6/25/2013

Though I typically select most of the songs to play at our Deadstein jam, this night was my official 50th Birthday jam at Deadstein meaning it was my obligation to select the songs. With such a momentous birthday coupled with the desire to play songs that work with the birthday theme I decided to be creative, thereby opening with a Ripple, a real rarity for Deadstein, especially as an opener.

Opening the night was not all that easy with the gremlins we have been encountering as Alan delayed the Ripple opener by several minutes while trying to get his tuner powered up. That eventually worked but shortly thereafter, I had to switch amps from the Fuchs Twin Reverb to an ordinary Silverface Twin Reverb which eventually crapped out at the end of the Lucky Ol Sun forcing an unexpected ending to what was a nice first set. Highlights included the best version of the Lost Sailor/Saint of Circumstance played to date, which we have been playing for the past several weeks. I anticipate we will be playing it for the upcoming several weeks also in a attempt to make it better and better.

After the opener we did play While My Guitar Gently Weeps. We usually find ourselves playing this song late in the night after we are all spent so I figured it would be good to play it while we were still on top of our game. The beginning of it was rough as we didn't exit the first lead well at all. Fortunately, the final jam of the song made up for the earlier deficiencies as we jammed that lead like riding a wave, barely staying ahead of impending doom. I really let my hair down, what's ever left of it, on that number. We had a misstep with a Sing Me Back home that never got off the ground, but short of that the music from the first set had a good feel to it.

As mentioned before, the first set was cut off because my amp started to crackle but I went back to the amp room a selected a Super Reverb to use for the second set. While the amp was super, it lacked reverb but instead of worrying about it, I just made the best of it and played through it. Samson was our opener for the set but I decided to veer from our core and try to tackle some Dark Side of the Moon music for another change of pace. Due to my lack of reverb, I wasn't thrilled with how I sounded and felt for the second set but I did keep my act together. A complete That's It For the Other One suite enabled us to get in some powerful jamming during the Cryptical while also keeping us on out toes y throwing in the others parts to that song. We did that okay considering we virtually never play the whole Other One. To close the night I selected Brokedown Palace which was a nice book-end to accompany the Ripple opener. Fifty years old and for 23 of the years I have been doing this Deadstein jam. In just 5 more short years, , I will be playing with Deadstein for over half my life. What a long strange freakin' trip it's been. Woo!