Tag: Music

Musically Nostalgic

Feeling a little musically nostalgic for Boston in the 90’s. Pardon the youtube flood.

Gigolo Aunts. I never actually saw this line up. Once at Christmas I saw the Phil Hurley sit in with them while this drummer was in the crowd. That was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen by any band ever.

Jack Frosting. They weren’t around for terribly long, but we thought they were seriously cool.

Betwixt. Same guitarist as Jack Frosting (same drummer too, I think), but add in a lead cello. Possibly the weirdest awesome band ever.

Kustomized. The Drummer from Mission of Burma and the Volcano Suns comes up front. Also… extremely goofy video. I had never seen this one before. It was the 1990’s after all.

Smackmelon. This band should have ruled the universe. No kidding. Only a couple of records. Unbelievable awesomeness. I never got to see them live. When they announced their final show I really wanted to go, but I had a gig of my own at a Halloween party my boss was throwing. Mike on bass, my brother on drums, and me on guitar and vocals. We played a bunch of our own songs that Mike and I had been playing off and on for years. No one was impressed. I bet Smackmelon was wicked that night. I’ve never seen this video before, but I seriously think this is one of the best songs in the entire universe, known or otherwise. Spaceshot.

Buffalo Tom. There’s really no reason why these guys weren’t disgustingly huge. They had the songs. One perfect song after another. I consider it a cultural injustice that their Let Me Come Over record wasn’t a 10 million seller.

Letters to Cleo. Again, how were these guys not a household name? Cleo shows became events for us. Not to be missed. Perfect. Over and over again. Perfect.

The Dambuilders. Kinda sad that I can’t seem to find any live videos. I’ve never seen this one, and also never heard this radio edit. Eff-bomb free rock and roll for the kiddies. This band was incredible live. We saw them in the middle of Mass ave once. The one show that I remember most was actually kind of a bomb. They were playing a bunch of songs from what would be the last record. It was the first time I, and probably many others in the room, heard them and the reaction was not all that positive. It was at TT’s. I can remember the band members giving what I thought were “oh shit” looks back and forth, although I might have imagined that. When they got to the end they did a few older songs and it was the usual awesome. Fast forward a couple of months and they played the Middle East Downstairs. 3/4 of the band were living in New York by then (I think, it’s been a while and I might have heard the wrong stories) so they weren’t playing out much. That night though, all of those new songs were played with a ferocity I couldn’t believe. It was like a redemption. Of course, this could all have been in my head, but they were so good that night it was scary. They were also louder than I’ve ever heard any band indoors. Even with really good ear plugs I had to move to the back of the room. It was unbelievably loud. Also, unbelievably awesome. I think that may too have been the last time I saw them. Shame, they were fantastic.

Throwing Muses. No explanation needed. For my fanboydom they are second only to the holy triumvirate known as Rush.

Throwing Muses get two videos because song perfection. Also because both of these are from the 80’s which I wasn’t going to do, but perfect songs. So, yeah…

Pixies. I believe there is a state law that declares if you share Throwing Muses videos on a blog you are obligated to follow up with at least one from The Pixies. I want Lizardfish to play this song.

Big Dipper. Well… this is also from the 80’s, but the Gigolo Aunts covered this song in the 90’s… so if you squint a little it works.

Mission of Burma. I didn’t see them until 2001 and this video is from 1979 so I guess the whole 90’s theme is down the tubes, huh?

I guess I’ll stop now before I go off topic again.

David Crosby

David Crosby from Crosby Stills and Nash is on Twitter. As celebrity Twitter users go I think he’s my favorite. He answers tons of fan questions, usually in one word answers, and he’s always an entertaining read.

I saw this tweet yesterday:

Well, speaking as one who plays in a cover band, I take that as a challenge! We have three singers in the Lizardfish, but we don’t have three Crosby Stills and Nash level singers. Pulling off songs recorded by what is probably the greatest three part harmony vocals of the last 50 years would be quite a stretch for us.

Fortunately one of my favorite Crosby songs doesn’t have any vocal harmonies at all! We could probably make this work, sort of…

Not Going to Share

I finally did it last night at band practice.

I set up mics on the drums, on the bass amp, and on the guitar amp, and ran a line out from the PA, all into my Mackie board, then into my Lexicon USB interface, and then into GarageBand in stereo. It worked!

But I ain’t sharing any of it. Not this time at least.

The bass guitar is UBER loud (although the tone has a nice snap to it). The drums are really, really quiet and have no bottom end at all. The guitar is a little low compared to the vocals. Kevin’s voice is a touch on the loud side but not too bad. My voice is WAY low in the mix (just how I like it!) and needs to come up.

In other words, the mix is all but unlistenable. I knew that would happen though. I will make some adjustments on the board next week and see how it sounds, and then repeat the process the following week until I have a mix I can live with. I don’t want to take time out of practice to adjust things, so I will just do it week to week based on what sounds bad on each successive tape.

Also, I don’t think we were terribly good last night. After the last two practices being really great. I am pretty disappointed in myself. Listening to a nice clean recording just makes my shitty playing all the more obvious.

Next week I hope to have something to share. Maybe.

Another Great Rehearsal

I just added a post to the Lizardfish website. Rehearsal last night wasn’t just good, it was constructive in a way we haven’t really experienced yet. At least not since I joined the band.

Another Great Rehearsal.

I was going to just reblog it here, but apparently I’ve shut that function off. Oh well.

Amp Confusion

I think I’m falling out of love with my amp.  I have a Marshall Valvestate VS265.  My friend Larry owned one and it had a feature that I absolutely drooled over.  Three switchable channels.  One clean, two distorted.  That’s not too unusual, but the part that I thought kicked ass was that all three channels had their own separate volume.  Meaning I could use one channel for rhythm and another for leads and the leads could be at a significantly louder volume and not get buried in the mix.  Abso-freakin-epically-lutely awesome.

I bought it in 2003 before my first gig with Break Even.  At the time I felt it was a little toppy, but Steve the other guitarist played a little bassy and the two tones meshed together fairly well.

Today?  I’m sick of being so trebly.  I can’t seem to find any bottom end no matter what I do.  It’s making me fall out of love with my amp.  So what do I do?  I’m considering buying a distortion pedal and only using one channel.  If I can get a fatter, warmer sound that way, it might be good.  The alternative is a new amp.  I spent the evening watching sales videos for Fender Twin Reverbs.  Yes they are usually on the top heavy side, and I’d need a distortion pedal, but something about it is making me want want want.  Sadly I don’t have $1500 lying around.

Gear… My kryptonite.

Apple Music Fail

It was just a matter of time, but this iTunes Match user (who generally sings the service’s praises) just found an instance of the Apple Music bug where Match users are finding that songs have been removed from their My Music libraries.  Tracks 1-3 of the Rush Vapor Trails remix are gone, gone gone.

Hey Apple… I want my missing files back.

I sure hope the last backup I did has everything that Apple removed.

Addendum: The bug is dumber than I thought.  I organize my iTunes library in playlists.  Every song I have exists in at least one playlist, and when I use iTunes, the playlist view is the only one I ever use.  When I’m using my iPhone or iPad it sometimes feels faster to find what I want to listen to by pulling up the artist, and then drilling down to the album.  That’s what I did when I noticed the Apple Music bug.  The full album exists in Apple Music, just not under the artist/album in My Music.

Those three songs appear in about 1000000000 different versions in My Music (ah bootlegs), so I thought I’d search for one of them and see if any others disappeared.  Imagine my surprise when not only did I not notice any other versions of “One Little Victory” missing from the search results, but the remix album version actually appeared and I could click it and play it.  Well, that’s dumb.  It’s still labeled correctly, but it shows up in search but not in the album itself.  Right.  Dumb.

I then thought, I made a playlist for Vapor Trails that included the album, the remixed album, and the couple of additional remixed songs from a compilation album.  I went to my playlists… and the missing songs were all there (“Ceiling Unlimited – Remix” is playing in my ear buds as I type this).

Well… that’s just… Dumb.

Fix this please, Apple.  Fix it soon.

Goodnight, Sweet TT’s

It’s a sad night for Boston area music.  Tonight is the last night we will have TT the Bears in Cambridge.  So many nights watching so many great shows.  Talk about your first rate downer.

(I didn’t start bringing a camera to shows until well after rock clubs stopped being a regular thing for me.  I only have pics from two trips to TT’s, one with Kay Hanley on January 3, 2007, and one with Cordelia’s Dad, two days later on January 5, 2007.  Had I owned a digital camera as far back as 1995 or so, there would probably been hundreds more to share today.)

   
 
Fare the well, oh TT the Bears.  You will be sorely missed.  Thanks for the memories.

Tipper’s Gonna be Pissed

Damn, Tipper Gore is gonna be pissed off at me.

This is a song from Thursday night’s practice. I didn’t include it in the playlist I posted yesterday because I made a dumb mistake during my guitar solo and it soured the whole thing for me. Now that same mistake is going to bring down the might of the PMRC (is that what Tipper’s censorship group from the 80’s was called? I can’t remember).

I was feeling a little goofy all night. I was also feeling a little adventurous. The result, I did a lot of silly little gimmicky things that sound okay when you pull them off, but sound really dumb when you don’t. Most of them sounded okay. During this song I got it into my head that I was going to strum a dominant 7 chord way up high on the neck during my solo. Robin Trower does it all the time and it is super awesome when he does it. Unfortunately for me, having the same first three letters of my first name does not make me as skilled a soloist as Robin Trower. I started playing the little gimmick and then realized… what the hell am I doing? That chord doesn’t work in this key. What are you an idiot? As I stopped I shouted an obscenity. I won’t repeat it here, but it started with the letter “f”. Now I know you’re all crushed to learn that I sometimes say bad words, but you’ll just have to accept that I’m not this pillar of morality that you thought I was. I’m sorry about that (not really).

At some point later in the song it occurred to me that I very nearly yelled my bad word into my microphone. Hehe, thought me. I asked the other guys if they heard it and they said no. I just listened to this recording a few minutes ago and sure enough, I heard it. BOOM, right there where Tipper Gore can be all offended by it.

Enjoy my little eff-bomb! WOOHOO