Just a minute guitar break

Season Finale!

Posted in Tips and Tricks, Video on April 23, 2010 by justaminuteguitar

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Chord of the Week – F (barre)

Posted in News on April 23, 2010 by justaminuteguitar

Stories from the Compound

Posted in True Story... on April 23, 2010 by justaminuteguitar

My name is Bert. And one time I got a chance to play in a band that was way over my head.

This is the story. It’s the saddest story I can think of, and it happens to me. So some of the names are changed, so that nobody knows who I am.

This neat lady was the bass player in this very neat band in Boston, in the late eighties. Let’s call them the Elves. They were very cool and they were famous. And she had some time off, like a month or something, from her Elves duties, and she thought she would write some songs and make an album.

Somehow, me…I knew this neat lady, because I was known, a little bit, in Boston, for being kind of a hanger-on to this other pretty odd, but beautiful, and also very popular band. I was their manager.

And they were so popular, this pretty odd, but beautiful, and also very popular band, that people thought I was actually crafty, a hard-worker, somehow imbued with the qualities of the people around me who were “making things happen.”

I wasn’t.

Anyway, through an interesting connection, somehow, somehow, when the neat lady bass player with the time off from the Elves was looking for a bass player, my name came up.

Now I want to try to give you a comparison as to how famous, or, how should I say it, totally cool this neat lady bass player was who was the bass player for the Elves.

It was as if the bass player for Nirvana was making a solo album, and I got the chance to be the bass player on that album. What’s that guy’s name, Krist Novoselic? Imagine yourselves being offered to play bass for Krist Novoselic’s solo album. Only, I cannot tell you how much cooler the neat lady bass player is. She still is!

Now, here’s the other thing, I also want you to imagine, that the reason you get this offer is because of the theory that anybody can play bass.

I had a very good friend that was now a member of this band, let’s say she played the French horn in the band. She was very enthusiastic and had confidence in me, and she got me into the band. She said, Bert can play the bass. And she said to me, you can play the bass, right? I said, yes, I can play the bass.

I was the bass player. I played the bass. I was showed some bass tricks by this neat lady from the Elves, and it was cool. Imagine it, you guys. It was very, very cool. She would write songs and I would go to her apartment and she would show me the songs and show me the bass. There was no problem, you see. My bass playing was being approved, like every night, in small, one-on-one sessions, and in a larger, practice-space, band-like settings.

Oh, and let me mention this. There were three rotating drummers in this band, due to, I don’t know what. But three very, very, very cool drummers. And I was partnered up with them. Because a drummer and a bass player make what is known as a rhythm section. These guys would smile at me and say stuff like, great, or good job!

And, the music that was being made, by us, US! Because I was a part of it! Was really pretty great.

We would practice in this band, and we were going to make demos and then we were going to make a record.

And, honestly, it was fun, but I wasn’t so super-into it. I had my own band going on by now, and I was getting a little cocky. I was part of a very cool bunch of little projects, and I was writing songs. People thought I was cool and I thought I was cool.

Then we went into the studio to record the demos. A very kind of famous, underground studio. Very cool.

We are recording, and we are all doing our parts and it is kind of professional and, I don’t know…it was going well. Well.

And I lived, right around the block from this famous underground Boston-ish recording studio. So when there was a break, I went home and had a sandwich.

And when I had that sandwich, everything was all right. Everything. The sandwich was all right. I was all right. And the world was all right.

But when I got back to the studio, the neat lady bass player was working on her vocals. And she was having, kind of a problem. She was talking to the engineer through her headphones.

“What is going on with the bass? It’s off, Randall. It’s, something’s totally…no, I cannot…try it again. No, no, something’s completely wrong. Well, let’s just try and turn it down.” They try that.

“No, oh no, no way. Just, just turn it off. Turn it completely off.”

The bass, she said. Turn it completely off.

And that was it for me. She redid the parts, most of them anyway. And I wasn’t in the band anymore.

I went home and sulked for a while, but then I thought I should go back, maybe it was all a dream.

I didn’t get to be back in the band. But I did get to hang around the studio while they recorded, feeling humiliated, but somehow unwilling to let go. I got to look up some words in the dictionary. She was looking for a good G word to fit into a song. I cannot remember the word I found, but I believe it was a good contribution.

Ladies and Gentlemen, that one, I have never gotten over. It has shaped every move I have made since. Every word I say, everything I do, everything I eat, everything thing I, I don’t know what… everything.

But, come on, she was the bass player in the Elves. One of the coolest bands, to this day, ever. Of course she was going to discover that I was, in no way, going to stack up to what she thought the bass player in her band should sound like. But how come I could not have figured that out? I could’ve saved myself a lot of humiliation.

Not everyone, it turns out, can play the bass.

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