Seriously, I didn’t have many doubts when walking in there..JF and Jon are accomplished musicians…but man! I was blown away at what we came up with after three hours!
Showed up to Jon’s place and unloaded my gear around noon and we were up and at ‘em after a few technical problems (why isn’t my microphone working? My printer ran out of ink!).
The moment was upon us…the first song to play together. We decided on Diggin’ a Hole and took it from the top. I think all of us were looking at each other with trepidation. Was this going to be awesome, or was it going to suck?
As soon as the drums started up and I strummed along, I could feel it. The electricity was there. I am not talking about JF’s massive JCM800 in the corner of the room. I’m talking about how you know it’s going to be a good afternoon!
Then BLAMMO, JF enters in with the electric guitar in the way the electric guitar blows you away when it makes an appearance in Big Sugar songs. It was off to the races for the rest of the afternoon. I was so impressed with our first attempt that I immediately switched to bass guitar to see if we could make the song rock even harder. That took awhile to get used to, but I thought it turned out a-ok.
Alive was the next tune we tried. It was going good but we stopped once in awhile to fine tune it. But once we got it down and we entered into JF’s solo I was mesmerized. It was like I was standing in front of Mike McCready himself! I can’t get over how sweet JF plays lead guitar. He practiced like hell and it paid off. He mentioned that his wife figured that the other guys probably didn’t even practice as much as him. I gotta say that from the sound of us all in the room, we all put our heart into it and it was paying off in spades.
After that we noodle around with Jet Airliner which was decent and we let Jon play around with learning the drums on Hold Me In Your Arms. JF and I chatted and noodled around for a bit and broke into Sixteen Saltines which sounded pretty darn decent even without the drums. Later on, Jon came in with the drums and I gotta say, it’s a freaking sweet tune to just have some fun with. It’s definitely different practicing on my own with the acoustic and hearing how it sounds in my basement vs. when the electric and drums are also with it!
Yellow Ledbetter was a highlight of the day as it’s one of my faves and we did pretty decently considering we never practiced it.
Two enthusiastic thumbs up over what we came up with that day. Here’s to hoping Martin can join us the next time (I believe he may have been working) and here’s to hoping we get together sooner rather than later!!