Playing in the Band

Playing in the Band.

Playing in the Band

Not just any band, a 19 piece Big band.  You know, people who can read music and the like except I’m the only one who does not read.  Reading is a skill not especially necessary for a guitar player as the chords are indicated above the staff.  Play the chords as written, take note of the rests and repeats and be sure to end on your last beat of your last measure.

I play with musicians who range all the way into their 80’s.  I never thought that I would even know anyone 80 years old and here I am making music with them.

I feel the music more than read it.  There are tunes we play that sound like we are reading them and there are those that sound like we are really playing because we are.  There is no lag between seeing the note, processing and playing it.  It’s all right there simultaneously in the moment and when we all get it right we’re in the pocket.

That’s an old jazz term meaning the rhythm section was so locked in to each other that they were playing as one.

Here’s the best – no one does it better.

On Time Is Late

Dads are generally people of few words.  My father was especially like that and as a Dad I understand.  One piece of advice he did offer was offered in my eighth grade graduation remembrance book. ” Walk Tall and Think Big ”  he wrote.  I have carried those words with me since the spring of 1963.  The good stuff stays with you sometimes despite the load of bad and awful things we often only remember.

My advice to my children has always been ” On Time is Late” which is pretty self-explanatory.  I hope someday they recall those words with the same warmth and fondness I have regarding my father’s words.

My dad also said a lot of other things which are not necessary to repeat and which need to stay buried right where they are.  Nobody is perfect, least of all Dads.  But we try.

What Happened To Us ?

” Do you love me?” she asked.

In the slightest hesitation before he spoke, a space so small that science can’t measure but her heart could she knew that he did not love her anymore.  

His words would not matter because she knew.  She knew that they were at the end.  Not by her choice but she wasn’t going to hang around and wait for the inevitable.  Better to leave with my dignity intact and so she started making plans for moving out and moving on with her life.

She knew she seen this movie before.  Knowing herself and the months and mountains of pain and unhappiness that could lie ahead she decided that this time she would be stronger than she had ever been before.  

There would still be the oh no not again pain and as she wrote once before when another relationship had failed ” Time is measured in terms of pain not felt.”

Time.  She knew it could be her friend.  She was reminded of a journal entry in which she wrote ” August, 1978.  The change begins.”

 

Did you ever …

Did you ever wonder why everything is so much more expensive when you’re broke?

A Lawless Rodeo

 No one can park closer than 2 feet from the curb because of snow drifts and piles of dirty slush.  Thus squeezing a normally two lane wide street down to one barely passable lane.

Cars are parked at crazy angles with fenders high on snow banks.  Parking spots that have been dug out look like revetments with only one way in and the same way out.  

It’s chaos on the roads with the rule of law breaking down and good manners tossed aside.  There must have been a memo today, which I missed, proclaiming Tuesday as ” Let’s all be stupid day.”  I guess it was widely read since there was no lack of idiocy with a generous helping of lunacy and rudeness.

I only report what I see.  As Joe Friday used to say – ” Just the facts please.’  Just the facts please.

 

Fifty Years ( Again)

So it’s been fifty years since The Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan show.  I don’t know how to measure the time that’s gone by – money, material gains, people, girlfriends, children, places, experiences?  I keep trying to make some sense of fifty years.  As though I could tie a bow around the years and say, This, this is what it was and what it meant.

I can’t empty fifty years of anything and spread it out for examination.  I don’t know why I’m being chased by the fifty year anniversary.  I keep thinking that it’s not a big deal and to many people the fifty year marker is not at all noteworthy.

I like to date things when I buy them, especially if I know and hope that they will be a part of my life for a long time.  Guitars, tools, things like that which have lasting value and has their value increase as the years go by.  Here we go now, I think I’m on to something.  I’d like to think that I am like one of those things that increase in value as I get older.  I’m looking for the value and worth as a man my age.  People are valuable but as they get older they should be be seen as such.  Having more worth and instead we seem to look at old people and say – Gee, I hope I never end up like that.  Playing with bands as I do I am often surrounded by people with players, men and women, in their 70’s and 80’s.  I sat with a friend at a funeral last week who is 92 years old.  He’s pretty spry.  He knows what’s up and what’s coming.  He’s no dummy.  We saw many older people at the funeral whose best days were well behind them physically yet they kept pushing on ( and driving – help us !) seemingly oblivious to what I saw as their obvious frailties.

So this is what this fifty year mania is about.  Not about The Beatles but about me getting older.  I can still keep up when I want to but  I know how to choose my spots anymore.  I keep wondering when old age will hit me and leave me debilitated.  Does it just happen one day or is it a gradual, creeping thing?

Yeah, well when we were all young punks we thought our parents were old and on the way out, that they couldn’t possibly understand what it meant to be young and that was just too bad for them because we were going to be so very different.  I used to think that 65 was a death sentence.  Now I feel like I’m just getting started.

Invisible

Tags

invisible, Running

My kids had a cross country coach in high school who once told them to be invisible when they ran.  Part of a training run cut across a section of a golf course and they would definitely be trespassing.  When I ran in hs and maybe college I think that some of our races were held on golf courses which are perfect places to run.  Golfers apparently don’t think so.

Back to being invisible.  Sometimes the lack of customer service makes me feel as though no one can see me.  That is frustrating and sometimes in a crowd I feel like I’m there but really not there.  That’s my choice.  But wouldn’t it be great if you could be invisible?

Not for nefarious reasons like eavesdropping or committing crimes.  Just to observe and see people as they really are when no one is watching, well, someone would be but who would know?  At time being invisible is the way I make myself feel.  That’s a day when I’m feeling cold and small.  It’s a self-esteem issue.

The Really Big Shoe

Tags

Beatles, Blow up your tv

I don’t know what I was expecting last night when The Beatles were saluted by the Grammys.  I think I was looking forward to an introspective, quiet and intelligent program.  That’s not what I got.

It was an exercise in seeing how many graphics, swooping camera shots and cuts we could possibly jam into every possible second of the show.  I’m watching to see Paul play, not people I don’t even know they are in the audience clap and dance and mouth the words.  The band is onstage.  We’re not here to see the lights or the pretty pictures or even listen to the out of work actors introduce yet another – ” Who are you?” playing a Beatles tune.

I thought the Letterman segments were well done and I would have liked to have seen more of that.  I work in a world of flash and trash, enough please.  Paul made a good point which I had never realized before when he said that John with any other guys or George or any of us with other players would have been a terrific band.  He modestly and honestly said – ” We were a good little band.”

I enjoyed the segments with the fans  and Sullivan’s production crew.  The music stands on it’s own and doesn’t need all those bells and whistles to work.  It worked 50 years ago.  It still works now.

Blow up your tv.

 

Fifty Years

Tags

Beatles, fifty years

I can’t quite wrap my head around the passage of time.  I’m looking for a deeper meaning.  Fifty years have passed since that Sunday night the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan.  I don’t know how fifty years feels, looks or what it means.

I was 13 years old in 1964.  What is the substance of all those years?  I can’t see it or taste it.  It’s measured in who I was then and who I am now and who I was in between.

I think what is so telling about this anniversary is that I have something tangible that I can hang those 50 years on.  Their music still is at was.  Music freezes time and freezes you in time too.  The songs have locked me in a time and place that were the best and happiest days of my life.  As awful as high school and being a teen aged boy were there was always a ray of light in the music.  There were girls and drivers’ licenses on the horizon.  If I only knew.  We thought that we would and could live forever.

I want to take those fifty years and make them into something better than just saying I’m sorry that I didn’t do better or I didn’t always do the right thing and that I’m so sorry that I still did the wrong thing when I knew better.  Those decisions froze in time too.

Turns out that the only thing that does live on is the music.