The World of Stuff .com

I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition

Today my band, VRT, played probably our last gig. As described before, the band has too many problems to continue to play live. It’s a tough situation, and it just doesn’t work. I’ve already gone into detail with that.

Of course, all five of us were supposed to be there. Alex, the bassist, said that he would try to get time off work to go. Sean had said that if Alex wouldn’t play, then he wouldn’t play either, because we would sound too bad. (Though I can’t imagine how playing without him would make us sound any better.) This morning, Sean called me to ask what time we were going to play, and we discussed microphones and microphone stands, which he had said he would bring. Then Alex dropped the bad news on Sean and then me.

The odds were good, then, that Sean wouldn’t show up at all, even though he could. And he didn’t. Someone who I explained the situation to said that he probably wagered his unwillingness to play live on Alex’s unreliability. I think Sean doesn’t like to play live because he doesn’t like the songs we play. He invariably describes our songs as old people music and stuff. I saw a lot of people our age or younger watching today, though.

On one hand, I can understand Sean’s frustration — we’re extremely slow to learn new songs — because he has a certain image of what the band should be, and I do agree that we should play newer music. On the other hand, I don’t think that refusing to play was a good solution, and we suffered because of it.

As for the gig itself, it was pretty good considering the circumstances. Our original set was to be:

But seeing as neither I nor Nick, the other guitarist, could play the lead part in “Birthday,” we decided to drop that song. I think it was Mark, our drummer, who suggested “Secret Agent Man,” which is a favorite at our practices. (“Dizzy Miss Lizzy” was also a favorite at our practices before we dropped it into our set at the last minute before a gig.) With that change and some shuffling, the actual set was:

“Secret Agent Man” was pretty good considering we hadn’t really practiced it much. “Seven Nation Army” could have been better, but it was still good. I finally got the words right (more or less). “A Place Called Heaven” is a song I wrote (one thing I’ve never told you is that I write songs). I’ve always tried to get the band to play it, but they’re never interested. So I played it myself. In “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” I had to take Sean’s place playing the neverending lead guitar riff. I did pretty bad with that, and Nick didn’t have the chords down too much. We decided to end with “Yellow Submarine” because that was the first song we ever played and the one we’re best known for.

I’ve often recorded parts of band practices on tape, but this was the first live performance I’d ever attempted to record. (I didn’t think it would be possible because the microphone wires are very short.) Even though the mikes I had to use are sometimes faulty, on this occasion they were just fine, although the recording levels were a little too high, leading to some distortion and clipping. But still, I was impressed. My dad helped with the placement of the mikes. I don’t think he could have gotten them better.

Funny… Paul McCartney also recorded the Beatles’ final concert on a portable tape recorder for posterity.

Well, as I’ve said, we’re not breaking up now, but this is the end of a chapter in our longish history as a band. So I guess another chapter is only beginning…