Question #1: did anybody at the time not know that the dude was gay?

Not David Coverdale

David Coverdale

Question #2: is it my imagination, or are these women not all that pretty? Being in this photo was the equivalent of being the designated cupcake in a video for a hair metal band, and I’m not seeing a lot of Tawny Kitaens in the group.

Yearbook photos

No, seriously, I’m not being a frat boy ragging on ordinary women for being human, because these are cover girls. Look closely at these women’s faces — for the most part they look trapped in a regrettable yearbook shot.

I guess the issue was health. People used to be more or less about to drop dead at any moment. No orthodontia, no liposuction => no Tawny. Swimsuit models are like the Six Million Dollar man in comparison.

Bring plenty of copies of your lead sheets for the musicians. Don’t be cheap.

It’s hard enough to read and play at the same time. If people have to share they won’t be able to put the page in a place that allows them to concentrate on their playing.

My new rule: make one more copy than I need.

I’ve been collecting examples of how people write out songs. This is a user-submitted schematic of a Django Reinhardt tune called “Minor Swing” on the site djangopedia:

This example is brilliantly obtuse, especially for a composition which is pretty close to the Louie Louie level of simplicity.

Anyhow, here’s how the tune really goes.

The tune “Goodbye Booze” is a three chord goof for making drinkers feel pleased with themselves. This in itself is not usually hard, but how much damage can three chords do anyhow?

The song was written in 1901 by Jean Havez. Gid Tanner and Faith Norris, also known as The Skillet Lickers, did a recording in 1926. There’s a Charlie Poole recording in 1926, after the Tanner/Norris version. There’s a 1939 recording in the Library of Congress’ archive of California folk music from the 30s. The best known version these days appears to be the one by Old Crow Medicine Show.

I transcribed Charlie Poole’s recording, and I figured I’d share my work here:

1. To print it out, grab the PDF.
2. To look at it in the browser, grab the PNG img.
3. To modify it using Sibelius, grab my Sibelius file.
4. To reuse it in mix, grab the MIDI file.

I saw a great local band called “Modern Skiffle Quartet” at Cinema Bar last night. Goofy good fun.

Skiffle is, more or less, a highly obscure British genre of the late 1950s which does stiff but friendly renditions of American jug band tunes from the late 1920s. The mood is happy go lucky and embarrassingly perky. It’s post Elvis and pre Bob Dylan. So this band last night was white Americans circa 2010 reviving white Brits ca. 1958 reviving black Americans ca. 1930. And this is not the same as skipping the intermediaries and going straight back to revive jug bands. The fun of it is copying the copiers.

Modern Skiffle Quartet is too small an outfit to even have a Myspace page. But whatever. If you see em around they’re very worth a drive to the bar.

Here’s Lonnie Donegan, the genre’s biggest star:

Photographic evidence of a band called “The City Ramblers”:

So it was my turn to call the song and I pulled out a cheat sheet I made that was damn good, except that the chord symbols were in the ordinary font for chords, meaning that they were too tiny to read and the mandolin player had to go out to his car for his glasses. So today I changed to a font size that a blind man could read. Check this out:

p

I’m a sap for neighborhood-level arts. I can’t abide arena shows, and I’m not even very interested in 500 seat shows. But I loved the person who played before me at the Talking Stick the other night, a singer songwriter named Whitney Steele:

She was a good singer, and I liked that she got a bunch of friends to hang out, like her girlfriend who brought her child. Playing local gigs is about introducing your friends to one another, and they seemed to be a pretty natural social scene. You could see that she was at ease with them and vice versa.

The one thing which is hard to accomplish is that they need to be able to focus on one another rather than you. It’s not about you. Yeah, your music and personality are a factor, but unless you’re Picasso they’re only part of the deal.

Following up on my post about formatting cheat sheets for songs, I tested out my cheat sheet for “I Wanna Be Loved By You” at a jam last night. One of the guys found that it was breeze. The other player had a tough time making sense of it.

One of the problems was that I wrote up minor chords by putting a dash after them, so “C minor” would be written “C-“. This notation is a jazz convention. Jazz players use ‘-‘ for minor, ‘+’ for augmented, ‘°’ for diminished, ‘ø’ for half diminished.

The guy who had an easy time with the chart is a jazz player. The guy who didn’t is a bluegrass player.

Bluegrass players use the convention of a lowercase ‘m’, so that C minor = C- = Cm.

I like the bluegrass style for a couple reasons. One, it’s intuitive. A beginner would probably guess what ‘m’ means but not what “-” means. Two, it’s visually distinctive. A dash is a tiny and hard to see, while a ‘m’ is very clear.

The down side is that it’s faster to write a dash than the letter ‘m’, and that a dash is more comfortable to jazz players.

I have updated the cheat sheet to use the ‘m’ style.