I was back on the road with my band yesterday for a benefit concert.
This is what was programmed.

Afternoon off from work, preparation of the stage, rehearsal / sound check. 9 opening act. 10 kick off. Energetic set list. All covers. 6 stones numbers (rocks off / miss you/ melody / SFTD / wild horses) + a couple of Black Crows, Rod Stewart and a slow Led Zep number (since I've been loving you).

This is what happened.

Had to go out of milano for a short meeting. Meeting turned out to be 2 hours long. Traffic jam on my way back to milano. Eventually I arrived at home 8 pm. I change my self, stuff all guitars, amps and assorted rubbish in the car and ... hole in the tyre! Changed the tyre. Rushed to the place. Just in time to set up my stuff and play a short blues to warm up. After 3 minutes I broke AT THE SAME TIME two strings on the strat: the low E and A. Never seen something like this in my whole life as "guitarist". I replaced the two strings. I had my LP with me, so ready to go! Rocks Off, bass line before the solo and ... no solo! Guess what? the lead guitar broke a string (. Guitar out of tune for the rest of the song. I gave him my strat, but the E and A wouldn't stay tuned and Jealous again stank. The guitarist of the opening band gave him his guitar for the next number, Hot legs. Again, bass solo and ... no guitar solo. Another string, a G this time. Total 4 strings in less than 1/4 hour. Great! By the time of Since I've been loving you not one guitar was tuned and the only tuner wouldn't work in all that noise.

All in all our worst perfomance all time!

C

p.s. I was forgetting, also the lead guitarist found his tyre flat before arriving at the place.

bad karma?

:-)

-----------------------------------------------------
Oh, give me the beat, boys, and free my soul
I wanna get lost in your rock and roll and drift away

Indeed!

C

Bad karma for sure!

a) Mmmmmmm... That was the reason you were practising "Melody" so hard, innit?

b) Breaking the low E and A strings!!!!!! "You're So Rude", mate!

[There'll be no wedding today...]

Wow! So sorry ya had such bad luck. Unbelievable. My day seems to going much better now,Thanks. Better luck next time, it couldn't get worse, right? cw

If you had the balls of a Pete Townshend those guitars would be in a thousand pieces on the stage, you would have been written up in the local paper, become famous, sign with a high power agent / manager, inked a multi-million dollar record deal, have your hit single playing on every radio station across the world and getting head from Pam Anderson. That's how it works mate...it's all in the timing.

Did you think of paying people back ? LOL !

The moral is:

Stop trading off other peoples' songs from 30 years ago and write your own stuff and be your own band.

Miraculously, your work will finish on time, an angel will fly you to your gigs and supply you with magic strings which never break.

It could only get better after that liddas!

Hey man,

being in a band is tough work regardless if it's your own material or cover songs. in fact, the more challenging of the two at least as far as playing the material is doing the covers, which is what we're doing right now. so many people are so used to hearing songs played the way it is on record. the challenge is: to play these songs as perfect as possible in 1 take, which is something you know the artist never had to do in the studio!

the nice thing about originals is that if you blow it, people never can be too sure if it was intentional.

rock on man, every performance has it's own little ins and outs!!

keep rockin'!

The main problem of our group is that we can't find a male singer who is into rock and roll music.

I might be narrow minded, but in my opinion unless you are Tina, rock and roll does not suit female vocals. Females are wonderful for the blues, jazz, bossa, folk, plain rock, etc. etc. But they seem not to have the "roll" in their DNA.

At least not here in Italy.

Since this is a problem that drags on for years on one side we grew up to be mainly an instrumental jam band (gov't mule, black crows, prince, stones a la CYHMK kind of stuff) that improvises on simple progressions. Being 100% improvised, you can say it is our stuff.

Every now and then we organize a benefit concert and we recruit a singer. This way we have fun and do some good, which is not a bad thing. No singer has ever lasted so long to try and give shape to our imrovisations and create proper "songs".

Of course also these concerts are "improvised", so most of the times we have to play some covers, just to have something with the shape of a song to give to the people. Most of the times we go for the obscure ones (at least for the odd audiences), anyway (yes bruno, that is why I was practicing Melody). Never liked "juke box" cover bands. Anyway, just to give an idea, a set list of 10 / 12 songs could go on for 2, 2 1/2 hours.

But you are right, I would love to play my own music.

And, yes, it COULD be worse, "it could be raining" (Igor, Young Frankenstein)

C