Tag: gig gab

Don’t Forget the Water

I was listening to a hockey podcast this morning. It was three hockey writers shootin’ the breeze. They veered off topic and started talking about the pros and cons of real vs fake christmas trees.

Shit, thought I, I forgot to water the christmas tree yesterday.

The downside of putting up a real tree right after Thanksgiving is you have to be extra careful about maintenance. If you want to have a green tree on christmas morning then you better keep it watered. Otherwise Santa will be putting presents under some dead, ugly, brown thing with needles all over the floor.

I’ve also listened to a couple of amateur musician podcasts today and the topic of discussion in each one is the Get Back documentary. They all agree with me. Despite being 800 hours long, that movie is absolutely magnificent. It’s just an utter delight. Where else do you get to see the creative process where Paul McCartney literally wills the song Get Back into existence? That song didn’t exist at all until Paul sat there, strumming on his bass, forcing it out of his head. It’s just magic. It was genius at work. Literally.

One little item that I didn’t really catch had to do with Paul. For huge swaths of the movie the band is playing like shit. There’s so much noodling and farting around, whether it be all of them together, or just one or two, or whatever. The question was posed… in all of that mountain of playing… do you ever hear Paul play a bad note? I need to watch the whole thing again, but right now I can’t recall anything. So not only was he pulling super classic music out of his ass, over and over again, he is also playing so well he seems incapable of doing anything that doesn’t sound right. Hell, he’s even playing his Rickenbacker bass at one point and one of the strings pops out of the nut and lays against another string, and he’s still playing great. How is that possible?

Okay. Back to work. I had a deadline moved up on me and the pile of stuff I thought I had two days to do suddenly has to be done today. Enough of my yakkin’, let’s boogie!

Live Streaming Music

Tonight while I was cooking dinner (chicken breasts [because my wife rules], instant mashed potatoes, and steamed broccoli) I was listening to today’s new episode of the Gig Gab podcast.  They were talking about making the best of every bar and club and music venue in American being closed and all of their gigs canceled by live streaming their bands.

Lizardfish has done that a couple of times and it’s always goofy fun.  Listening to the discussion really made me want to get the four of us into a room together to just play for Facebook Live.  It’ll be a couple of weeks as we’re not all riding it out in the same general region of New England, but I think once we all are back in the same state again we should do it.

Turns out I’m not the only one thinking of this.  Neil Young let it be known today that he’s going to do some live streaming from his home.  His wife is going to run the camera.  His wife is Daryl Hannah.  I had no idea he was married to a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, though she never got that Hattori Hanzo sword, did she.

After hearing this, I think we absolutely have to live stream our next practice.  I mean, Neil wrote “Rocking in the Free World.”  We play “Rocking in the Free World.”  Now we can have two things in common with Neil.  It’s pretty much our destiny, don’t you think?