A couple of songs into our set I realized I couldn’t bend strings. I pushed them but they didn’t move. Let me rephrase, my brain told the fingers on my left hand to bend the string and the fingers on my left hand refused to comply with the request. Given that my entire guitar existence revolves around bending strings it meant I was basically playing with handcuffs on.
The problem started out as the usual is-it-arthritis-or-carpel-tunnel-or-what pain, but it wasn’t all that painful. It hurt, but there have been times when it hurt a lot more. It was more like my pinky finger and, to a lesser extent, my ring finger just turned into dead weight. My pinky just stopped going where I told it to. The ring finger stopped going into some places I told it to. Bending strings was most of the ring finger issue. Fretting chords was the big pinky problem. There is one song we do that requires a good deal of pinky and it was the biggest train wreck of my life. It’s all open chords and it goes from Cmajor to Csus4 to Gmajor. My pinky handled the sus4 part without problem, but moving to the G just didn’t happen. I tried re-voicing the G to avoid my pinky but it sounded like shit and I kept screwing it up anyway. Then looping back to the Cmajor my ring finger started screwing up and it made the disaster even more disastrous.
There was one song in the setlist that has a pretty long solo that I usually blow all over and it makes me feel like a real guitarist and I basically get my musical rocks off on. I cut it short because I couldn’t do anything that I wanted to do. I was frankly embarrassed. There was another song with an extended solo that we had on our B list. Greg wanted to play it. I told him I couldn’t. We moved on. When we were down to our last 3-4 minutes I said screw it and suggested we play it. I survived, but by that point I was so upset and embarrassed that I just didn’t care if I puked all over the joint. I still had to work around bends so I did a lot of strumming and double stops, but it wasn’t so bad. We sort of ended on a decent note.
At least I sounded good. Using my Les Paul Custom and the Klon KTR as a clean boost into a driving Fulltone OCD through my Fender Deluxe Reverb sounded ace. Switching up the gear selection at the last minute was absolutely the right choice. It doesn’t hurt that the Deluxe is lighter (slightly) than my Fender Bassbreaker 18/30 and my back was completely freakin’ killing me so that was another example of it being a good choice.
The reunion was okay I guess. I was feeling extremely anti-social and supremely introverted, but I think that was as expected. There were a bunch of people there that it was nice to see after all this time. I just don’t like that kind of social setting. Shoot me.
Here’s my point of view for the group photo. I thought I was the furthest person away from the camera, but Kevin the Drummer was actually behind me photobombing the shit out of the thing. Good job Kevin.
After the show but before the break down I wanted to try and take an artsy photo of my awesome amplifier, but the drummer photobombed again (not on purpose this time).
Inside the Red Head's Head 