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Live Music, II

(Continued from here, and semi-prodded by Randy and Ed.)

Though the fair gig was a disaster, we kept after it. Whether or not our music was palatable to the public at large, there was something undeniably cool about getting songs worked out. The three of us, when practicing, often lost track of time. Practice sessions were invariably sleepovers in one town or another.

Even when the three of us weren’t practicing together, we practiced separately. There might be a particular lick in a song that needed some smoothing out. If there were, it would be expected that it should be smoothed out by the next time the three of us got together. So, that would mean playing 4 bars of a song over and over and over again, learning each note in a lick, then putting them all together, then getting them up to speed. It sometimes got frustrating, but when we all got back together, and put all the pieces in place, it was worth every minute of practice.

We didn’t get any paying gigs for the remainder of my senior year in high school, and I don’t remember if it was because we didn’t look for any, or because none were offered to us. It could have been a combination of both. Whatever it was, we were content to get together and learn our craft.

Soon, I was on my way to college, and the band – such as it was – was left up in the air.

One thing I learned at UM (arguably one of the only things) is that it is extremely cool to have a guitar and amp. Not only does it make your dorm room a center of conversation, it’s also immeasurably useful when your next-door neighbors keep you up all night with their drunken exploits. I won’t go into a great amount of detail here, but suffice it to say that a very loud and distorted open ‘E’ chord (with plenty of feedback) inflicted on two guys with monster hangovers is pretty sweet revenge.

I actively avoided getting into a band for a while, since, to my mind, I was already in one. Being in Missoula, I took in a lot of live music. I watched bands play. I watched how guitarists fingered chords, and played leads. It was a rare night that I didn’t learn something from watching the guys who had been at it for a while. I was a lousy date, to say the least. But, I did pick up a lot of stuff.

Our drummer decided to attend UM, so we were back to 2/3 strength. But we found ourselves running in different circles, and we never really got a group together, at least not while we were at school.

That first winter he was at UM, we decided to get together with my brother over Christmas break and do some jamming. He was an industrious sort, and managed to score us a New Year’s Eve gig. That gave us a goal to work toward.

That Christmas break was particularly cold and bitter. Temperatures hovered around -20 the entire week after Christmas. Being young and of very little brain, the cold didn’t stop us from traveling 43 miles one way to practice. My brother and I did the bulk of the traveling, since we could leave our equipment mostly set up at the drummer’s home. One particular night, I had to drive with my driver’s license in one hand so that I could scrape the windshield at regular intervals! That trip cost my brother a fair-sized crack in the finish of his 12-string acoustic. It didn’t react well to temperature changes.

We put together a night’s worth of songs, and prepared to take our roadshow to Barkell’s Hot Springs in glorious downtown Silver Star.

For those of you who have never been to Silver Star, it is one of the many Montana towns that are called towns simply by virtue of having a bar and a post office. Silver Star actually has a general store, too, so that makes it larger than some.

How did the gig go? Well, it was 20 degrees below zero, no alcohol was being served, and it was in the middle of nowhere. We passed a goodwill plate for donations, and probably ended up with $20-$30 for our time. By the time we allowed for travel, meals, etc., we probably each lost $50 on the deal.

But we sure had a good time. We even put together an original tune for the show entitled, “White Guys Can’t Rap.” Thinking back, it was probably pretty awful, but by the same token, it was meant to be.

For whatever reason, this was the last time the three of us played together.

I hadn’t lost the bug yet, though, and when I returned to school, I met a guy who played bass, had rounded up a singer and a lead guitarist and was looking for someone who could play rhythm guitar and a drummer.

One of my roommates at the time had played the drums in high school, and this was the excuse he needed to get back into it. He sunk $1000 into new cymbals for his kit, and began to work the rust out. He was up to speed in no time, and we were in a new band by summertime.

Now this band was a little different from my previous ventures. There were a couple of the guys were very serious about music, and wanted to carve out a niche in Missoula, then move out to Seattle to “make it big.” Personally, I just wanted to have some fun with it and maybe make some money while I was going to school.

Overall, this band was one of the best I’ve had the privilege to play in. Our “rhythm section” – bass, drums and rhythm guitar were very tight. Our lead guitar player was, hands down, the best musician of the whole lot of us. If something made music, he could play it and play it well. His only weakness, if there was one, was that sometimes he would venture out into solo-land, and forget that the rest of us were around.

The bass player, singer and nominal “sound guy” lived in a (long since demolished) huge, dilapidated house at the corner of 3rd Street West and Reserve in Missoula. It was remote and it had a basement. I doubt if there was a more perfect “band house” in existence.

That summer was memorable, because it was the first summer I hadn’t gone home to work, but also because almost all of my free time was spent rehearsing with the band.

Rehearsals almost always meant beer. We went through a lot of beer that summer. There were people coming in and out all the time, almost always bringing some beer. Some would stay for a couple hours, some would stay for days. There was room in the house for them. We had impromptu parties where we would just play a “set” for whoever showed up to listen. Those were a lot of fun, because we’d tend to just “noodle” and try out new stuff.

A funny thing about playing music: There are times when it seems like all you can do is hit wrong notes. Then there are times when everything falls into place, and you can’t hit a wrong note, even if you try. Those rare times are really hard to describe. It seems like you can read your bandmates’ minds, and you know a half measure ahead of time what they are going to do, and you anticipate it, and make a subtle change to accentuate their change, and it works. It may be a transition into the next piece, or something as simple as the end of a 3-bar solo. We had a lot of those “clicks” when there was no one around to hear them.

I remember one of those “clicks” when we were playing out the end of a song while switching guitar solos. The lead guitarist had a “pyrotechnic” style. He could play all over the fretboard, and do it fast. My style of leads was more from the “too stupid to know more than 5 notes and slow to boot” school. He would play 8 bars or so, then I would play 8 bars. I didn’t have to look at him to know when he was going to end, nor he at me when we switched. We probably extended that song to a good fifteen minutes until our drummer, out of sheer exhaustion, chucked his sticks at us.

The drummer and I can still remember that.

For our two paying road gigs, we had a 1962 International Harvester school bus to transport ourselves and our equipment. On the front and back of the bus, the “S” and “h” in the word school were painted over, making it a ” c ool bus.”

Cool bus, indeed.

Stories about the “cool bus” are for another day, though.