Last Night's Solo Gig
06.30.07 (11:11 am) [edit]SET ONE
Intro Improv - Fuckabout
Splendid Isolation (Warren Zevon)
What's So Funny 'Bout Peace Love & Understanding (Elvis Costello)
For What It's Worth (Buffalo Springfield)
Norwegian Wood (The Beatles)
Bridge Of Sighs/Breathe (Robin Trower/Pink Floyd)
I Was In The House When The House Burned Down (Warren Zevon)
I Have Always Been Here Before (Roky Erickson)
Delia's Gone (Johnny Cash)
Something (The Beatles)
Ankle Bracelet (Mike Keneally)
Sunday Morning Coming Down (Johnny Cash)
Substitute (The Who)
Powderfinger (Neil Young)
Little Wing (Jimi Hendrix)
The Needle & The Damage Done (Neil Young)
Theme From Spongebob Squarepants (AKA The Worst Audience Participation Moment In The History Of The Western Hemisphere)
Asshole (Beck)
Excitable Boy (Warren Zevon)
Delia's Gone (Johnny Cash) (repeated upon request)
Comfortably Numb (Pink Floyd)
SET TWO
excerpt from Fear & Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72 (Hunter S. Thompson)
Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride (DB)
Key To The Highway (Eric Clapton)
Pigs On The Wing/Pigs (Three Different Ones)/Pigs On The Wing (Pink Floyd)
I Talk To The Wind (King Crimson)
Lucky Man (ELP)
Guess I'm Doing Fine (Beck)
Lawyers Guns & Money (Warren Zevon)
Werewolves Of London (Warren Zevon)
I Won't Back Down (Tom Petty)
Bang A Gong (T Rex)
It Won't Hurt (Dwight Yoakam)
SET THREE
Hope (For Abby) (DB)
From The Beginning (ELP) (w/ Improv - The Breakdown Of The Magic Delay Pedal And Subsequent Feedback Hell)
Heartattack & Vine (Tom Waits)
Mexican Radio (Wall Of Voodoo)
Back In The High Life (Steve Winwood)
Lay Lady Lay (Bob Dylan)
Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead (Warren Zevon)
Fast As You (Dwight Yoakam)
James K Polk (They Might Be Giants)
Karma Police (Radiohead)
Mother (Pink Floyd)
Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride (DB)
The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) (Tom Waits)
A really obnoxious drunk guy sang the Spongebob theme with me (and annoyed the shit out of me the rest of the time he was there) and my delay pedal's battery went to hell and created some psychotic feedback loops.
But, a woman liked my Tom Waits covers. A KILLER UNSPEAKABLE BABE of a woman, and I damn near fell to my knees and begged her to let me introduce her pussy to my face. Forever. Holy fuckin' SHIT I'd eat that for the rest of eternity...
But instead I got drunk with my buddy R. Hey, he's a nice guy. I just don't wanna suck his cock.
Good gig.
Love,
Dougie
Meet My New Friend
06.24.07 (2:00 am) [edit]The Enigmatic Minor Scale
Oh yeah, try THIS shit on Roadhouse, motherfuckers!
The scale:
1, b2, b3, #4, 5, #6, 7
E, F, G, A#, B, Cx, D#
-0-1-3-6-7-10-11-12-
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------
------------------------
Hammer-ons of the damned, fast triplets
---------0--10H11-0-(4 times)-------------(8 times)
-11H12------------------- -----------------0------- ----
------------------------- -----------10H12--------- -----
------------------------- ------------------------- -------
------------------------- ------------------------- -------
------------------------- ------------------------- -------
So, ya wanna three-chord riff?
---------------
---------------
--8----9---10-
--8----9---11-
--7----8---10-
----------------
Beat these chords into submission in a Frippoid frenzy like they were bastard children of The Beast incarnate. That C# on the 11th fret of the D string doesn't belong in the scale, but fuck it, it's EVIL.
Of course, always remember open strings:
--0--0---0-
--0--0---0-
--8--9--10-
--8--9--11-
--7--8--10-
-------------
You're probably best off having a beer beforehand.
Also, I stuffed a pencil over the bottom E and under the other five strings near the bridge at a slight angle and began my low-rent foray into Fred Frith-isms tonight. Oh, I've got some SHIT up my sleeve.
Fuck, should've washed that shirt...
Happy trails, cocksuckers!
Dougie
Hope
06.22.07 (11:26 pm) [edit]I wrote this a couple months ago and posted it elsewhere, but I thought I'd share it here. Reading it again tonight, it still burns in me. I read this aloud at my last solo gig and I was stunned to recieve applause for it. (I've read other things where they just sit there and look at me, but I suppose that's to be expected...) An attempt to channel James Joyce through my bizarre friendship with a girl I just can't seem to stop thinking about for long.
Hope (For Abby)
"It's a belt", I say as I dive headfirst towards your chewy center. Half my time on this planet, you know so much more than I. Dipshit dinosaurs drive dangerous dildos down darkened dreams that I know full well will lead us to hell, but there is none.
I'm only sleeping yet I should be creeping because your feeping is making me reconsider the merits of the ferrets that eat my soul every time I gaze down the hole that passes for my mind when I find you there once again, so often it seems, but these dreams never seem to go away.
Too many miles, I stand upon piles of my own undoing every time I consider your magical whatever, the leather I find warmth in while gazing on your eyes, cutting me down to size six, the fixed notion I have that you are so much more than reality suggests, oh how I long for the rest.
Close the gap, take a nap. Dream.
I have hope.
A Curious Feeling
06.21.07 (10:14 pm) [edit]The reasons for this will be kept on hold for a while, but tonight I am revisiting one of the more important rock albums of my past.
A Curious Feeling was the first solo album by Tony Banks, the keyboardist for Genesis. Released in 1979, it is regarded by most fans as overwhelmingly his best solo work. Virtually unremembered by the public today, I regard it as one of the lost classics of a very interesting era.
I did a recent post about high school memories. My best memories of that part of my life have nothing to do with school, but they do have a lot to do with learning.
I became addicted to '70s progressive rock at age 15. Coincided perfectly with the dawning of my absolute inability to get anyone to fuck me. This shit does NOT create experts in social interaction, friends. Everyone else was into hair metal, which I despised and mostly still do, or godawful commercial music like...uh...the shit Genesis was doing at the time.
Genesis was a beacon for me. A calling. At around the same time I decided I HAD to be a preacher, I WANTED to be a rock musician.
Y'all know which one won THAT fucking contest.
I said "rock musician" and not "rock star" for a reason. I never craved fame, always regarded it as a pathetic joke solely reserved for very strange people who I didn't share values with. I've loosened up a bit on that, but only when it comes to others. *I* still don't give a shit about being a "star" and I know I never will. I am a working musician struggling to be NOTHING but a working musician, and that's all I need.
I sat alone in my room for hours trying to decode this music, find out what made it tick. And I learned a lot of bass lines off a lot of albums, mostly of the "prog" variety. One of my personal triumphs was the day I sat in front of a tape recorder for five hours teaching myself by ear the bass part to a 13-minute piece of music by Emerson, Lake & Palmer called Karn Evil 9. When my teacher worked out the line on King Crimson's Larks Tongues In Aspic, Part II for me, I went home and tried to work out all the shifting time signatures to write the thing out. Being ADD as all fuck, I think I only did the first couple sections of it. But these were seminal times for me.
Genesis provided the most emotional resonance, and was in fact my inspiration to play. I'd a;lready played piano, but not seriously. I ended up with a bass, and playing along with the albums to songs like Fountan Of Salmacis, Firth Of Fifth, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, and No Reply At All made me in large part the bass player I am today. I've always seen the bass as having as much potential for melodic invention as for the more obvious rhythmic and harmonic-foundation roles it usually serves. Mike Rutherford's bass playing was a catalyst for my own. One of the most incredibly undervalued musicians in rock, Rutherford created vital, vibrant, endlessly cool bass parts, and did many outrageously beautiful things with 12-string acoustic guitars as well. The fact that he's primarily remembered for what he did in the 1980s is a very, very sad thing to contemplate. But even then he had his moments of invention. in a few cases on some fairly godawful songs. (If you can stand to hear the song Invisible Touch again, note Rutherford's simple but effective bass part. It's about the only thing of interest to hang onto in that piece of shit.)
I became a musician because of Phil Collins, surely one of the great ironies of my life. Once upon a time, it would have been COOL to say Phil Collins was your major inspiration as a musician. In 2007, it's like saying a McDonald's commercial shook your spiritual foundations and set you on a path to clearer and brighter days. The amount of WRETCHED SHITE this sorry little bastard has inflicted on an unsuspecting public in the years since my initial spark may very well be proven some day to parallel the need for psychoactive chemicals among so many members of this failing culture. If you can make it through any single album Collins has recorded in the past twenty years in one listen, you BETTER need some fucking Prozac, or I will have to go back to religion just to pray for your doomed ass.
But goddammit, there was a time when he was one of the most exciting drummers in his field, and was connected with scores of brilliant musicians and albums that any young musician in this foul year of Our Lord 2007 would do well to consider. The Phil Collins of 1977 and the Phil Collins thirty years hence are two very, very different bald eagles.
But enough of those guys.
Tony Banks is a personal hero, albeit a very odd one. Guilty of as much forgettable dross as he is for works of majestic glory, the scope of his catalog includes some of the very finest works of what is today known as classic progressive-rock, and some of the most dumbass bits of Spinal-Tap-esque bullshit of the years since. there once was a time when his name conjured up images of grand harmonic movement and highly individual soloing, and even some really cool keyboard sounds. (Obviously I'm not referring to the tweezed cheesesticks of the '80s.) His writing and playing on The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway is the shit Herculean legends are formed of. The towering intro of Watcher Of The Skies remains one of the most memorable moments in rock keyboard history. Various bits of piano work scattered through the period 1970 to about 1981 (when it all kinda ended in many ways, but not QUITE) are among the most sublime uses of that instrument you'll find in rock. By simply changing the bass note under a particular triad or two (hardly the most original idea, but one that he was a master of) he forged a musical personality that grabbed me by the balls as a 16-year old, and forced me to explore the wide world of harmony. My tastes in these things have gone in very different realms than Tony's over the years (I don't see Tony Banks sitting down and listening to a lot of Thelonious Monk or Edgard Varese, for example) but I can trace my interest in chord theory directly back to this man, and it is the thing I am proudest of in my own musicianship. I am also quite fond of much music with the most basic harmony imaginable, but when I start tossing off twisted chords or getting modal with my bad self, Tony is in there somewhere.
And I'll never be as good as he used to be before he lost his mind and started getting so damn erratic.
A Curious Feeling is not the best produced album ever, Tony's attempts on guitar and bass are not generally something that couldn't have been perfomed more gracefully by a studio musician, some of the arrangements aren't so hot, and the singer spends a lot of time sounding like he's about to take a really big shit, but after a while, these things seem not only secondary, but many times come to the point of feeling quite appropriate to the personality and atmosphere of the album. It has a STRONG personality and atmosphere, and I'll take that any day over a Daryl Steurmer guitar solo or a nice tidy hit single. Fuck that shit. This album sounds like TONY MOTHERFUCKING BANKS. And that's all I need sometimes.
I played a very strange (and extremely insignficant) part in the history of progressive rock music nearly nine years ago, when I travelled across the Atlantic to England to be part of a tribute concert to Tony Banks' solo music. Most of the night was the very first public peformances of Tony's work - he never did this himself. HIs work with Genesis was huge, and his bandmates attained high levels of success, but most of Tony's solo work was ignored. A Curious Feeling actually sold somewhat well in his home country at the time of release, but those days are long gone - one of his later albums never even sold a thousand copies. So he never did this stuff live. We did, and I was the bass player. We even got an album out of it, but please don't bother me about that, because I'd rather forget all but 20 minutes or so of that thing...
Listening to A Curious Feeling tonight, I remember WHY I did such a crazy fucking thing. This music changed my life. It provided solace to me during my very awkward teenage years and has continued to provide pleasures large and small even today. Even with its flaws - and perhaps even in part because of them - it makes it far easier to look past other bits of his catalog, solo and band both, because the things I value most in music - personality, soul, attention to detail, the ability to tell a story somehow - these things are all over and under and soaking through A Curious Feeling.
I'm about to sit down and begin re-learning the songs I used to know how to play on it, and learning for the first time all the others. I will talk about this again. Now is not the time.
Love,
Dougie
High School Meme
06.19.07 (11:26 pm) [edit]I seldom do these things, but I stole this one from Sheryl.
Fill this out about your SENIOR year of high school! The longer ago it was, the more fun the answers will be.
1. Who was your best friend? Ben, currently a city cop.
2.What sports did you play? Avoided it like the plague.
3. What kind of car did you drive? 1978 Chevette. An utter shitbox.
4. It's Friday night, where were you?
Sitting at home with prog-rock albums and a bass, pining for the nice Christian girl who wouldn't have anything to do with me.
5. Were you a party animal? Hardly. I was scared I was going to Hell just for the fucking prog albums.
6. Were you considered a flirt? I was obnoxiously over-the-top with the aforementioned girl, and it was a small school, so everyone knew it. No wonder she wouldn't fuck me.
7. Were you in band, orchestra, or choir? Choir. I was terrible.
8. Were you a nerd? Oh yeah. I'm the guy who played Pink Floyd's Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together And Grooving With A Pict for these repressed white people in Fine Arts class and expected them to ENJOY it.
9. Did you get suspended/expelled? No.
10. Can you sing the fight song? Never cared.
11. Who was your favorite teacher? I really liked our histroy teacher. She really wasn't much of a teacher, but she was a nice lady and TRIED. I remember correcting her a few times in class, and got a good talking to from the principal over it (I wasn't exactly the king of subtlety then anymore than I am now), but I didn't REALLY mean to piss her off.
13. School mascot? Lion.
14. Did you go to Prom? We had a bogus Junior Pseduo-Prom I went to. I'm not sure exactly what we did for the Senior Year, because I think I didn't go or left early. I actually don't remember.
15. If you could go back and do it over, would you? Maybe a couple things, but overall I'm glad I got to experience a fundamentalist Christian education my last two years of high school, because that's what broke the first few bricks off my own stupid religion that took years to get over. That's where I learned to ask questions - because nobody ELSE was - and those questions led me to where I am today. That's good.
16. What do you remember most about graduation? My back hurting like a motherfucker - I got a killer sunburn during the senior trip to Florida and couldn't even wear a shirt under the gown.
17. Where were you on senior skip day? We all went to one of the other kid' houses and ate junk food and watched TV.
18. Did you have a job your senior year? I was the janitor. Originally for just the church and elementary school building, but eventually for the high school too. The principal HATED that I had a key, and tried to fuck with me, but I put him in his place. That's a good story.
19. Where did you go most often for lunch?
Armando's, a long gone Mexican place with the best damn green hot sauce ever. These days it's a grungy strip bar.
20. Have you gained weight since then? Shit, I gained twenty pounds that summer...
21. What did you do after graduation?
Goofed off for part of the summer, took a job at the college a bit before starting there, then entered college, which pretty much was a lost cause for me by then. I had NO idea what I was doing and left after two and a half years. Do I regret that? Partly. I would like to finish someday, but I'm glad I stopped going to the place I did go to, because it was seldom a really good experience.
22. When did you graduate? High school, 1988.
23. Who was your Senior prom date? I don't remember. The Junior thing was with Juilene, a very nice girl who I should have been a better friend to. I mostly ignored her.
24. Are you going / did you go to your 10 year reunion? No. We tried to have a 15 year, but it got canned with just enough short notice that I ended up at Juilene's house expecting them all to be there. I ended up talking to her for half an hour, which is when I realized that I should have been better to her back then. Nice girl. Our 20 year will be next year, but I have no idea if I'll go. Walking into a reunion of 12 students from a Christian school as an athiest could be pretty damn weird. If I disliked them, I could do it just to fuck with them, but the fact is, my senior class was probably the only time in my entire involvement with Christianity that I really felt like part of the group. They were good people.
25. Who was your home room teacher? A lady who moved away, I believe. Had her for two years. She taught English. Very uptight sort of woman, but quite OK in her own way. I saw her son a few years ago. He and my sister are both leukemia survivors. I think she was baffled my me, but I liked her well enough.
Anal-yzing My Stats
06.19.07 (7:54 pm) [edit]Since I posted about Cornhole: The Movie, I've been getting hits at least three or four times a day from people doing Google searches for the damn thing.
Which I think is pretty funny.
I just wish I knew what kind of movie they thought they were looking for........
Love,
Dougie
Oink
06.17.07 (10:53 pm) [edit]One of my Myspace friends sent out a goofy survey wherein you're supposed to think up a three-word phrase to say after having sex with someone.
My favorite?
"That'll do, pig."
Laughing my nards off,
Dougie
Oh dear gawd, deliver me from evil...
06.13.07 (4:46 pm) [edit]
www.cornholeplanet.com
Wasn't Cornhole Planet featured in one of Isaac ASSimov's books?
No, wait. That would be L. Ron Hubbard...
Love,
Dougie
My Kid Is Trying To Kill Me
06.10.07 (5:27 pm) [edit]Katie showed me her two little horses today, toys from her car.
Yellow and green. She named the yellow one "Lemon." You would assume that you know the green one's name, but you would be wrong.
After a couple guesses, she told me his name was Seaweed.
SEAWEED.
"Because seaweed is green! I couldn't name him GRASS, because THAT WOULDN'T MAKE ANY SENSE!"
My daughter's sense of the absurd is highly admirable. However, I'm beginning to think this is going to turn into a Lewis Black bit about anuyrisms. One day she's gonna come up with something weird like that, my brain is going to try to figure it out, and the next morning you'll find me dead in the bathtub.
She's been a TON of fun today. We spent a while in a park and walking around a mostly dried-up creek, deep in the trees. She had a LOT to say, mostly about the waterbugs.
Then I took her to a practice for her upcoming dance recital. All the girls did GREAT. It's a fairly complicated routine they're doing, and a lot to remember for kids their age, but they did a wonderful job. It was also cool when we got there to see all these little girls calling out each other's names and running at each other for a hug before running around like lunatics together. These kids really love each other.
Meanwhile, me and MY friends still answer the phone "Hey, whaddya want, cuntface?"
Driving down the road this morning to pick her up, listening to a Zevon bootleg, I heard him sing "Send lawyers, guns and Meat Loaf."
That's stuck in my head on auto-fuck-repeat now.
Have a lovely day, ya bastards!
Love,
Dougie
I'm Killin' Me!
06.07.07 (6:18 pm) [edit]Perusing the news today, I spotted an article on Paris Hilton. Who, by the way, IS NOT NEWS. If you have the SLIGHTEST interest in this dipshit waste of tissue, YOU NEED TO SPEND MORE TIME OUTSIDE.
Anyway, out of nowhere, merely from seeing her name on an article, I found myself saying out loud:
"Cunty McFuckcake."
I hope I can be forgiven for the way I laugh hysterically at my own stupid jokes sometimes.
Love,
Dougie
Update
06.06.07 (10:41 pm) [edit]I tend to save my personal shit for the new blog, but here's a rundown.
!.) Day job still erratic as hell, and I'm almost not willing to do this shit anymore anyway.
2.) Still in a desparate shape financially, but I'd like to think the next few months could change things if I could just get my motivation levels back on track and attack the few possibilities I have.
3.) My entire ration of happiness derives from time with my daughter, and time onstage.
4.) Unless a certain young lady writes. She's starting to again, after a few silent months. My desire for her burns in ways that both comfort and terrify me. I need the inspiration she brings. I do not need the distance and the knowledge of how futile it is to continue hoping against hope that we could ever connect in some way.
5.) I've been writing a lot. Various snippets of fiction involving her. Working on an unfinished story I started three years ago involving a Hunter Thompson-esque character in a Lovecraftian world. Blog posts that have not been posted for their insane, irrational content.
And two songs. Two complete songs in less than a week. One inspired by heroes, one inspired by the woman I love. I think they're both excellent, and that NEVER happens.
6.) I've given serious thought to moving out of here next month when my lease expires, just to somewhere up the road a little, though I've also considered living out of my car for a while to save on bills. But in the last few days, the desire to change my situation without resorting to ripping up the foundations of my life is taking over. I think I'm staying. I've got less than three weeks to decide.
7.) D isn't happening. We talk less and havnet' seen each other in nearly 7 weeks. I'm trying not to think about it too much, because when I do, it stings. I hate the jump between confidence and despair that has characterized this relationship since day one. I no longer think of it as her fault per se, it's mostly just the result of us being so far apart and having such different lives, and I don't wish to speak against her anymore, but the lack of effort I see makes me sad.
8.) So I spend my nights in a bottle dreaming aloud of my angel dressed in black. My Lolita, now firmly and unquestionably legal in thes epast couple weeks since her 18th birthday.
I only wish she felt the same way.
Love,
Dougie
Cornhole: The Movie
06.06.07 (12:28 pm) [edit]http://tinyurl.com/ysxz2y
Sorry, but I already have Cornhole: The Movie, and it's NOT geting released into theaters.
Wristwatch, Crisco,
Dougie
------
The video story on this features the female reporter saying "if you're interested in the shoot..."
Sorry, but I heard that as "chute."
LMFAO
Tonight's Set List
06.01.07 (11:59 pm) [edit]Apparantly nobody stays out in this town past 11:00, so they shut down early, but we had a great late dinner crowd for my first set or so, very cool and appreciativepeople, and I enjoyed myself a hell of a lot. The owner is a very cool lady and I hope to play for her again sometime. I got paid the same, and got seven dollars in tips and a shot of Jager from a drunk chick who likes AC/DC. And I liked her friend. Oooooh, I wanna make friends with her friend...................
Here's the set list:
SET ONE
Splendid Isolation (Warren Zevon)
Heart Of Gold (Neil Young)
Brown Eyed Girl (Van Morrison)
Norwegian Wood (The Beatles)
Back In The High Life (Steve Winwood - Zevon's version)
I Won't Back Down (Tom Petty)
Lay Lady Lay (Bob Dylan)
Poor Poor Pitiful Me (Warren Zevon)
Bang A Gong (T. Rex)
Delia's Gone (Johnny Cash)
The Needle And The Damage Done (Neil Young)
When You Say Nothing At All (Keith Whitley)
Whiskey In The Jar (traditional)
Rockin' In The Free World (Neil Young)
SET TWO
Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride (D.B.)
King Of The Road (Roger Miller)
Excitable Boy (Warren Zevon)
Key To The Highway (Eric Clapton/BB King version)
Comfortably Numb (Pink Floyd)
I Talk To The Wind (King Crimson)
Lucky Man (ELP)
Well All Right (Buddy Holly)
Powderfinger (Neil Young)
I've Always Been Crazy (Waylon Jennings)
Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd)
Rock And Roll Ain't Noise Pollution (AC/DC)
Love,
Dougie
Good Ol' Dr. Death
06.01.07 (5:25 pm) [edit]Jack Kevorkian is out of prison. Which makes me happy.
While I understand to a point the reservations of those who opposed his work, I consider Kevorkian an important figure in the fight for the right of individuals to make their ultimate decision. I'm glad he put himself out on the edge of this issue and took the chances he did so that those of us who recognize that our lives are OUR property, and not that of a government or a god can end our time in this universe in our own manner, without the months or years of pointless suffering that so many of us have to endure at the end of our lives.
My hat's off to you, Jack. OK, I'm not wearing a fucking hat. But you get the idea.
Love,
Dougie