I recently lost another friend and fellow musician. As I get older, they seem to be passing with increasing frequency. I guess that’s only natural, but it’s never easy to hear that news.Daisy Mae was a wonderful, very sweet woman who played keyboards in a country band I was involved in for a few years. I played with them off and on, and so did she. Always smiling, she was an inspiration.
A jam session was organized in Daisy Mae’s memory, and I was honored to be invited to attend, and to play drums. It should have been a wonderful event, with many fans, friends, and family reminiscing, sharing memories, and musicians playing beautiful music in her honor. I will admit, I have played with all these folks before, at other jam sessions, and I knew what I was getting into. However, the experience was enough to make me wish the next one would be in my honor—so I wouldn’t need to be there.
On that warm Autumn Sunday, I was the only drummer in attendance. I don’t feel boastful saying I am quite competent, and I am versatile enough to play just about anything they threw at me. There also was only one bass player there, Bo, and he was not incompetent. That’s the good news. The bad news? There were seven guitar players. Seven!
It was a two-day event, and most people attended the day before, so there weren’t many people there, except for the musicians. At no time did the audience outnumber the band.
Seven guitarists at a memorial jam, or any jam session for that matter, is no big deal. A couple at a time will get up to play with the drummer and bass player. They can play a few songs that they all know, and when they are finished, they get off the stage and the next two or three guitar players get their turn. It can be a lot of fun. It can be musical. Music is supposed to be musical. Sadly, this was not to be.
For the entire five hours, seven guitars were playing simultaneously. Notice I said simultaneously, not together. Sometimes only one actually knew the song. That did not stop the others from playing…something. A couple of the songs seemed to go on forever, with each guitarist afforded the time to play his 8-bar solo. With seven guitar players, that’s well over two minutes of just solos, for just one song. And that is if each player took only one solo, and stuck to just 8 bars. At one point, I got up from the drums in the middle of a song, and went to eat a piece of fried chicken. I came back in time to end the tune, and no one had even noticed my absence.
Cacophony does not even come close to describing the experience. Seven guitar players, each in his own little world, strumming along, oblivious to their contributions to the din.
Throughout the event, I tried to engage each of them with eye contact, and tried to encourage a feeling of playing together, which is really the whole point. But most of the time they all stared at their fret boards, purposely fingering each chord, and paying no attention to where they fit in musically with everyone else. The only time I got eye contact was an occasional confused glance when someone actually listened and realized he was playing a completely different song. But he stayed the course.
Even when most of them were actually paying attention, it went something like this: Homer would play a song that he supposedly knew. Jethro would watch him play, and try, mostly unsuccessfully, to follow along. Jed, to his credit, was doing pretty well following Jethro, faithfully copying most of the wrong notes. Barney is trying to follow Jed, reinforcing the dissonance. On it goes, downhill, until we get to Lucky. Poor Lucky. He did not earn his name that day.
There were a couple vocalists in the small audience who were there to sing with the band. Now, you would think if you wanted to sing a song with a band, you would find a song the band knew. Surprisingly, this is not usually the case. The guest singer always wants to sing a song she ‘knows’ and likes to sing, even if the band has never even heard it. In this situation, however, it mattered not one bit. The band could not have played any better if they had known it. But, unfortunately, it could get worse.
We launched into the song that the first singer wanted to play, and some of us even knew the song. Having sung with the record many times, she knew the words (with the help of a printed lyric sheet), and she seemingly knew the melody. At last, we were poised to make some sweet music! The excitement soon evaporated.
Vocal phrases came and went with no relationship to the song structure; she had absolutely no sense of timing. There were no pauses between lines or verses. She basically read the lyrics as if there were no music backing her up. Finishing the song a few bars early, she smiled, and left the stage. As far as she was concerned, she was a rock star that day. Good for her. I wish my mind had been somewhere else, too.
The bass player and I did a commendable job of keeping it together that day, so seven guitarists could feel like real musicians. We did a good deed, but it took its toll on our emotional wellbeing. And honestly, if I put aside my musical snootiness, it was a good memorial for our departed friend.
As we were packing up that afternoon, one of the musicians said to me, “Scott, it was a real pleasure playing with you today, but if you tell anybody I said that, I’ll deny it.”
I replied with a chuckle, “Don’t worry, Leroy. I won’t tell anybody I even know you.”
Scott Wright © 2016