[drumming diary] Bloomington Blokes

Aside from the pure novelty of being paid anything for an actual rehearsal, the week o'Granian a couple of weeks ago was an interesting and enlightening experience.

My initial read of the situation was "backing band for singer/songwriter," which sounds relatively easy on paper, even with just one rehearsal before back-to-back gigs. Either I'm not quite as sharp as I used to be, I was never quite as sharp as I thought I used to be, or Garen's music is somewhat more complicated than that. It's likely a combination of the three. To the last point, he likes mixing things up with an extra bar or two on turnarounds in lots of his songs, which he says aren't so much "his" as they are songs for a band that doesn't actually exist.

The problem is that "or two." While I had my nose in my charts for a fair bit of the proceedings, things obviously feel better when that's not the case. So you rely on memory. When you've got a choice between no extra turnaround, one bar or two bars, on one day of rehearsal and a flagging short-term recall, that's not always going to end well. My favorite on-the-gig cover of this came at the second show, in Bloomington, when I played a two-bar fill-in where it should have been one. This earned me a bit of a dirty look, so I just played over the fifth bar of the chorus as well. Repeating a mistake makes people think you meant to do it, and fits into my evolving notion that good bands and musicians don't make mistakes, great ones make mistakes and cover them up so ninety-nine percent of listeners don't know they happened.

That's getting ahead of things a bit, though. The rehearsal was maybe a little more intense than I expected, but I have a much more laid-back approach to learning tunes than most these days. I go for form rather than detail, so the first time through the tunes included lots of mild rebukes for, say, not having the bass drum pattern quite right. This almost was about to bug me, but there wasn't really time for that sort of thing, and Garen's the boss, plain and simple. Not my place to argue with management style in that context, so I made sure I could figure out what he wanted, and made my notes.

In retrospect, what I could have used was one night of playing along with the CD, instead of intense listening and charting leading up to the one rehearsal. Having never actually executed the songs with sticks in hand made for a learning curve for muscle memory on top of the mental side of actually remembering the parts. The second time through the set was much smoother.

As for the gigs themselves, the prevailing theme was "hurry up and wait." Wise Fools called for a 7:30 load-in, but no semblance of a soundcheck until nearly 9pm. That said, the renovations to the room were very nice, but the weather didn't allow for opening the front windows and making the long wait more pleasant. The idle time afforded us the opporunity to realize one of the other bands rehearsed two doors down from us, and their drummer heard us the night before and recognized the tunes.

Garen was still struggling with a nasty cold, but we made it through the set pretty much unscathed. One particularly drunk girl said that it was the best she'd ever seen, owing largely to the reunited Rhythm Section of Doom. Or the alcohol.

And did I mention hurrying up and waiting? Got out of work early on Friday in order to carpool with Mitch down to Indiana University, and were able to hang on to WGN's signal until the exact point LaTroy Hawkins blew the save. We were told to be there by 7pm, and that we would lose an hour on the way. Neither of these turned out to be the case. We ended up arriving at 6pm because parts of Indiana don't change their clocks when everybody else does, and the sound guy didn't get there until much, much later. That said, the stuffed breadsticks were tasty, even if they didn't pass that much time.

The venue, Kilroy's Sports Bar, reminded me of a slightly smaller version of Joe's in Chicago, which makes for an odd coincidence since the main talent buyer at Joe's is a Hoosier himself. I think.

The nasty cold had turned nastier by this point, which made for some struggles through the set, but we muddled through and mostly did okay from a support standpoint. The crowd, to be perfectly honest, wasn't great, but somewhat appreciative. I've played for disinterested crowds before, so I'm never going to get hung up on it. Better than outright hostile, anyway. Hoffer's little brother brought some college friends after we went and visited him after sound check. That didn't make me feel old at all.

Since the prospect of crashing at a house full of college kids didn't seem altogether appealing, the Rhythm Carpool of Doom headed back Chicago-ward immediately following the gig. At first, we weren't sure we'd be able to find an open gas station at 3am, but this was not the case. A couple of wrong turns later, and we were on our iPod-through-the-car-stereo enabled way.

So overall, I think I did what was asked of me, but I still feel like I could have been a little more prepared and maybe a little more on top of my game, skills-wise. It was a good yardstick, personally, and I liked the songs, which almost always makes a project worth doing.