I had to bark down that bone wisdom at a band rehearsal the other day... it was more of a casual fun music session in a living room.. that's the way to roll. You see SR JONES got into CITR Shindig (Tuesday September 20 @ the Railway), one of the first shows i ever played in Vancouver, and the first at the Railway club... It was the only way to play the Railway club in those years if you were me.
It Looks like I'll be splitting this town in the New Year for an extended absence... another fork in the road that looks like it will land me in Portland Oregon.
8 years ago if you told me i would have spent the last 3 plus years as a stay home father to 3 young girls, i would have called "loony bin" on your ass. Now it looks like another turn of the fortune wheel of life ( king lear). I'm set for it... as they say on the bench "fuckin' rights" I could use a new adventure. I never had the young adventures... or at least the travel and such as i set to work very young to make money to salt away for some reason... that was the house... Not that i didn't have adventure, I just made it locally. "I may as well put this Fatman suit on and go out and do some interviews if nobody else will" i would think. My poor cousin, who flew out from London Ontario, just a sweet innocent girl, picked up at the airport by Carl Fatman and then rushed to a Motorcycle Man show at the Cottage Bistro... The family back in Ontario was concerned for me for quite some time after that one... It really wasn't until i had kids that they considered me normal, cause that's what normal people do right?
I guess the next segment is:
Never rule out what somebody might be able to do.
Not that we are trying to make any sense of coherency in this little exercise... that's what paid writers do. Although glancing through the National Post the other day... i might have to wonder.
OK it was the band thing i meant to talk about... some people weren't there.. why worry about them? (I knew they couldn't make it as they were out of town... why should that stop progress) The classic mistake of the rookie band. When i was in a band called Knockin' Dog we had a member who came an hour late every rehearsal and then proceeded to spend 20 minutes complaining about something... in time, the band that we were in the first hour of rehearsal was 10 x the band we were in the latter part of the rehearsal. Of course the self centered son of a gun, who had a deflection for every reality, refused to quit the band so you are tied to this sense of earlier commitment which is stalling every bodies good times. We had a studio session booked a few months in advance and he just stopped showing up at all, so naturally we just prepared for the session... He was playing another game but we were interested in music. On that day we went to the studio to record i had a visit from the said absent band mate. Knowing that other members believed "no fucking way he is playing if he doesn't show for rehearsal" i just lay ed low... for sure he damn well knew we had the studio booked and was there to lure me into some insane argument over my apparent betrayal... i was in no need to be annoyed so i just offered tea and snacks and weathered the moment... If it was just us, i probably would have been fool enough to try to go into the studio as an act of non betrayal... which is total horse shit, but that's the way we rolled... and in the end it would have been a nightmare. But because i had a commitment to other people who had worked hard i had to hold strong... that's the thing about me... I will always throw myself under the bus but i won't throw somebody else under the bus... ( However it is fair to note that sometimes the bus goes off roading and mauls innocent bystanders)... so i need to put somebody on the team that has the same reasons to thrive as myself so i can defend their ground and by default stand up for myself. it hasn't always been that way of course, and I'm sure reading this could prove to be a great source of ironic comedy for many.
That day, the only day i left a studio way early, our band stomped down a album (Roadbed-Represented), that i think is fair to say has stood the test of time. There was so much focus on "would we actually even be able to come together and lay down this music we know, love and are hot on"... and so little focus on "we have to do this, to achieve this, to then advance this", and only one person is smart enough to think for everybody. I remember being in Red Robin eating dinner with the band and the sun had not gone down yet... and we were done.
do what you can do... Let the chickens worry.
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