Geezer Rock

The KDOG Summer Tour: Geezerpalooza!

Summer 2008: Old Man Jam!
You're never too old to rock and roll, even though our typical show resembles a John McCain fundraiser. To prove it, KDOG has a busy summer of gigs. And our price is finally up to "free," in that we will not lose money. Of course, we are still in the hole. The start up costs for a band are quite high, especially when you're packing the world-famous $35,000 drum set with the legendary titanium pedals. So...

May 24 Private Party @ Swabbies
1-4 p.m.
This is a graduation party for our friend Darren Zinzer, the youth leader at St. John's. My son Brett and I play in the Sunday night FLOW service with Darren.

Friday, June 6: Swabbies 7- 10 pm
Swabbies is a great venue on the River. Perfect for us. We play outdoors. It's way up on Garden Highway near the airport, where I-5 crosses the river.

Friday, June 13: KDOG on the Blacktop
This is a private office party at Kenton's building. This gig was Drew's debut with the band last year. And it was Nick's first post-heart surgery gig.

Friday, July 11: Swabbies 7-10 pm

Saturday, July 26: Moonlight in Margaritaville
I'm looking forward to this one: KDOG opens for the Jimmy Buffet tribute band, Garrett Wilkerson and the Parrotheads. It's a benefit show in the foothills.

Friday, August 8, Swabbies: 7-10 p.m.

Saturday, August 9: KDOG at the Serrano Visitor Center, 7 pm
What band hasn't dreamed of playing the Serrano Visitor Center? I just hope it doesn't turn into another Altamont.

Saturday, September 6, Biker Bash at Miller Park, 1 p.m.
This is a radio station party.

Friday, Sept. 19, Fairy Tale Town Benefit
We play this benefit for the Sacramento Area Emergency Housing Çenter every fall. It costs $80 or so, but you get all kinds of food and wine provided by local restaurants, caterers and gourmet suppliers. We play on the main Fairy Tale stage right next to Eeyore's pen. I just hope it doesn't turn into another Altamont.

Friday, Sept 19th, Swabbies 7-10 p.m.

Kenton In For Repairs!

Exploding Intestines!
We postponed rehearsal on Monday. Kenton is recovering from hernia surgery. It's his second operation this year. (The first was on his shoulder.) He's due for elbow surgery during 2008. Arthritis, old sports injuries, migraines - Kenton is experiencing more mechanical problems that a GM vehicle. Even after his shoulder repair, he's still having pinched nerve problems that make his hands go numb and cause him to drop drumsticks in mid-song. In the words of Junior Kimbrough, Kenton "done got old."
Kenton's hernia basically involves his small intestine exploding out of his belly button. People say that there is nothing disgusting or shameful about the human body. These people are young liberals. Don't believe them! When they get old, they will know the truth: are God given bodies are just big hunks of raw meat filled with slimy organs and bacteria. Your colon contains more bacteria than there are people on earth! And as you approach your "expiration date," your body will start to behave just like raw chicken that is starting to get a little "off." You will start to break down. Also, there will be a smell. I emerged from the bathroom the this morning trailing a haze of methane and sulfur smells that caused me to think that I am starting to "go bad." Kenton said the hernia repair hurts worse than the shoulder surgery. He played the drums Sunday morning at St. John's, which nearly killed him. We're scheduled to rehearse Thursday night. I hope he makes it.
Death Is Not Santa Claus
I turned 50 on March 18. To celebrate, I attended a friend's funeral. My friend, housekeeper and bon vivant Jeff died of lymphoma. He wasn't feeling too good around New Year's. Two months later, he was dead at 38. Fast growing tumors seeded themselves throughout his body, including his brain. That cancerous mass pushed his left eyeball out of its socket. When I saw him, I swear the first thing I thought of was the googly eyes on the Sesame Street Muppets. Then his eyeball filled with blood and turned black. Jeff endured other Job-like indignities, including the installation of two colostomies. This event raised spiritual questions, among them: God made everything, but He certainly has a lot of quality control problems. Federal regulators should look into this. Maybe Congress could hold hearings.
SENATOR: Since you are God and are incapable of lying, we're going to skip the swearing on The Bible and get right into the questioning.
GOD: Thank you.
SENATOR: Please state your name for the record.
GOD: God.
SENATOR: You are the supreme being.
GOD: That is correct.
SENATOR: This would make you incapable of error.
GOD: Yes.
SENATOR: You have previously stated that you created everything in the heavens and Earth, including the beasts of the field and everything that swims in the sea.
GOD: In six days, yes.
SENATOR: You also created man and then woman in your image?
GOD: Correct.
SENATOR: If you created man and are incapable of error, perhaps you can explain to the committee why my small intestine is exploding out of my belly button.
About a month later, my grandmother died two weeks before her 95th birthday. I just got back from the funeral. This event was a celebration and a family reunion as we recalled a life well-lived. She was ready to go. Not long before her death she told me, "One of these days I'm going to get sick of you people and go see Harold" (her husband of 60 years, who died in 1995). This was in contrast to Jeff's funeral, where I watched a video tribute of his life and cried with my mouth full of pie.
Rock Bands: The Guy Support Group
After my grandmother died, I received three cards of condolence. Two of them were from guys in the band - Kenton and Nick. Kenton never forgets these small gestures - flowers, cards, notes, presents. For my 50th birthday, he gave me a shirt that belonged to his grandfather, who drove beer trucks. It has a big patch that says "Hamm's" on the back. It's at least 50 years old. When I opened it, I told Kenton, "I am not worthy." I had to quit drinking, but when I feel down or stressed, I put on my Hamm's shirt and sing the famous jingle for this great brand:
From the land of sky blue waters
From the land of pines tall
Comes the beer refreshing
Hamm's the bee refreshing
You want to make sure you wife is not in the house when you're doing this kind of thing.

Honkin' With Bobo

Monday nights rehearsal was notable for two reasons.
1.) Kenton absolutely killed on "Bad Little Doggie." Best version ever. (I have watched Geezer cover bands doing "Bad Little Doggie" on YouTube, etc. None of the drummers even try to duplicate Matt Apts tricky groove, which Kenton does really well. It's a tough part.)
2.) I found out why Nick missed rehearsal the previous Monday. It's a great story.
Since turning 50 and experiencing the miracle of emergency open heart bypass surgery, Nick has devoted himself to road trips and weekend adventures with his friend, Bobo.
And why not? Nick's son is grown. He's got a low-stress job in the City Sewer Department. He's romantically unattached, owing to the fact that he approaches women as if they were Improvised Explosive Devices.
Nick and Bobo barnstormed Santa Cruz and Big Sur last weekend.
The weekend's highlight: Bobo stripped down and jumped into the pool at Hearst Castle right in the middle of a guided tour. This is highly illegal. Bobo subjected himself to arrest. The fine for jumping into the pool at Hearst Castle is $2,600. Nick said the security people were all for arresting Bobo.
"I talked them out of it," Nick said. "I said, 'Look. This guy has issues. Why not just let him get back on the bus and go.' And they did!"
Nick told that Bobo's next goal is to "swim with the otters at the Monterey Bay Aquarium."
"Oh my God," said Dru. "They WILL arrest him for that. Those things are an endangered an protected species."
"Yeah," I said. "Bobo is endangered, but he's not federally protected."
Bobo's nickname evolved from his original alias, "Burn Out." I guess they used the acronym "BO," then went with Bobo.
Bobo is the official KDOG photographer. He'll position us for a band photo, aim and compose carefully and then turn off the camera. "I got it," he'll say as the lens cap snaps shut and the lens retracts back into the body.
I think there's a song in the adventures of Bobo.

What And Quit Show Business? Pt. 3

From Rancid To Swabbies on Friday May 6.
Last night, the nice lady across the street said of our noisy Monday night rehearsals, "Your band is starting to sound really good. We enjoy listening to it. Are you playing anywhere?"
I told her were were scheduled to play at Swabbies on Friday, May 6, from 7 to 10 pm. Then she asked us if we were available to play a house party she's hosting on in May, but we already have a gig booked - a private party. We're in demand! Now I know how The Beatles felt when Ed Sullivan called.
The neighbors have not complained about the band at all, or even mentioned it casually. ("Our tomatoes are really coming in good, except for the ones that exploded during that guitar solo the other night, of course.")
"Anyway," the neighbor lady said, "it's really sounding good. I mean, when you first started..."
"It was pretty rancid," I said, reading her thoughts.
"Well, rancid, I don't know about that," she said. "But there has been a progression."
I Should Hit You, Drummer!
Despite the way I portray myself and Kenton in these pages, we're actually decent human beings who have never put metal in a microwave or started a nuclear war. We fight a lot in the context of the band, but these beefs never spill over into our personal relationship outside the band, which remains cordial, as in "It would be most cordial of you to stop choking me now."
Without a doubt, Some Kind of Monster is the best movie ever made about the subject of band fights. It's even better than the audio tape of The Troggs arguing as they attempt to record a follow-up to their hit single "Wild Thing." This tape, which must be the source that inspired This is Spinal Tap, features the immortal line, "I should hit you, drummer."
My one-line review for Some Kind of Monster is, "It's just like pre-school, except with rich guys and electric guitars." Relationships between the members of Metallica are so bad they have to bring in a psychologist/performance coach to help them resolve their issues! We should definitely do this! Except the guy charges $40,000 a month! Do you know how many drums you can buy with a budget of $40,000 a month? Several!
The best scene: drummer Lars Ulrich screams "Fuck!" directly into the face of James Hetfield. Their faces are so close together that Hetfield can smell the breakfast burrito Ulrich consumed two days earlier.
Some Kind of Monster teaches an important lesson: band fights are even more important to rock and roll success than bulge-outlining tight pants. Conflict means progress. Just like in marriage. Except in bands, the post-fight make-up sex isn't as good, most because everyone is exhausted from carrying the drums around.
Learning "Bad Little Doggie" got us to stretch ourselves while squeezing the pus out of the giant swelling carbuncle of unspoken tensions. ("Squeezing The Pus Out of The Giant Swelling Carbuncle of Unspoken Tensions" would be a great title for a self-help best seller, to be followed by "Never Wear White Pants to a Farting Contest And Other Life Lessons.") It was a necessary phase we had to pass through, such as adolescence or death. (The difference between adolescence and death is that death does not require the purchase of pimple medicine.)
It was a learning experience. I hate learning experiences. Learning experiences are the root canal of life. You never learn anything good about yourself. You never discover hidden talents or capacities slumbering inside of yourself, such as the ability to solve word problems or dunk a basketball. You only learn that you're a bitter, angry, tiny, resentful, negative, self-absorbed creep - a condition psychologists now call "Major Butt Hole Disorder," or MBHD.
Kenton and I both experienced MBHD before, during and after the Melissa Surprise 40th Birthday Party Gig as the carbuncle of unspoken tensions swelled to roughly the size of a mini-van. This story will have to wait, since I have rambled on too long. I know have to do my regular job, which is writing advertising. Yes - I write stuff that's even dumber than this Blog.

What And Quit Show Business? Part 2

Last Night: Rock Minus One
We had another in a series of good rehearsals last night. Nick didn't make it. He's in Santa Cruz. He just decided not to return on Monday. It was Caesar Chavez Day here in California. Nick works for the city sewer department. City workers got the day off. Angry tax payers, however, continued to flush bodily wastes into our great city's pipelines.
Nick is The Dude in real life. The Dude, of course, is the character played by Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski. Nick doesn't smoke weed or drink White Russians, yet he approaches all life decisions with The Dude's stoner ethos. Nick doesn't wear a watch. He rarely answers the phone. And if he's not feeling it, he just doesn't play. When he was in The Bittermen Blues Band, he once left the club right in the middle of a show. Another time, the band members realized mid-song that the harmonica had dropped out. They found Nick hiding behind an amp.
Drew, Kenton and I rocked it up anyway. We learned a new song, "Walking The Dog." The band's name is KDOG, so we're trying to add more dog-influenced material. I'm lobbying for AC/DC's "Givin' The Dog a Bone." We also rehearsed Gov't Mule's "Bad Little Doggie," which is Kenton's all-time favorite song. It's even the on-hold song at his advertising agency.
We still haven't got "Bad Little Doggie" down. This fact no longer driving me crazy. But two months ago, I was ready to kill Kenton and quit the band over this song.
Bad Little KDOGGIE!
I didn't want to learn "Bad Little Doggie." Kenton begged me to learn "Bad Little Doggie" for at least two years. My objections were based on the fact that "Bad Little Doggie" is filled with actual notes that have to be played in the right order. We can sort of fake our way through most of our songs, most of which contain anywhere from one to three chords. If somebody forgets the beginning, the end or even entire parts of the middle, it's hard to notice that anything is wrong. Nick sometimes plays entire songs in the wrong key. We frequently forget the words and simply ad-lib entire new passages and plot lines. Any audience members who are paying attention are befuddled when songs they thought they knew by heart suddenly sprout new verses and choruses. ("I had now idea 'La Grange' was about government farm subsidies. I guess that's the mark of a classic - the more you listen, the more you discover.")
"Bad Little Doggie" is filled with different sections, abrupt rhythmic shifts, key center changes, tricky riffs, accents, and drum parts that have to be played with machine-like precision or the song falls apart. Plus, the guitar solo filled me with dread, since I'd have to at least pay homage to Warren Haynes' great licks on the original recording.
We had one advantage: Dru liked the song and could sing it as well as Warren Haynes.
"Bad Little Doggie" definitely rocks, but it rides on a funny, off-kilter drum groove that is impossible to dance to - another strike against it.
"C'mon, Kenton," I'd say. "That song is going to clear the dance floor. You're not thinking about the audience. You're just thinking about what you want to play."
Last fall, I gave in, as all must when confronting the glacier like power of Kenton's will. I created a one-song iPOD playlist that repeated "Bad Little Doggie" to infinity. I listened to this song non-stop for a month, slowly working out the riffs and parts. I counted all the bars and made a guitar chart.
"You'd been have your parts down in this song when we start rehearsing it," I'd tell Kenton
"Oh, I've got it down," he'd say. "I've listen to this song more than anyone. I've been playing along with it for five years."
I already knew what would happen: Kenton would show up at rehearsal and have no idea what was going on with the song.
The prediction came true.
He didn't know where the open drum fill came in. He played busy fills when we was supposed to be quiet. Each new section seemed to catch him off guard. It was like he was hearing the song for the first time. I'd go totally berserk at each rehearsal, screaming "you're wasting everyone's time. Rehearsal is not the place to learn your part of the song! You're supposed to show up knowing it.! Why the fuck am I standing here teaching you your own fucking favorite song?"
Kenton would yell at Nick for some minor fluff, then turn around the blow his part so badly, we'd have to start over.
After one extremely tense rehearsal in November, I told Nick: "You know, I knew this was going to happen. So why am I so damn mad and out of control?"
I could've drawn up a drum chart for Kenton. I could've made time to listen to the song with him and work out the parts. I didn't. My thinking was, "He's the guy who needs to make a chart and listen to the song. He's the guy with the $35,000 drum set and the personal road crew who brags about being a pro drummer since he was four! It's time for him to back that shit up!"
Kenton took me to a Gov't Mule show at the Fillmore at San Francisco in November. With his typical generosity, he paid for the tickets and drove.
We had a great time. But Kenton felt compelled to rip on the drummer for the opening act. "He's mediocre," Kenton observed. Kenton worships Gov't Mule's drummer, Matt Abts. All other drummers are deemed unworthy in comparison to Matt.
Kenton is always policing other drummers. "Eh, this not guy's showing me anything," he'll say.
"Yeah, all this guy can do is know when the songs start and stop, playing steady grooves and rock like a champion," I'll shoot back, the veins bulging out of my forehead like tree trunks.
Kenton's antics are infuriating, but they're innocent. He's a good friend. He's not mean or dark or angry. That's my department.
I enjoyed rubbing Kenton's face in "Bad Little Doggie" a little too much. This didn't improve our performance of the song. All it did was screw up my attitude and make rehearsal extremely tense. Nick and Dru stood around looking uncomfortable, like little kids when mommy and daddy are fighting. ("Mommy still loves daddy, but if daddy doesn't start refilling the ice trays, mommy is going to find a brand new daddy to come live with us. Won't that be fun?")
On the plus side, these outbursts did distract from the fact that I wasn't playing "Bad Little Doggie" too well, either.
Example: for two months I have been faking my way through the guitar break, even at shows. I was trying to learn the basics. Two days ago, I sat down with the recording yet again to get the guitar break down note for note. I was startled to realize that the guitar break is actually in a totally different key. How could I miss a tiny detail like that? The song is in E. I'd been playing a guitar solo in E. Drew played the bass part in E. I started to transcribe Warren's licks. As soon as I got the first phrase down, I played it a few times and thought, "Hey - this doesn't sound very good over an E pedal tone in the bass." At last night's rehearsal, I finally understood that the key center of the song shifts to F sharp minor for the solo. This little detail escaped me! Like Kenton, I'd listened to "Bad Little Doggie" a million times with really hearing much of it.
This is called "eating humble pie." My serving of humble pie came with humble ice cream. It doesn't taste particularly good, probably because it's low fat.
Even with this new knowledge, we're still mangling "Bad Little Doggie." The good news is that parts of it sounded really good. And I'm not particularly upset about the bad parts. Not any more.
I know understand that "Bad Little Doggie" is hard song with lots of what musicologists refer to as "notes." (Notes are those little golf-club shaped marks you see in your church hymnal on Sunday. You're supposed to "sing" these notes, as opposed to standing there thinking about how many hot women actually go to Church.) Many of these "notes" are extremely close together in "Bad Little Doggie," possibly due to a printing error. That's just the way it is.
I didn't blow up once last night. Why? Because I have finally realized that being in a bad rock band still beats playing golf, watching TV and also watching golf on TV.
It took a long time to achieve this fragile peace. Stay tuned for more of my infantile emotional displays as I relate the story of KDOG's gig at the Momo Lounge in honor of Melissa's surprise 40th birthday party! Thrill as we damage the hearing of party goers and sell up to one official KDOG t-shirt! Feel a sense of relief as sage advice from Philip the Swiss/German sound engineer turns things around just as all seems lost!