Geezer Rock

Keep It Stupid

It is often observed that simple music is the most difficult to play. "How difficult it is to be simple!" Van Gogh once said, around the time he painted a mostly brown picture of a pair of shoes. I'd take it one step further: stupid music is the most difficult of all. This occured to me last night as we rehearsed "La Grange," a great song that manges to be both stupid and sublime at the same time. Virtyally no lyrics. No real chord progression. A nifty modulation up a minor third for the first guitar solo. All this in less than three minutes on the record. And yet, it's still so difficult to execute. You have to get a thousand little nuances just right, from the tempo to Billy Gibbon's little triplet guitar quivers in the first solo, which I discovered are tough to execute with the right timing and feel. Frank Beard's drum fills are also hard to duplicate. Dusty's farting-in-a-trash can bass sound, along with his incredibly steady time and willingless to play the simplest part possible, are also key elements. If all this isn't right, your version of "La Grange" will not rock. This is simply unacceptable, even blasphemous.
I think "Keep it Stupid" would be a fantastic band name. Since Kenton "KDOG" Lee will never agree to a change, perhaps Nick and I can turn this into a song.
Rehearsals at the Mojo Dojo Hair Care Products Storage Facility have resumed the air of drudgery now that the excitment of Nick's heard surgery has passed. Dru is learning the KDOG set list and adding a few cool touches of his own, most notable "All Right Now," which is another simple song that demands laser-like attention to detail. The tendency with this song is to over-play, which must be resisted. Free's original record is as perfect as a clothespin or a paper clip or a hammer: no uncessary flourishes. It has to be played that way. I have been having fits getting the guitar solo with exactly the right feel and timing. It's starting to infect my mind. Last night, I dreamed about this solo. I was trying to play it on the tuba, for some reason. The effect was not a rockin'.
Kenton, who tends to overplay as natrually as beavers tend to build dams, actually showed admirable restraint last night. I know why, too. He had a sore elbow. He showed it to me: the thing was swollen up like somebody had smashed it with a baseball bat. It looks like Kenton's arthritis is speading from his hands. He trussed it up with one of those Ace elastic braces. I know it hurt like hell to bang on the drums when your joints are creaky like that, but I think it actually improves Kenton's playing for some reason. I am not alone in this assessment. Midway through practice, Kenton apologized for his playing, saying he felt "off."
"I think you sound great," Dru said.
"I can barely move - my elbow is killing me," Kenton said.
"I know - so you're doing less," Dru said.
I agreed. Kenton did sound steady and driving. Favoring his elbow, he holds back a bit, I suppose, and plays more purposefully. He thinks about what to leave out, rather than what to put in.
Thank god I'm holding up physically - so far. Even so, my left hand, my fretting hand, is fatigued by the end of a two hour-reshearsal. On the last two songs, it feels shaky. It's just a strength and stamina issue, I'm sure. But since I can be quite a hypochondriac, I immediately wonder if this is the beginning of Parkinsons or if I've had one of those "mini-strokes" that are so popular these days. After Nick had his triple bypass in late February, I began having about 12 imaginary heart attacks a day. Every gas bubble was suspect. I pictured myself in the back of the ambulance, blue, with the EMTs compressing my chest. I've gotten over this phase.
I've been thinking a lot of about simplicity/stupidity lately. I saw a violinist perform a concerto at the Mondavi center last month and marveled how many different sounds and tonal colors he evoked with just his intstrument and his hands. When he was really digging in with the bow, he even produced his own fuzz tone: thick, over-tone laden passages that actually sounded quite wooly and distorted, even though he was playing a an unamplified insrument. After that show, I boxed my my effects pedals and went back to the basic set up: my Les Paul plugged straight into either a Fender tweed or a Marshall amp. No master volume. Just turn it up and grind.
I saw ZZ Top several times in the 70s and early 80s. Most shows, Billy Gibbons played his Les Paul straight into an amp. A very loud amp. He would play the whole show without moving off the bridge pickup of his sunburst Les Paul, yet produced a full spectrum of loud, quiet, dirty and clean sounds just using his hands and the volume knob. If he did have any effects pedals, I couldn't see them. There are some great videos on YouTube of ZZ Top playing on the German TV Show, Rock Palast, in 1980. His performance is a master class in what's possible when your sound is coming out of your hands and mind, instead of out of an elecrtronic box.
©2007 Edward Dean Chance ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Just Having Fun

Kenton "KDOG" Lee gets heaped with abuse for his the monstrous drum kits that he hauls around. Too big, too fancy, too loud. The stages we play can hardly accomodate him.
I had lunch with my putative brother-in-law Tommy Dunbar and Jon Rubin, both of Rubinoos fame, the other day. Jon's obseravation on this topic: "Is he having fun?"
"He's having the time of his life," I replied.
"Well, then, so what?" said Jon.
It's an obervation worth pondering. I wrote earlier that I have come to regard Kenton's ever mutating drum kit as a part of the KDOG show's visual impact. I don't have to haul them around, either. Kenton hires two guys to help him. As long as he pays them out of his pocket, I can't complain.
This is one reason why I oppose adding a keyboard player. I don't want one more piece of gear on stage.
©2007 Edward Dean Chance. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

New Songs

The reconstituted KDOG whipped out a clam, productive rehearsal last night. Nick never sounded livlier or better. Maybe more blood is getting to his brain after his heart surgery. Or maybe the whiff of mortality just woke him up.
We've had more bass players than Spinal Tap has had drummers. None died choking on vomit - his own or someone else's. Dru is our best four-stringer yet. Plus, he's got a great rock and roll voice. Nick and I are baritones. Dru is a tenor with an overlay of good old soul grit in his vocal chords. That means we can add good songs that Nick and I could never attempt: "Cinnamon Girl," "All Right Now," "Come Together," "Funk #49," and other Geezer Rock classics. (Note: I just realized how hard it is to spell "cinnamon." I had to look it up.)
Every new bass player has brought in a new array of songs to learn. If nothing else, it keeps us fresh. But there's more than that. The bass player also alters the band's feel in subtle and dramatic ways. Dru, although he is not a skilled player, has the best time of any bass player we've had. He just never rushes. I call rushing "white boy" disease because it particularly seems to affects white guys. We're too antsy or something. He has a better ear and picks up new songs faster. He can also sing harmonies, something we've never had in the band before. At least not since the first bass player, Steve, a great singer who quit to join a fancy band with a horn section. Dru's steady Freddie time has unleased a new solidity in Kenton who suddenly stopped rushing, too. Maybe it's a conicidence. I don't know. Last night, we played, if I may be so immodest, a killer version of Free's stomping classic "All Right Now." The song is Free's version of "Honky Tonk Women," but it's a tribute that almost outdoes its source material. I play Paul Kossoff's solo from the record note-for-note. It's one of my all time favorites, an example of perfect feel and note choices over flash. The last thing the song needs is some kind of Eddie Van Hanlen gnat-notes whizzing up and down like fireworks. I've heard cover bands do it that way. It's hard to duplicate Kossoff's hummingbird-like vibrato, which is a key to making the solo sound expressive.
Kenton has us down for yet another one of our "comeback" gigs on June 22 in the patio/parking lot behind Kentons' office building. It's a BBQ that the commercial landlord for the building is throwing. I sure hope these people aren't planning on talking to each other. KDOG, despite my efforts, is simply a loud band. The neighbors will complain. Maybe the police will come.
I couldn't be happier to be doing "Cinnamon Girl." One possible twist: I might want to mix it in with Roger Clark's take-off, "Kennedy Girl." ("I wanna live with a Kennedy girl/I could be happy/The rest of my life/with a Kennedy girl.")
The KDOG list of songs is now approaching 80 - and growing. Plus Nick and I have an idea for a new original. Nick told me he's not cleared for "sexual activity" until he can climb two flights of stairs comfortably. I told him he should write a song called "Two Steps Shy." It concerns a man who desperately hoping to get the medical okay for an evening of passion, but those last two steps are just more than he can handle. I want one of Nick's lyrical treatments that make it hard to figure out precisely what the song is about. If Nick's heart surgery doesn't lead to new songs, what's the point? (I mean, aside from saving his life.)
Possible portent of doom: last night towards the end of the rehearsal, Kenton was heard to mutter, "I'm thinking about putting my roto-toms back on my kit."
©2007 Edward Dean Chance. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.