, then I sat as the others tuned and futzed with their effects pedals, then sat as the bassist went on a frantic thirty-minute search for a songbook (which was under a coat the entire time). We finally started playing, and after five songs the sound man came up and said "Ya gotta stop playing. We got a phone call from the cops saying the neighbors are complaining." To this day I believe the sound man really said "We don't want you to play anymore." Tails between our legs, we tore down and slunk back home. That was my first gig as a drummer. But that was seven years ago, and apparently the Horseshoe learned something by putting up sound panels in the front window which made the venue sound surprisingly good for an all-wood barbecue joint.
I got to the Horseshoe to find it surprising empty - there were the other Twangdogs and about six others. "Where's the other band?"
Fellow Twangdog Rich Gordon answered "Oh, they never showed up." I found that humorous, having just read an open letter from a bar owner in the Tampa area who had some advice about band professionalism and who said that the band's true purpose was to sell drinks. (That might be a topic for another day.) I think the first tip for any band would be: come hell or high water, show up. Or, if you can't, the reason for not showing up better involve a hospital and/or a police report.
So, it turned out I had considerable time to set up the drums. I sighed - it looked like things were going to work out after all. (It's a matter of trust - trust that all will be well in the end.) We all set up, and did another remarkable Twangdogian job of filling up an entire stage with instruments. I think you could put us on stage at Symphony Center and we'd still fill the entire stage. We played our sets, and Andrea Bunch was nice enough to come down and listen after appearing at Fretknot Friday with a student of hers. There were a few good moments in our sets, but overall I felt as though we still needed a bit of work to sort out the rough spots. Towards the end of the second set, we started "Best of My Love", the Eagles ballad, and I totally blanked on what the tempo should have been. Not that I cranked it up to Warp Factor 5, but I was a bit brain-dead at that point. Ditto our closer, the Decemberists' "Down by the Water." Fortunately I guessed right on the tempo and the others carried that song quite well.
Sunday's gig at the City Winery was a different story. We had a slightly larger stage, and one fewer band member, so we had some space to work with. Instruments set up and sound check run, we went back to the Green Room where one of the staff took food and drink orders. I wasn't used to that kind of treatment. "So this is how real music stars are treated," I thought.
(For a schedule, check out http://www.citywinery.com/chicago/tickets.html. I'm sure the wine is good, but the food is incredible.)
So I put in my order - mini-sliders and a pork belly coupled with french toast - a strange combo on paper, but not so odd on the taste buds. I ate my meal with Judy in the audience.
I went back to the Green Room to join the others. Debbie and Andrea changed into their stage outfits, John put on his striped 70s pants, and at 7 we took the stage. Taking the stage with us was a guy we dubbed "Wine Man". The show was a "wine pairing" - the audience would get a taste of wine for a three song set, then a taste of a different wine for the next three songs, and so on. So, four glasses of wine for 12 songs.
I fought off nerves for a good part of the evening. The City Winery is a venue that is a big step up for folks like me - an attentive audience, no TVs so I can follow the ball game or try to follow the detective story on USA Network while playing. This was a concert. Fortunately, the audience couldn't have been more receptive and encouraging. After a couple of songs, and in spite of a mistake here and there (the perfect gig, I think, is like chasing the horizon), it was a great show. Aerin was bogged down with laryngitis, so Andrea had to sing all the songs, and she handled it extremely well. It's like having two Ann Wilsons in the band - Aerin is an outstanding singer in her own right and all the members have a good sense of the arrangements of the songs.
As a band we acquitted ourselves rather well. "Even It Up" started off the set, and the first song is always the hardest, though if you get that first song down, it's a big boost for your psyche for the rest of the night. "Mistral Wind," an extremely tricky song, went off without a hitch. "White Lightning and Wine" started off at a given tempo and I tried, given Aerin's cues, to slow it down a bit. (If you think trying to slow down a song as inconspicuously as possible is an easy task, think again.) The last set had two of my favorites: "Crazy on You" and "Barracuda." We finished with Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll," and we may have stumbled a bit, but the song is enough of a full-throttle rocker that a flub here or there may almost be required to do justice. But that last set tested my mettle as a drummer - I played about as hard as I could, so much that my solo at the end of "Rock and Roll" sounded to me (as I remember it) to be a bit clumsy, though I did have some fun with one of the roto-toms.
Two gigs in three nights - two paying gigs, though I'd be able to blow through that money on a decent night out with Judy - and a good sense of tired on Monday. Just give me a few days, and I'll be ready to go. I think. Maybe give me a week.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Sunday, May 5, 2013
The Progger's Progress, pt. 2: Smitten by the Mellotron
I think in it was 1972 when I first heard "Stairway to Heaven." And, if you're honest, you were probably impressed with that song when you first it as well. Sure, the song is the poster child for radio overexposure and general adulation, but it's range in dynamics, from opening acoustic guitar to all-out rock, is done so subtly that you probably didn't notice the changes. Sure, the lyrics are a bit over-the-top, but you can't deny the excellence of the instrumental performance.
So, like about 80% of the other kids my age, I became a Zeppelin fan. And, it was on "The Rain Song" from the Houses of the Holy album (an album whose cover shouldn't be left lying around, unless you wish to give grandmothers a strong bout of arrythmia), that the Mellotron finally stuck in my conscience. Of course I had heard it used before - the flute opening of "Strawberry Fields Forever," and numerous Moody Blues songs that came across the radio. In this case, however, the Mellotron was so prominent in that lush, lengthy instrumental passage after the first verse of "The Rain Song" that it would be impossible to forget.
Chicago made interesting use of the Mellotron on their seventh album. The opening track, "Prelude to Aire," featured Walt Parazaider's flute meandering over tom-toms and percussion, then Robert Lamm comes in, adding some odd counterpoint. At the end, Lamm uses an off-kilter six-note ascending arpeggio. When I first heard this song, so uncharacteristic of the band that gave us "Saturday in the Park" and "Just You 'n' Me," I was caught by surprise. Head sandwiched tightly between the two speakers of the crummy record player I had at the time, I thought "Okay, that worked." That Chicago VII may be my favorite album of theirs should have told me something - side 1, with "Prelude to Aire," "Aire," and "Devil's Sweet" was a daring bit of jazz-rock fusion that I appreciated from when I first heard it.
A few months later, on a cold and windy Saturday afternoon, I had stumbled across a cassette of "A Question of Balance" by the Moody Blues. I always liked "Question" and put the cassette in for a listen. As the song faded, Mike Pinder's "How Is It (We Are Here)" came right in - a standard technique on those Moodies albums. The song is a bit furrow-browed, as are pretty much all of Pinder's songs, but after the first verse there's a swell of mellotron. And it hit me. Psychologists refer to it as a "flash moment" - an otherwise insignificant moment in time that becomes permanently etched in one's memory. For me, I had my flash moment.
Suffice it to say that I was on a Moody Blues jag for the next six months, buying all their albums, from "Days of Future Passed" to "Seventh Sojourn." There is no doubt that many would consider the Moodies as prog, but so many of their songs weren't really that difficult to play, technically - hardly anything like Yes or King Crimson. Anyone with a year or two of guitar under his or her belt could play all of "Seventh Sojourn." It's a lesson, I guess - prog doesn't have to be 23 minutes of 17/8 music about fairies and elves (though some would say that if it is, then all the better). Nor does using a Mellotron qualify a song as being prog - if so, then you can put "Freebird" in the prog bin - a sobering thought. It leaves the question "what is prog?" to which I now answer "decide for yourself."
Somewhere in this time my high school had a dance after a basketball game. I looked forward to hanging with my friends and being disappointed by a total lack of interest from the girls. A band was going to perform (no dj's for this upper-crust school), and I got there a little early to watch them load in. As the band was bringing in their equipment, two of the members lugged in what looked like an organ in a white wooden casing. Jamie Vogt, who was a friend of mine at the time (and also a Moodies/mellotron fan) and I asked what this strange-looking keyboard was.
The guy carrying it in was nonchalant. "It's a Mellotron."
You'd have thought it was the Hope Diamond. ("So...that's...a...mellotron. Ohhhhhh...") Jamie and I stood there, wide-eyed and transfixed, while we got an explanation of its workings - a series of tape loops inside that played when the keys were pressed. (Legend says that the sampling of the string sounds were taken by three elderly women playing violins in a room. It may be true - who knows for sure?) We got a small demonstration of its ability, and Jamie and I were pretty much blown away. Wow - a Mellotron. Right there in our high school cafeteria. Why nobody ever cordoned off that area and put up a sign ("Here once stood a Mellotron. Proper decorum expected.") was a mystery to me.
And to this day, if I hear what sounds like a Mellotron (I don't know if anyone really uses them anymore - they weighed as much as a diesel engine and often went out of tune), it hits me like a scritch behind a dog's ear. The head tilts back and a slight expression of reverie comes to the surface. The sound goes from the ear to some place between the head and heart where music often makes its strongest connection.
So, like about 80% of the other kids my age, I became a Zeppelin fan. And, it was on "The Rain Song" from the Houses of the Holy album (an album whose cover shouldn't be left lying around, unless you wish to give grandmothers a strong bout of arrythmia), that the Mellotron finally stuck in my conscience. Of course I had heard it used before - the flute opening of "Strawberry Fields Forever," and numerous Moody Blues songs that came across the radio. In this case, however, the Mellotron was so prominent in that lush, lengthy instrumental passage after the first verse of "The Rain Song" that it would be impossible to forget.
 |
| The Mellotron in all its glory. It's a sight to behold, isn't it? |
Chicago made interesting use of the Mellotron on their seventh album. The opening track, "Prelude to Aire," featured Walt Parazaider's flute meandering over tom-toms and percussion, then Robert Lamm comes in, adding some odd counterpoint. At the end, Lamm uses an off-kilter six-note ascending arpeggio. When I first heard this song, so uncharacteristic of the band that gave us "Saturday in the Park" and "Just You 'n' Me," I was caught by surprise. Head sandwiched tightly between the two speakers of the crummy record player I had at the time, I thought "Okay, that worked." That Chicago VII may be my favorite album of theirs should have told me something - side 1, with "Prelude to Aire," "Aire," and "Devil's Sweet" was a daring bit of jazz-rock fusion that I appreciated from when I first heard it.
A few months later, on a cold and windy Saturday afternoon, I had stumbled across a cassette of "A Question of Balance" by the Moody Blues. I always liked "Question" and put the cassette in for a listen. As the song faded, Mike Pinder's "How Is It (We Are Here)" came right in - a standard technique on those Moodies albums. The song is a bit furrow-browed, as are pretty much all of Pinder's songs, but after the first verse there's a swell of mellotron. And it hit me. Psychologists refer to it as a "flash moment" - an otherwise insignificant moment in time that becomes permanently etched in one's memory. For me, I had my flash moment.
Suffice it to say that I was on a Moody Blues jag for the next six months, buying all their albums, from "Days of Future Passed" to "Seventh Sojourn." There is no doubt that many would consider the Moodies as prog, but so many of their songs weren't really that difficult to play, technically - hardly anything like Yes or King Crimson. Anyone with a year or two of guitar under his or her belt could play all of "Seventh Sojourn." It's a lesson, I guess - prog doesn't have to be 23 minutes of 17/8 music about fairies and elves (though some would say that if it is, then all the better). Nor does using a Mellotron qualify a song as being prog - if so, then you can put "Freebird" in the prog bin - a sobering thought. It leaves the question "what is prog?" to which I now answer "decide for yourself."
Somewhere in this time my high school had a dance after a basketball game. I looked forward to hanging with my friends and being disappointed by a total lack of interest from the girls. A band was going to perform (no dj's for this upper-crust school), and I got there a little early to watch them load in. As the band was bringing in their equipment, two of the members lugged in what looked like an organ in a white wooden casing. Jamie Vogt, who was a friend of mine at the time (and also a Moodies/mellotron fan) and I asked what this strange-looking keyboard was.
The guy carrying it in was nonchalant. "It's a Mellotron."
You'd have thought it was the Hope Diamond. ("So...that's...a...mellotron. Ohhhhhh...") Jamie and I stood there, wide-eyed and transfixed, while we got an explanation of its workings - a series of tape loops inside that played when the keys were pressed. (Legend says that the sampling of the string sounds were taken by three elderly women playing violins in a room. It may be true - who knows for sure?) We got a small demonstration of its ability, and Jamie and I were pretty much blown away. Wow - a Mellotron. Right there in our high school cafeteria. Why nobody ever cordoned off that area and put up a sign ("Here once stood a Mellotron. Proper decorum expected.") was a mystery to me.
And to this day, if I hear what sounds like a Mellotron (I don't know if anyone really uses them anymore - they weighed as much as a diesel engine and often went out of tune), it hits me like a scritch behind a dog's ear. The head tilts back and a slight expression of reverie comes to the surface. The sound goes from the ear to some place between the head and heart where music often makes its strongest connection.
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