Saturday, June 18, 2005
Too Much Music?
Spent the evening at the TSA compound last night. We worked on tunes for the Heritage Festival show on the 4th. This had caused me some anxiety as two of our most popular songs, Two Condoms and Vibrator Dependent can't really be played for that audience. I had figured that, minus two of our songs that we'd have a hard time filling an hour.
So last week we got together at the coumpound and worked up a set list. Just off the top of our head we figured we'd need 20 tunes. A lot of the stuff we do runs right around 2 minutes, so we figured that 20 tunes would be about right. And our experience with playing live has told us that we tend to play songs faster live. A 957 show in Spearfish, that we thought we had timed out right had all three sets running about 15 minutes short of an hour. Lord I played some long solos that night, TSA leaning in and screaming "Again!" as I played. I'm not the most inventive soloist, but I did actually learn to do it pretty well that night. I'd rather not have to improvise quite so much again.
At this point I don't think I'll have to. We played each song last night and timed them all seperately. Just playing time, the set list timed out to an hour and seven minutes. Sounds like 20 songs is a few too many! As we went through each song on the list and decided what to cut, we dropped 4 tunes: The Guess Who's American Woman, Tom Jones' It's Not Unusual, Rick Erstin's (no one reading this will know who that is) Don't Do It and my own Beer is the Answer. The first two cuts cause me a little trouble as in our bio I listed The Guess Who and Tom Jones as bands we cover. Additionally, the bio lists me on vocals/harmonica/kazoo. American Woman is the only kazoo song we're doing at the Heritage Festival. I'll have to work it in someplace else, I guess.
Reasoning for each cut:
American Woman - It's lost some of it's "whackiness" and there's just too much chance of something going wrong with it. Plus it trashes my voice a little and is tough on TSA's wrist.
It's Not Unusual - We both saw this as a chance to get goofy with a cheesy song. It never really worked out that way. Doing the horn part on kazoo never worked out and I went to harp. That actually worked pretty good, but caused it to loose it's "whackiness."
Don't Do It - A good song but we haven't done it in a really long time. It's just two chords back and forth and I've never really come up with an engaging harp solo on it. I thougt it was easitly the weakest song in the set. I've got some ideas to change that and I'd like to see it back in among songs we play regularly, but not at this upcoming show.
Beer is the Answer - I had originally listed this song as just "possible" along with Are You Drinkin' With Me Jesus due to the type of crowd at this festival. Then I found out there'd be a Beer Garden, so it didn't bother me as much. Still it's never really worked out as well in the duo as I thought it would. It always worked well at Sacora Station when I played it solo there, but they also seemed to think I was an acceptable guitarist. It's not that they're a stupid crowd, it's actually that they seemed to listen to the words I was singing. Pretty cool, but that probably won't be the case at the Heritage Festival.
Timing out all of the songs was an enlightening experience. We always new that The Brian Wilson was long and some versions we did with Mike R. ended up over seven and a half minutes, but the one we did last night came in at exactly six minutes. I guess we can't blame the long versions on Mike anymore. A new song, Springsteen's Born to Run came in at five minutes. I've been doing that song solo for a long time and never imagined it was that long. The new version of Got My Mojo Workin' came in at exactly seven minutes. I want to time the old version just to see how much time we would save by doing it like that. It's something we could change on the fly and save a minute or so if we were that long. The song will never be dropped as it's our big finish.
We pretty much built our set list around ending with Mojo and opening with Weird Al's You Don't Love Me Anymore. That gave us a strong opener and a strong closer. After that it was just filling in the slots in between. Playing all of the songs in order last night revealed no major "train wrecks." The only possible change I can see in the set list at this point is moving Plastic Jesus to later in the show since we can vary the length of it by adding or dropping verses. After discussing that, we decided we really like it second in the show, after somehting that sounds serious like You Don't Love Me Anymore.
I'm sure we'll fiddle with the set list some more in the next two weeks. I'll post a copy of the tentative list as soon as I get it.
Globex Corporation Newsletter
Your source for all that is
Slappy is Jebus
BOJ
So last week we got together at the coumpound and worked up a set list. Just off the top of our head we figured we'd need 20 tunes. A lot of the stuff we do runs right around 2 minutes, so we figured that 20 tunes would be about right. And our experience with playing live has told us that we tend to play songs faster live. A 957 show in Spearfish, that we thought we had timed out right had all three sets running about 15 minutes short of an hour. Lord I played some long solos that night, TSA leaning in and screaming "Again!" as I played. I'm not the most inventive soloist, but I did actually learn to do it pretty well that night. I'd rather not have to improvise quite so much again.
At this point I don't think I'll have to. We played each song last night and timed them all seperately. Just playing time, the set list timed out to an hour and seven minutes. Sounds like 20 songs is a few too many! As we went through each song on the list and decided what to cut, we dropped 4 tunes: The Guess Who's American Woman, Tom Jones' It's Not Unusual, Rick Erstin's (no one reading this will know who that is) Don't Do It and my own Beer is the Answer. The first two cuts cause me a little trouble as in our bio I listed The Guess Who and Tom Jones as bands we cover. Additionally, the bio lists me on vocals/harmonica/kazoo. American Woman is the only kazoo song we're doing at the Heritage Festival. I'll have to work it in someplace else, I guess.
Reasoning for each cut:
Timing out all of the songs was an enlightening experience. We always new that The Brian Wilson was long and some versions we did with Mike R. ended up over seven and a half minutes, but the one we did last night came in at exactly six minutes. I guess we can't blame the long versions on Mike anymore. A new song, Springsteen's Born to Run came in at five minutes. I've been doing that song solo for a long time and never imagined it was that long. The new version of Got My Mojo Workin' came in at exactly seven minutes. I want to time the old version just to see how much time we would save by doing it like that. It's something we could change on the fly and save a minute or so if we were that long. The song will never be dropped as it's our big finish.
We pretty much built our set list around ending with Mojo and opening with Weird Al's You Don't Love Me Anymore. That gave us a strong opener and a strong closer. After that it was just filling in the slots in between. Playing all of the songs in order last night revealed no major "train wrecks." The only possible change I can see in the set list at this point is moving Plastic Jesus to later in the show since we can vary the length of it by adding or dropping verses. After discussing that, we decided we really like it second in the show, after somehting that sounds serious like You Don't Love Me Anymore.
I'm sure we'll fiddle with the set list some more in the next two weeks. I'll post a copy of the tentative list as soon as I get it.
Globex Corporation Newsletter
Your source for all that is
Slappy is Jebus
BOJ
# posted by Blind Orange Julius @ 11:44 AM 
