First TTS Meeting and Get together Jam (Sunday, January 11, 2009)
Finally, January 11 arrives….forget Christmas, New Years, Anniversaries, and Birthdays…this is the day! Who are all these phantom musicians copied on the emails anyway. Man this feels like my first day in the new school after my family moved when I was 11.
Cool, there are some faces I recognize from local jams and CBA camp/Father’s Day in Grass Valley……..hmmmmm….a rather overwhelming number of guitars…..another good reason to play dobro…does the world really need another guitar player? There are also some familiar faces from the TTS performance…..I know Kelly, and recognize Wendy from Madfish, one of the Fall TTS bands.
The intro jam was also billed as a potluck….so everyone is knoshing as Hilary gives her introductory spiel on what the 8 weeks of TTS will cover. I sit down next to someone with a dulcimer…where I grew up in the south, dulcimer is a somewhat familiar instrument…..but I haven’t come across one out here yet. Hilary (who I've heard with Nell Robinson and Red Level) introduces the coaches: Dan Booth I recognize and have heard play bass several times with Kathy Kallick and 49 special, Jacob Groopman I recognize from the Berkeley 5th String and plays guitar with several groups in the Bay area……Dave Zimmerman is out of town, but I’ve seen him with Homespun Rowdy. Dave also runs Vern’s Stage at the Father’s Day Festival and although he probably doesn’t remember me…..I’ve camped for 2 years running next to his Homespun Rowdy/49 Special camp site in Grass Valley.
Hilary breaks us up into 2 or 3 jam groups and we kick it off……damn, these folks are good……..and I don’t know most of these songs………oh jeez I’m gonna have to fake it.
You know, one of the things about dobro is everyone seems to like the sound…and it is a very neat thing to play because it has so many voices; you can make it sound like a guitar, you can run rolls on it to fill the space a banjo would, there is the sustain you can get to cover fiddle parts…then there is the slippery slide-y dobro sound that is unlike most other instruments, in addition to a bunch of other voices. In a way there so many choices it makes playing a challenge. When in doubt, over my head, or in unfamiliar musical territory I always resort to trying to play a nice slippery dobro sounding single string melody with a few rolls thrown in for good measure. It seems to have worked….a couple of folks, including Jacob Groopman, paid me some compliments on the sound. Whew.
One of my other impressions about the intro jam (and from the Fall TTS concert) is that the median age of the participants is oh…….somewhere around 50-something. The coaches……..maybe 30ish. This could be interesting…I wonder how they are going to coach a bunch of cantankerous, over achieving, outspoken 50-something folks….or maybe I’m projecting my personality on the others…..ahhhhh who cares.
January 11, 2009 - February 1, 2009 Waiting to For the First Practice
One of the first emails Hilary sends out after the intro jam has the dates for the first practices and the coaches. Ok….she put me in two groups, that’s cool, Dave Zimmerman is our coach, good, Sunday evenings, ok……….wait a minute…..February 1…..I have to wait until February 1……that‘s forever….I wonder if Hilary would send me the email addresses of my other band members so we could get together and jam a bit.
I don’t know for sure, but I suspect I wasn’t the only individual who sent a similar email to Hilary. Right her reply, explaining why they discourage bands getting together before the first practice, Hilary sends the group a message pleading for relief from all the email traffic coming her way. Maybe my take on the general personality traits of some of the TTS participants is close to the mark after all.
There are actually good reasons for waiting until the first practices before cutting the bands loose to practice on their own…..one reason is to make sure there is a reasonable set of songs to practice and that there is a rough arrangement to practice around……another reason is to make sure everyone plays well together…..I mean “plays well” in the nonmusical, playground sense because some of the folks in my bands are, shall we say, very enthusiastic (including me) which can be off-putting if one has a thinner skin……and I get the impression that others sometimes think I am one giant callous from head to toe.
My song selection continues and I make the probably good decision to run some of the songs by friends that have more experience and that also know folks that did one of the other TTS rounds. Needless to say, they are not wildly enthusiastic about my proposed choices…..but they do suggest a great song which I put at the top of my list.
One of the other really enthusiastic band members in this mix is Jon. Jon is also doing a twofer band gig, on bass, so he and I get to see a lot of each other on Sunday evenings at the Zimmerman 5 and 7:30 band practices. Jon put up web pages for both groups where he posts the song choices, with downloadable mpeg files and song charts from each band member. Now this obviously gives us a central place to have resources that would be useful for the group and hopefully decreases the number of emails we send, thus preventing the associated confusion that occurs in an email storm. When Jon proposed the web site I thought it was a good idea….but also knew that it could turn into more work than Jon reckoned for. So far Jon has graciously kept at it with the appreciation of both bands.
With any luck, at least in this TTS blog, I’ll avoid what Twain says….but no guarantees. Then again, technically he’s writing about speaking.
"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
Mark Twain
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