After 14 months of pandemic captivity, I played a gig last Saturday. It was so much fun, I’m planning to do it again this Saturday at the same venue, R&W Vineyards in Cupertino. The band that I’m playing with (and I use the term band loosely) is the Ames bluegrass jam that I have been jamming with for a few years now. Linda, my favorite vocalist and mando picker also is part of this group. We got this gig because one the owners is also in our jam group,
So what happens when you have a group of semi-amateur pickers that haven’t played as a group in over a year get together for the 1st time in the post-apocalyptic times. As above with the term band, I use post-apocalyptic almost as loosely. There are no roaming mobs looting and pillaging in retrofitted military equipment like in the Mad Max movies but Moffett Field sort of feels like there could be. The building where we jammed for all the multi-year existence of this jam is now condemned but we jammed/rehearsed there 3 times in the last 2 weeks. Luckily, there are lights in this condemned building…but I digress, as I am apt to do.
Picking up where you left off after 14 months can be somewhat dicey in that it is a roll of the dice as to the quality of the music. We started out well, as everyone could still tune their ax (with a tuner, of course) but ittended to go downhill from there. Most of us had tried to keep our chops up during the down time and individually everyone was okay but none of us had played with any other musicians not named zoom and that wasevident in the first song. What groove? Obviously, I exaggerate…some!
As for me, I thought I did a relatively good job in maintaining my chops. I worked on scales and arpeggios. Using Strum Machine, I played through the changes of many songs but I’m basically a bluegrass bass player. Playing I, IV, V chord changes with no melody is basically torture, not only for me but for anyone else who had to listen like Linda and my dog but it definitely served its purpose of keeping my fingers on my doghouse
What I didn’t do for a year was sing. I’m not a singer per se as I call myself a bass player and not a bass player and vocalist. However, in the course of my bluegrass career. I have been known to sing a few songs.Like most semi-amateur bluegrass jammers, I have a few songs in my repertoire that I regularly call in jams. It so happened that the jam leader put a few of my songs on the set list for the winery gigs.
(Going all cliché on you) I told you that so I could tell you this. At the rehearsal, after not having sung a lick, unless you count showers and earworms, in over a year, I was lost. I faked it well and if the song was a train wreck, I blamed the dobro or one of the banjo players. Obviously, I had a reputation to uphold.
The rehearsals had a few hiccups as that is what rehearsals are for but nobody was backing down from the gig. There was wine involved afterall.
Let me do the math for you here. 3 hours of rehearsal after not playing for 14 months and then going to perform for 30-40 folks at a big Winerygig… and of course it went very well, if I do say so myself. Heck, they’re having us back this Saturday
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I didn’t mention Tequila once which I believe is a first for me.
Happy Seis de Mayo
