Thursday - February 21, 2008

The plastic guitar made my fingers hurt less 

Last night was a blast. There was a full moon eclipse, but that's not why I was overjoyed with last night. In fact, I barely saw it. I was too busy rocking out. And, for the first time (keen readers will notice this is a "Friends Like These" post, and not a "Games We Play" post) it had nothing to do with Guitar Hero.

No, this time was an honest to goodness, artistic, fun, musical jam session. We played "Fade Into You" by Mazzy Star that Amber and I were kind of working on - Carl picked up the solo parts nicely with his new slide, which sounded beautiful, and Josh jumped in on bass skillfully as ever, having never really heard the song. It didn't sound great, but then, unless we're talking about Rock Gods like Eric Clapton and Dave Gilmour, when do 4 random people sound good when they're jamming for the first time? The vocals were a little light, but we couldn't get the amp to stop feeding back... but we DID have a tambourine that we picked up downtown before everyone got set up.

After a bit of belaboring that song, we plunked around on a few other things, and Josh started laying down the bass line for "Are You Gonna Be My Girl?" by Jett. Now, sure enough, I was listening to that very song on the way home from work, and was thinking, "this would be a cool song to try." So, I pulled the tabs up on the computer, and literally 5 minutes later, I was jamming along with him. It's really not that tough of a song to play, but phenomenally fun. Plus, it gave me leave to use the distortion on my new amp.

This all came together very nicely, though. From all different angles, all of my friends seem to want to be serious about music. It's actually very reminiscent of how I ended up getting into Warhammer 40K - I always wanted to be in the hobby, but only dabbled because it's usually a group activity, and nobody else was serious about it until recently. Then, a few friends said, "Let's try. I'm willing to make the commitment." And, a few weeks later, we're playing Warhammer / Guitars. Same story, different hobby. Carl has been plunking around on an old acoustic that's been tearing up his fingers, and decided to make the leap to a real electric guitar. Josh has been playing bass in his church band for years, and Amber recently wanted to get into a choir... and that left me and my sadly under-used guitar, wondering at how all my friends are being musicians. So, I said, "Let's all do this in the same place at the same time."

Its an entirely new type of rush, and I don't quite know what to make of it, other than it felt great. It was like a dream come true - all those years ago, watching my brother and his friends be an actual rock band, amateur as they were, and now it was me. Hell, my brother was even cool enough to loan me his vocal mic for the evening, so it was all the more significant. Amber was rockin' the same mic as my brother did in Atomic Cantaloup. Is it possible to be star-struck... with yourself?

Ah well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. We have a bass player, two guitarists, and a singer. We have a second bass player who has no bass and has never really played one but really really wants to if he can wrangle the money and the time to learn... and we have no drummer. Also, we have no formal commitment that this is actually a band and not just a bunch of friends jamming on various instruments. We joked about being a band, but I don't know how much I'm jumping the gun on calling us one. We toyed with the name "Full Moon Eclipse" because it sounded cool, and our first jam session was on the night of one.

We'll see where this goes. Hell, if it goes far enough, I'll create a new category here on my blog for it. And if anyone knows a drummer...