William Weiss Interiors Studio

5/2/2000

Early eats makes for one very long set as the drummers protest to no end.

To sum up. We had no guests, early eats, one long drawn out set with Johnny in his Barney outfit going to Barry's birthday party and Rich coming in after a long days work for the second half.  And boy was he lucky! Last week it would have been a few pistachios and out of there but this week he benefited from the early eats.

Scott passed out by the end of the night from the relentlessness of the 16 song set.  Dave also fell victim to the freak and was in la-la land for most of the night.  All of these factors lead to our first drummer work stoppage protest during the Truckin'.  It lead to the ultimate demise of Scott for the night but it seemed to energize Dave as he caught his first wind to end the night energetically while others were falling by the way side.  Ironically, the work stoppage during the Truckin' lead to a percussion free Truckin' that was nicely done.  It was the musicians in the band not letting the drummers rain on their parade. Now that I am a drummer I can make bad drumming jokes like that.  I'm not even sure what the protest was over, was it the illegal use of the whistle to start the Truckin'?

I thought there were some excellent moments in the night musically.  The sound was good.  The PA sounded as loud and clean as ever.   A little too loud for some of those big Larry Brent moments. but in any case, the PA was under control and helping.

I tried something new with my sound this week in an attempt to thicken it a bit and it liked the results.  My amp and Strat have been on the bright side so this week I decided to turn all the tone knobs to 0 while boosting the volume past where I usually play it, so it was on 8.  With the 3 tone knobs at 0 I just get a trickle of sound going through but when I add 3.0 of bass, 2.5 of mid-range and 1.5 of treble I got a much warmer sound and controlled the volume and tone through the tone knobs, for the most part.  Whatever.  In addition, I spend much more time than usual playing harmonics during songs that felt comfortable doing which usually isn't the case for me.  

I really thought most songs were pretty welled played with many good moments from many perspectives.  Even the Loose Lucy, which Andy tried to ban until we studied it better, showed great progress because we played for the first time in the right time.  Although we made several errors in execution and had absolutely none of the right groove, we now have a much better understanding of what we have to do with that song and that we no the bad habits to break with respect to that song.

The way the drummers came in during the middle of Truckin' was even good.  Kevin finally got the final C# B A B E right to close the Liberty verse by the end of the song.  Mama Mex really moved and sustained itself though the transition was flawed.  Lost Sailor was lost as Kevin consciousness was out to sea.  Some how he got his sea-legs back to pull-off a pretty good Saint of Circumstance which ended up being a pretty satisfying way to end the night.

Kevin had a nice moment during the Row Jimmy  when he relaxed for a moment and let a mellow part be mellow during the "Row Jimmy Row, gonna get there I don't know . . . "  I appreciate the effort.  Playing was really cooking with a fast moving jazzy fling.

The early eats resulted in a Bens meal that was flawed in many ways but served our needs and got us to do the long 16 song set.  The weather was very nice.  Mets are on a mini 2 game skid and Microsoft is to be broken up one day.