Malingering
Earlier this evening we finally performed the AC/DC set we've been learning for the past few weeks. And considering it's only had three actual rehearsals in that time, it went pretty damned well.
This was a farewell bash for Phil, a guitarist I know who's moving to New Zealand in a month or so. I mostly know him through Dave, the guitarist from my first band, Loose Tourniquet, and he was part of the band tonight, along with Mark (guitar) and Glenn (bass) who I didn't even know until now. Phil relegated himself to lead vocals for this set (with just a couple of guest guitar solos), and did a passable job of tearing his larynx out impersonating Brian Johnson. After much consideration of what song titles might give a good name for a tribute band we finally performed under the name "Those About To Rock". And we did.
I've been listening pretty solidly to AC/DC for the last few weeks, and it's been interesting to compare that with the kind of study I had to do while playing in the XTC tribute, X-sTatiC. XTC material tends to be complicated, using rhythm and chord patterns that don't appear in other band's music. Even when the drumming is very simple it's not easy to blag, because the musical cues you'd expect to hear in the music aren't there. This makes the learning curve very hard; each track has to be learned from the ground up. But they are so distinctive that, once learned, they tend not to be forgotten.
AC/DC, by contrast, are simple, straight-ahead heavy rock. But deceptively so, as it turns out. Three chords and attitude was good enough for punk, but it's amazing what a difference a little bit of arrangement on top of that can make, and in this AC/DC prove surprisingly adept. An AC/DC drum fill might consist of *blat* *blat* *Crash!*, but when the music around it is very basic a simple fill like that in the right place is so perfect you barely notice it. But in the wrong place it stands out like a sore thumb. So their material tends to be dead easy to blag, but the little details that make it absolutely right are a sod to remember, because there's so little to them, but so many of them.
I've long held that if a young drummer asked me what to listen to, I'd tell him AC/DC. Not just because they're easy to play, but because they're a textbook example of doing very little but making it count.
So anyway, tonight we played a set of 13 songs and had an absolute blast. There were occasional mistakes, mostly of the "did this chorus go round twice or four times?" variety. And we'd never rehearsed "For Those About To Rock" with actual cannonfire supplied from minidisc, so this threw us in places. But we all managed to start and end together, and mostly stayed extremely tight for all the bits in between. And we were all saying afterwards that we should have done this years ago, and why did it not occur to us until Phil was leaving the country? So who knows, if we can find another singer it may yet happen again. (We may even manage one more gig before he leaves, depending on whether his wife thinks he can spare the time...)
This was a farewell bash for Phil, a guitarist I know who's moving to New Zealand in a month or so. I mostly know him through Dave, the guitarist from my first band, Loose Tourniquet, and he was part of the band tonight, along with Mark (guitar) and Glenn (bass) who I didn't even know until now. Phil relegated himself to lead vocals for this set (with just a couple of guest guitar solos), and did a passable job of tearing his larynx out impersonating Brian Johnson. After much consideration of what song titles might give a good name for a tribute band we finally performed under the name "Those About To Rock". And we did.
I've been listening pretty solidly to AC/DC for the last few weeks, and it's been interesting to compare that with the kind of study I had to do while playing in the XTC tribute, X-sTatiC. XTC material tends to be complicated, using rhythm and chord patterns that don't appear in other band's music. Even when the drumming is very simple it's not easy to blag, because the musical cues you'd expect to hear in the music aren't there. This makes the learning curve very hard; each track has to be learned from the ground up. But they are so distinctive that, once learned, they tend not to be forgotten.
AC/DC, by contrast, are simple, straight-ahead heavy rock. But deceptively so, as it turns out. Three chords and attitude was good enough for punk, but it's amazing what a difference a little bit of arrangement on top of that can make, and in this AC/DC prove surprisingly adept. An AC/DC drum fill might consist of *blat* *blat* *Crash!*, but when the music around it is very basic a simple fill like that in the right place is so perfect you barely notice it. But in the wrong place it stands out like a sore thumb. So their material tends to be dead easy to blag, but the little details that make it absolutely right are a sod to remember, because there's so little to them, but so many of them.
I've long held that if a young drummer asked me what to listen to, I'd tell him AC/DC. Not just because they're easy to play, but because they're a textbook example of doing very little but making it count.
So anyway, tonight we played a set of 13 songs and had an absolute blast. There were occasional mistakes, mostly of the "did this chorus go round twice or four times?" variety. And we'd never rehearsed "For Those About To Rock" with actual cannonfire supplied from minidisc, so this threw us in places. But we all managed to start and end together, and mostly stayed extremely tight for all the bits in between. And we were all saying afterwards that we should have done this years ago, and why did it not occur to us until Phil was leaving the country? So who knows, if we can find another singer it may yet happen again. (We may even manage one more gig before he leaves, depending on whether his wife thinks he can spare the time...)