I just received a notification on theBookFayce* that made me laugh.
Yeah, Lizardfish is a small business all right… really small. Loud, but really small.
*note: I say Bookfayce because I have this clear memory of Strongbad saying Bookfayce, but I can’t find any documentation to back that up. I think it was in one of the posts where he reads his email. I’m going to have to watch them all now so I can find it… assuming it exists.
There’s a work crew next door running two leaf blowers, a weed whacker, and a huge riding mower, all at the same time. They are louder than a Lizardfish concert. It’s insane.
It’s also making me want to play a Lizardfish concert.
Stupid quarantine.
As I type this I am downloading two very large .zip files containing four songs performed by the Mighty Lizardfish at my 30th High School Reunion. I was then and am still now convinced that it was the worst public performance of my public performing life.
The question I have for myself is…
Should I watch the videos?
The follow up question is…
Should I post them on the band’s website (assuming I have the rights, which I’m not actually sure of)?
My gut feeling is the answer to both questions is a resounding no.
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?
March kinda sucks.
I go through this every year. I finish my February music projects and then feel this gaping hole in the universe during March. From reading blogs and forum posts on rpmchallenge.com I’m clearly not alone in feeling this way.
So what to do?
A few months ago I was working on a way to add the rest of my old myspace blog to this site. I started up on that again last night. WordPress.com is able to back date posts but it’s a royal pain in the ass to go back to 2007 and 2008. Instead, I created a Blogger account and I’ve been posting back dated entries there. Once I have them all I’ll export them to an .xml file and import them here. That should work fine. The myspace blog covered pretty much all of 2006 through November 2008. I had pulled all of 2006 into my previous wordpress.com site so those are all here already. As of last night the Blogger page has almost all of 2007. I think I have about 75 more posts to go.
I’m still going with my Flickr photo-a-day project. It suddenly feels difficult though. It was easy last month. There was always music happening so I could take pics of that, and Disney made things even easier. Now? What the hell do I take pictures of now? Where’s the cat when I need her?
Back in January Jen and I did a tutorial for a javascript extension (I think that’s the right way to describe it… a scripting language built on top of javascript). It was fun and interesting but my javascript knowledge is ancient and more or less nil at this point. I thought I might have gotten more out of it if I did a javascript tutorial first. I would like to try something like that in the coming weeks. I would like to be a better all around programmer than I am right now. My company’s development tools and programming languages are proprietary, so even if I’m firing on all cylinders at work it doesn’t really extend to the rest of the world.
Years ago I found a set of wordpress.com tutorials called Blogging University. There are various beginner and intermediate level courses to help you get the most out of your wordpress.com experience. There were classes for customization, writing, photography, and interacting with other blogs. I might give some of those a try again, just for schnitzengiggles. If I remember correctly they were mostly prompts. Things like, today you should write a better About page, or today you should take a picture of water. Stuff like that. The photo stuff would be fine to redo, as I just said I’m always looking for ideas for photo-a-day. The basic blogging stuff is probably too simple for this page, but there is always the lizardfishmusic.com page. I could make some changes there. I don’t think I’ve made any changes to the layout there since I first created it. Maybe a face lift would be fun?
Exercising should be an obvious target for new projects. I had a really bad night Weight Watchers wise last night and I’m feeling a little crummy about myself today. I got home from work and just started shoveling food into my face and I really didn’t stop until I fell asleep. I need to be better than that. The gym might help in that regard, or at least minimize the damage of any future bad days. Right now I am having a problem with one of my feet (again). My right foot feels a little swollen and it hurts to walk. It’s not the same thing I had a month or so ago, and it’s not nearly as bad, but it is slowing me down right now. Once that eases up I need to get back to the gym, and I need to get into a regular routine.
There is always more music to record, and more songs to learn for Lizardfish, and more practicing in general to do. Just because February is over doesn’t mean I can stop playing. I was doing pretty well with finding time to practice back in January. I need to keep up with it. I’m tired of feeling like the weak link in the band. I’m also thinking of trying something new gear wise. I want to try to run a two amp rig in the band, but most of the amps I have now are way too powerful and if I paired them up I’d be unable to not drown out the rest of the band during rehearsals. I keep looking at my 15 watt Fender Bassbreaker as the solution. If I could pair that with another lowish watt amp that could work. I am thinking about going to Guitar Center to inquire about trading my Fender Stratocaster in for a Vox AC15. I think that might be the key to making it all work. A Fender Princeton reissue could do it, but it’s only a 10 inch speaker and I’d prefer to stick to 12 inch speakers if I can. I just like them better. We’ll see.
Should I start looking into using in-ear monitors? One of the guys in the band uses them. One of the hosts of the Gig Gab podcast swears by them. So much so that he’s always inspiring the other host to try them, even though he has a hard time with them. I don’t really want to spend money on it, but we’re getting to the point where we’re going to be mic’ing the room during rehearsals and I always wear ear plugs anyway. Is it time? I’m trying to decide. I’m definitely on the fence. We’ll see.
I was hoping that by this point in 2020 I would be able to do something to help out with the Warren for President campaign. I guess that isn’t going to happen. At least it seems highly unlikely now. I can get behind Bernie Sanders, but the idea of a candidate in his late 70’s who has already suffered a heart attack during this campaign is a little depressing. Platform wise I can 100% get on board. Human wise… ugh. As for Joe Biden. He’s a great guy and I love him to pieces, but he’s literally my last choice of all of the candidates we’ve had. Dead last. Yet another guy in his late 70’s but this time one who just feels like a frat boy who got lucky. He just seems a little too dumb ass for the oval office, and we already have a total dumb ass in the office now. If he ends up with the nomination he’ll get 100% of my support… I was just hoping the rest of the country would jump on the Warren bandwagon, that’s all. Yet another reason to feel let down by my fellow Americans.
There are a crap ton of TV shows that I want to watch. February has resulted in me falling way behind on all of the CW super hero shows that I like to watch. I’m like two months behind on The Flash, Supergirl, and Batwoman. I’ve been trying to get caught up on Star Trek Discovery. Season two is really good, I just haven’t had time to power through. The last season of Star Wars The Clone Wars is either about to come out or has just recently come out. I wanted to binge the whole series before I watched the new season but… Jar Jar… he kinda killed my interest in that. I want to finish season two of You even though it’s definitely meh. I want to watch Lock and Key and The Expanse and I still want to get back into Breaking Bad and Preacher. I’ve started both of them, but just haven’t been able to keep going. I’m not sure why, the are both good. I’m caught up on The Walking Dead, and the second spin off is just a month or so away. One show that I did not fall behind on in February is Star Trek Picard. It is so good. Just, so very good. I wish it was going to be a 25 episode season instead of 10 (I think it’s just going to be 10). I don’t want it to end… ever.
I’m sure there are other projects I can come up with that are just there for fun and a sense of creative accomplishment. If we get lucky and Spring actually gets here there are always day trips up to the mountains that I can drag my beloved Mrs to. There are so many waterfalls, and so many scenic views up there. They are all just sitting there, waiting for me and Jen and my camera to come and visit.
There’s also always Disney World. Or Disneyland. Or Euro-Disney, if that’s even still a thing. I’d say Tokyo Disney too but I have a co-worker who was supposed to go there next week and he told me it’s closed due to some global pandemic* thing. Maybe you’ve heard of it?
On an unrelated note, I am trying a new browser again. The same podcast that inspired me to try Brave has inspired me to try Vivaldi. This post is the first thing I’ve done with it. Isn’t that exciting? I’m just glad that the Last Pass plug in for Chrome works in Vivaldi too. That makes life a tiny bit easier.
*Go wash your hands. Seriously.
This picture popped up in my Facebook Memories today. Me and Kevin In the proto-Lizardfish days of 2012.
Look at how few pedals I had. Isn’t that cute? Wah, volume, a tuner, and the amp’s channel switch. It was so widdle.
I mentioned in the last post that we did last night’s show for free. It was Greg’s birthday party and we were just there to help celebrate.
When we were finished, Mike, Kevin, and I all left. Greg stayed because it was his party. What kind of party would it be if he left?
Anyway, after the rest of us were gone the manager pulled Greg aside and paid us. I’m totally surprised. Not only did we get paid for our free show, but we got paid more than Racks ever paid us.
Well, thank you very much, J. Brien’s! Any time.
I’m not going to say that last night was the best gig we’ve ever done, but after the shit show I had at the last one, this was pretty magical.
There were humongous equipment issues, one that was big enough to end the show early, and there were a few bad spots, including a full on train wreck that was thanks to yours truly, but overall I can’t remember the last time I felt this good about a show.
Greg the singer, the purpose of the show was his 50th birthday, recently bought a digital mixer that will replace my old Mackie 16 channel board. Last night was our first crack at using it and there were problems. He was able to get one channel working (and it sounded great) but he couldn’t get a second channel into the mix. We’ll figure it out but we didn’t have time last night so we switched back to the old board.
The train wreck was silly. We were covering The Cars. The song opens with me just playing eighth notes (fifth string, seventh fret) with accents on the fourth beat. At one point I accidentally bumped the sixth string and Kevin the drummer must have thought I skipped a beat. He tried to compensate, I didn’t, Mike the bass player didn’t either. Next thing we know we’re all hitting accents on different beats. Whoops. I just kept playing eighth notes, without accents, and Kevin counted us back in. Problem solved.
The show stopper was a tough one. There was nothing we could do about it. We were about half way though the second set (we were only planning to play two) and Kevin broke his snare drum head. He didn’t have a replacement head. We hung on for a few songs, trying to make the best of it, but eventually we had to give in to the truth and we wrapped it up. Kevin said he was embarrassed. I tried to tell him to not worry about it, but I don’t think I did a good job. Shit happens. It was a birthday party and we weren’t getting paid. If you’re going to break a snare drum head that was pretty much the best time and place to do it. The downside is that we only played about 75% of our planned show. The upside is that I was home by 12:15AM. We’re old people. Getting home an hour or two early was a pretty sweet deal.
So how did I do personally? Let’s just say I haven’t been this happy about a performance in a long, long time. At the last show I was really nervous going into it. I don’t know if that exacerbated the problems or not, but I started out playing like dog crap and it got worse from there. About halfway though our one set my left hand had had enough and stopped doing what I told it to. It’s not uncommon for me to have to deal with a huge amount of cramp-like pain in my left hand (it’s ruined gigs for me in the past) but that was never really an issue. In this case it was like my hand just went dead. It was awful. I thought it was nerve damage, or something horrible and unthinkable like that. A few days later I read an interview with Little Steven Van Zandt who was joking that the members of the E Street Band are just too old to handle Bruce Springsteen’s four hour shows. He said he gets so tired he can’t bend strings anymore. That was exactly how I felt at the last show and it was like taking a load off my shoulders. I am not broken, I just ran out of gas.
As for last night? None of that. I was fine from start to finish. I never had any of the cramping pain (which might be arthritis) and I never had any fatigue. By the time we were playing I wasn’t even doing any of the things that seem to hold off the pains (I think squeezing the neck kicks it off so I try to keep my hand as relaxed as I can, which then leads to me cutting back on my lame attempts at shredding) and I was getting as close to showing off as I get. My playing wasn’t great, but it was good. My solos were repetitive and sloppy, but they were much more enthusiastic than usual. It was… fun.
I didn’t have any equipment problems of my own, although there was quite a bit of buzz when all of my dirt pedals were on. My Fender Bassbreaker 18/30 made its public debut and it sounded great. As much as I love my Fender Deluxe Reverb, there is just something about having two speakers in the cabinet that just can’t be beat.
I had the Klon KTR on all the time, to put a little hair on my clean sound. I maybe could have dialed the gain back a smidge to be cleaner, but what I had sounded so good. That little red pedal lives up to the hype to a level that I can’t explain. It just sounds fantastic, and it makes everything else I use sound better.
I used the Fulltone OCD (not the new germanium one) for my dirt. One thing I’ve always noted with the Bassbreaker is it is really toppy. There is a lot of focus in the treble frequencies. Is that an issue with the EL84 output tubes as opposed to the 6V6s in the Deluxe (the 30 watt channel on the Bassbreaker is based on the ’65 Deluxe Reverb)? I don’t know. I try to compensate for that with both the EQ on the amp itself, but also with the tone knob on the OCD and I might have over done it a little. I was a little bassier than I normally like to be. There were a few times when I thought about adding some high end to the OCD but I was afraid I’d mess up the good thing I had going. My distorted tone wasn’t perfect, it never is, but it was good. Good for me at least.
I managed to use every pedal on the board at least once. I used the cheap-o delay for a slap back effect on one solo. I used the cheap-o pitch shift on a different solo. The phaser was used for one full song, the flanger was used on another song. The uni-vibe was on for one solo. The digital delay was set to dotted eight notes for one full song. I’m not sure if I like how it came out. The delay was okay on it’s own, but when I was using it for the U2 style rhythm effect it muddied everything up quite a bit. I used the wah-wah a few times, but I didn’t over do it like I sometimes do. Did I miss anything? Oh yeah, the little digital reverb was on for the whole show. I found a pretty good setting that I’m happy with and it’s changing my mind on whether I like the TC Electronic Hall of Fame Mini. I’m still not loving it, but it’s okay.
So in summation, Lizardfish at J Brien’s in South Lawrence was, with the exception of a broken snare drum head, a really great experience. The band had played there a few times before I joined (I was in the crowd for one of them) but they haven’t been interested in letting us play there for years. Greg’s birthday was the reason they let this show happen. At the end of the night though one of the staff members said she was hoping we could do it again. I agree, let’s do it again. There are still three more band members’ birthdays to celebrate, right?
Rest In Peace, snare drum head. We hardly knew ye.
My SG made its public debut today. I used it for the first set. I think I’ll use the Les Paul for the second. 
Inside the Red Head's Head 