First off, I must apologise, to myself if no one else, for not touching this blog for so long. It's not that I don't have anything to say for myself. Far from it, I am full of thoughts, ideas, accusations and threats as usual, I have just let my lazy bone dominate the more productive ones. That's it.
Now, back to the plot. I used to be a working musician of middling ability but plenty of passion who five years ago found himself uprooted from surburban London to Porterville, CA. The culture shock has been considerable, the resulting reverberation will forever ring in my ears, but one thing I never expected was to get my music back. I was never anyone you heard of, or were likely to hear, but for reasons I may or may not explain at some point, I had stopped playing some time ago. A spell in music management had all but killed my love for all things musical, but with the encouragement of my partner Karmen and the economic need to make some wonga I found myself playing guitar again.
Before going any further, I should talk about Porterville a little. It is a small agricultural town about fifty miles out of Bakersfield. It has a population of around 50,000, pretty evenly split between predominantly Hispanic and mostly white communities . On the face of it, it would seem to be a friendly little place, and in some ways it is, but there is an undercurrent here, several in fact. There is gang activity, and the murder rate per capita is higher here than in LA. Poverty and all that goes with it is evident, yet there is something about this place that is almost inspiring. It is a real community with real people and it is my current home and I am good with that. There are community events here that can move me to tears of joy in a way I was never moved back home in London.
Well, about three years ago, my resumed guitar playing had improved enough that I wanted to start playing in front of people again. I started tentatively, playing a few numbers in a small coffee house to no one in particular. Then a few benefits at the local community theater and finally... This is when it all got a bit daunting. At one community theater thing I met a John Mayall look-alike called Bob who it seemed was a mainstay of the local music scene. (I thought this at the time, and I still do, even though I now know what the local music scene actually is!) He played bass, liked the blues, wanted to play it, and heck, he thought, why don't we form a band. We found a drummer and the rest is history, albeit a history only about 8 people actually know about. I was never what you could call the premier division of guitarists, but I found the kind of gigs we could get soul destroying. The few venues in Porterville itself used mostly country bands. Our gigs were mostly out of town, in restaurants where folks were paying to eat, not listen. Also, the musical dish of the day round here IS country, ninety nine times out of a hundred, so our brand of brash blues rock with a murder ballad or three thrown in was not always to our audience's tastes. (In fact the drummer didn't like it that much to be honest. The bass player and I once turned up late at a gig to find he had set up karaoke by himself and was regaling the audience with a selection of George Strait classics, but I digress.) We would get asked to play George Jones and Johnny Cash songs far more than we would ever get asked for BB King or Muddy Waters. I even tried a few perfunctory country songs, but I mostly ended up sounding like an English person choking over an inedible fish entree. We made a little money, and that helped a lot, but I couldn't help feeling that this was a long way from where I wanted to be. Things came to a head one night at a gig in nearby Exeter, I threw a temper tantrum worthy of a five year old, just as we were approaching a few proper gigs that would have audiences willing to listen. The band broke up, I was sent to bed without supper and I had to face the prospect of finding another outlet for all my bluesy white boy angst.
I joined one of those 'rehearsing a lot for a gig that never quite comes' type bands. Rather than blues with a fair bit of improvisation this outfit favoured reproductions of fifties and sixties top 40 hits. I was hopeless at this. The thought of playing the same thing in the same song every time appalled me far more than the prospect of trying to feed some bluesy improv to a bunch of disinterested Merle Haggard groupies. It felt like being one of those pavement artists recreating the old masters in chalk on the sidewalk before footprints, dog poop and rain destroyed the whole thing. What a precious A-hole I was, but it did set me to thinking. The rest of the 'cats' in this covers band kept going on about how this was 'supposed to be fun', even though their constant bickering and power trips proved one of the main reasons why it wasn't. I recalled how with the last mob there were times when I had really had fun. The sort of 'flying by the seat of your pants not knowing what you are going to play next but if one person enjoys what you play it has been worth it' kind of fun. Men! They never know when they're well off do they? The covers band finally had enough of me. They swear to this day that I was not fired from the band. Instead, I received an email saying that the band were 'going in a different direction'. I assumed this was up a one way street and after moping for half a day for being turfed out of a set-up I didn't even rate much, I breathed a sigh of relief. Then, in the few months that followed I missed rehearsals a lot. We men... etc. etc!
One of the high points of the first band had been one night when our regular drummer couldn't make it and instead we had a native American guy sitting in with a friend of his on guitar. The jamming quality that night improved a thousandfold, the meagre audience even enjoyed it to the extent that the tips almost doubled our fee. (An exaggeration, but I am running with it.) In March of this year Bob the bass player from the first band contacted me to say that the other two had a three night engagement up at the local Indian Casino, good money, turn up and play. I did so with trepidation , but it was wonderful. Four sets a night, 12 over the weekend, and we averaged about five songs a set. Lots of guitar play, bordering from the aargh to really quite good. The band stayed together. Our drummer left, the next one got arrested after one of our gigs, but the one after that stuck. The moral of this story? I am not sure, other than that maybe I have realised that playing is infinitely better than not playing. The work we can get is better than no work, and there is more than just a little cash in it for us. We play originals, we do get to do shows in front of appreciative (if admittedly mostly very drunk and fairly small) crowds. I spent too much time thinking about the what could have been stuff. The here and now can be pretty good too.
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1155282116/bclid1173324681/bctid1861222496
