Turn Those Speakers Up Full Blast, Play It All Night Long

Turn Those Speakers Up Full Blast, Play It All Night Long

Well, I can on weekends. And I think I will be for a long time.

FANTASTIC gig last night. The last half of the first set and the first half of the second had the best bass playing I've done in fucking years, but I'm not the one to blame - T was STICK-SLAMMIN' MY ASSHOLE with the best fucking drumming this band has ever witnessed. I went after some ridiculously over-the-top Entwistle-isms and nailed those little greasy cocksuckers to the wall and took a big ol' fuckin' glorious piss all over their grimy heads. But I'd NEVER have pulled that shit off without T there knockin' on my back door.

He did a lot of that Friday night too (including a superbly absurd snare fill on Billy Joel's You May Be Right that had me and the keyboardist almost in tears laughing) but last night fuckin' RAWKED. We did a version of Jumpin' Jack Flash that made the Stones sound like the bleeding Mantovani Fucking Orchestra on bad barbituates after being pummeled in an alley by Nazi youth on crack. That one caused me to deliver the best backing vocals of my life.

Not that we don't still have shit to work on. T is getting better with intros and endings, but he's still chumping some of them, and I'm still feeling very weird - sometimes completely out of place - on guitar, though I'm still getting plenty of nice comments, so it might just be my self-conciousness while playing songs on my beat up Strat copy that I used to beat the bass to. I certainly did some good shit, but it's tentative in too many places. I'm fine with that, though. Not completely, I don't like that feeling, but I know it's pushing me forward. Having a crackerjack group of fuckers like these guys to climb those peaks with makes all the difference in the world.

My family are being fairly silent on the issue, but I know they are baffled by my insistence on this split existence and the drive that goes along with it. Fuck them. When did THEY ever put their asses on the line sleep-deprivation be damned and fight for something they believed in and loved? I sure as fuck never saw it.

Saturday morning, Mom and I drove up to Ft. Wayne. We had lunch at a familiar Chinese restaraunt on Coldwater Rd. - I used to go there all the time, but it's been years. I always said it was my favorite, and yesterday confirmed it. They've got a hot and sour soup and a Hunan chicken plate that will knock your ass clean off yer...uh...the place where your ass is attached.

Then we spent a few hours at the library. They've got the second biggest genealogy collection in the country there, and it's all out on the shelves (I understand that Cincy's is third, but much of it is in storage, so I've never got a feeling for the scale of their collection) and is a MOTHERFUCKER to behold. I've spent a lot of time in county libraries in the past few years, but their history and genealogy collection alone is bigger than the entire holdings of most of the other libraries I've been to.

Mom got me out some CDs too. I've finally heard Zevon's Transverse City, and I'll revisit David Torn's Tripping Over God, one of the most outrageously cool slabs of guitar skronk this side of Robert Fripp's bidet.

I wanna have a band called Robert Fripp's Bidet. We'll do classic country. "Hi! Welcome to Bob's Country Bunker! We're Robert Fripp's Bidet! That last song, of course, was I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, by the master Hank Sr., who I'm sure didn't mind having his picture taken. Sit back and relax, here's a Faron Young toon. Bootleggers choosing to rob the spirit of music from this performance with their vampiric methods will be taken out back, beaten with cattle prods, and shot."

I've got another bizarre story of genealogical coincidence (involving a town in western Kansas I drove through last year, and my inability to draw straight lines in my head while looking over my notes) from yesterday's library visit, but I have to leave to pick up Katie soon.

I got home just before starting to write this, about the same time everyone else is leaving for Sunday School. No Backyard Bible Adventures for this bass-blasting white boy. I spent four hours at a rest area just past the state line this morning after forcing my dead ass down State Road 35, waving to the fuckin' deer. Didn't sleep for shit, but I feel good, just like James Brown. OK, if James Brown was a fat pseudo-funky white asshole with attention deficit disorder.

M and Layla were there last night. M came up to provide harmony vocals on a couple tunes. They danced some, which I loved seeing. They looked happier than ever. She was as beautifully radiant as I've ever seen her, and magnificently overflowing with every single thing that I love in her.

When I left, my brain was wanting to revisit all that shit I wrote about her a few months ago, but I resisted. OK, I jerked off all over myself. Funny thing - masturbation has a great way of clearing the mind and making you refocus onto the shit that really matters.

Like the fact that Nova wasn't there last night. Damn. OK, I've got pics. More jerking off! Woo hoo!

The below picture will be disappearing later today. Enjoy.

Further note on last night's gig - I've done a few special gigs (last week's car show, a recent outside thing for veterans) without the aid of alcohol, but last night was the first full four-hour bar gig I've done stone sober in a very long time. That shit is going to happen more often. (Given the longer drives now, it has to.) I was SHOCKED how much I enjoyed myself with only water and a jar of honey to rely on. The honey is my effort to take up one of our lead singer's better ideas - my throat went to fucking HELL for a while Friday night right in the middle of Rockin' In The Free World. Last night's version (along with Lawyers Guns & Money and Heart Of Gold) was much better. I'm learning a lot about dynamics doing this solo shit, and even when I'm not at my best, I'm better at it now than I've ever been. All the insecurities I've felt for so long are exiting like a well-formed turd, and thank Jeezus for that particular steaming shit.

Time to reprogram the brain cells back onto more domestic things. I've got a day with the best five-year old kid on the planet to look forward to. You fuckers be well, ya hear?

Love,
Dougie

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