Category: lizardfish
Wait Until Next Week
The plan was to start The Great New Singer Process today with a band practice with just the three of us so we could start rehearsing some of the songs we’re going to ask auditioning singers to try out with.
Nope. We have a one week delay. Mike the Bass Player has something going on at home that he needs to take care of, so we will meet at his house seven days from now and kick off the journey then.
This is bad news because we were all looking forward to it, but for me personally it is also good news because holy crap do I need to practice.
Seven days from now. My calendar is marked. Bring it on.
New Update to the Band’s Blog
I am thinking I might start posting to the band’s blog more frequently. By “more frequently” I mean more often than never. I’ll reblog everything here too. Why post to one site when I can post one thing to two?
I used to own a custom domain for that page. It expired ages ago. If a new name is in our future, I’ll wait until we pick something to look into a new domain.
Something to Play Along With
Just saving this for later, as this blog sometimes serves as a browser/machine independent collection of bookmarks for me…
That’s a playlist of my band rehearsing each of the songs currently on our new-singer-audition-to-do-list. I haven’t listened to any of it yet so I don’t even know if the takes are complete or not, and I don’t know if they sound good enough to actually make anything out, and I don’t know if we made any colossal screw ups or anything.
In other words, this playlist might be a waste of time, but I did it during my lunch break so it is morally on the up and up.
I have a wordpress.com blog for the old band too. Maybe I’ll post it there for funzies.
Which Guitar?
I have two musical goals for tonight after work.
First: Put together a playlist of the songs on our potential-singer-audition-songs list so that I can start practicing the holy hell out of them.
Second: Decide which guitar I want to use for the band’s come back work. As of right now I am leaning toward the birthday Les Paul that my wife bought me for my 50th birthday almost three years ago. I’ve been playing the two 70’s Gibsons that I had all of the repair work done on since November or so, but I think I want to start the return-to-the-band process with my newest guitar.
Whatever guitar I decide to use for the band’s comeback (which is scheduled to start this coming Sunday) is going to need new strings. I have a couple of boxes here, but I might need to order some more from the Amazonians today. We’ll see.
It’s time to start focusing on getting the band running again. I’m mentally ready for it, but not quite ready from a guitar playing ability standpoint. I have a lot of rust to shake off.
These are pictures I took for today’s photo a day challenge, but they are not the guitar I am talking about. Oh well.
Musically Good
I was sitting in the living room working on melodies and lyrics for the two Record Every Month songs when my band’s drummer threw out a list of songs he thinks we should use for singer auditions.
I was going to kick off the discussion over the weekend if one of the other guys didn’t do it sooner. I am really glad someone did it sooner. I was starting to be nervous that maybe I was the only one of us still invested. I’m not. Hear me breathing that huge sigh of relief.
The list of songs he suggested is good. Most of what I was going to suggest is on it. A couple I wanted were not, but I can let the other guys talk me out of them. It’s all good.
Progress is a good thing.
We Need a Plan – Follow Up
On Sunday I wrote a post about trying to form a plan for moving forward with my band. I wrote out what I thought we might do to find a new singer and hold auditions and all of that fun stuff. I said I was going to send it to the other two guys in the band and that I would probably do it some time on Monday… then I immediately sent them what I had written. It wasn’t the next day, it was the next minute.
Both Mike the Bass Player and Kevin the Drummer agreed with all of it. The first of our singer-audition-preparation-practice will be a week from Sunday. One week after Easter. Over the intervening week and a half I’ll get the conversation started regarding which songs we should work on. I want at least five and at most 10. Enough to give potential new singers something to work with, but not enough to overwhelm us as we try to shake the rust off. We should try and be diverse in singing styles but I am thinking we should stay away from Bon Scott. Something about Greg the Former Singer allowed him to handle Bon Scott era AC/DC while most normal humans probably couldn’t deal with that high pitched screechiness. Greg didn’t sound like Bon Scott at all, yet somehow he could do it. Let’s not ask any potential new singers to go there. Okay… maybe we brush up one song just in case someone is feeling ambitious.
We also need to figure out the P.A. situation. We had a little one that was barely powerful enough to get a voice loud enough to be heard over the drums. That little dinky P.A. thing was replaced by something Greg bought. We don’t have that anymore because… ya know… it is Greg’s, not ours. Hopefully the little dinky thing still works.
So the ball will start rolling again in 12 days. I’ll likely share every single thought the three of us have as we work toward the next step. You know how it is for oversharing nerds like me.
We Need a Plan
I need to fix what’s left of my band. I don’t know how. I think we need to come up with a plan. Something we can work through that will result in getting everything moving again.
We need a singer. I tried craigslist and got a surprising number of responses, but we weren’t organized enough to act on any of it. Here’s what I am going to suggest to the other two guys…
- The three of us pick a handful of songs. Maybe 5-10. They will be our singer-audition songs.
- The three of us start practicing again. Once a week. We rehearse the holy hell out of those 5-10 songs for a month or so, maybe a little longer. We get them to where we can play them in our sleep.
- We put up another craigslist add. This one will have the responses forwarded to all three of us. If anyone answers the add we immediately schedule an audition. We give them the list of songs and give them a week, two weeks tops, to work on them and then we all get together.
- Eventually we offer the job to one of two people and then we’re off and running.
I am going to send this list to Mike the Bass Player and Kevin the Drummer, probably tomorrow at some point. Hopefully they’ll be up for it and we can get things moving in the right direction again.
No
First, allow me to let the great Jeff Beck answer this question (with some help from Rod Stewart and Ron Wood):
No, I am not superstitious. Sorry to let you down. Didn’t we just have to answer something about whether or not we believed in fate? Was that here or was that one of the 1000000 lame ass polls I’ve seen on Threads? I don’t recall.
Nope, I don’t believe in superstitions. I don’t believe in astrology. I don’t believe in fairy tales, especially ones about dudes who claim to be their own fathers. I don’t believe that walking under a ladder is going to cause me to have a bad day. I don’t believe in any of that stuff.
I do believe in Stevie Wonder though, and even more hero-worshipfully, I believe in Jeff Beck. I also believe that Jeff Beck did a session for a Stevie Wonder record and in payment Stevie wrote Jeff a song that he could use with his new metal band, Beck Bogert Appice. I believe that song was freakin’ epic.
While I believe in the epic nature of that song, I do not believe that the BB&A version was better than the Stevie Wonder version that Mr Wonder was asked to record by his label because they were afraid he had given away a potential classic… which of course he did. As big a fan as I am of the legendary Mr Jeff Beck, Stevie’s version is way better.
Both of those versions, however, are better than the version my band, Lizardfish, recorded at a rehearsal one day. Yeah, we played Superstition too.
So no, I am not superstitious, but I do know a couple of killer songs when I hear them.
Four Years Ago
Four years ago tonight. The pandemic had not happened yet. Had we heard of Covid? I think so, but it wasn’t in our area yet.
On this night four years ago, February 1, 2020, my band played its last gig. I used my Gibson SG and my Fender Bassbreaker 18/30 on stage for the first time.
When will the next gig be? Will there ever even be a next gig? I don’t know. I hope so.
Inside the Red Head's Head 