So, I’ve been playing a little less poker the past few days. The reason? Long story. In short, I’m doing some coordinating. I don’t really mention it too much these days, but I used to play guitar in a local bar band throughout most of the 90s. We weren’t anything special, but we made a lot of friends, and for the most part, had a good time. We gave it up in 1998 to move on to other things, like real work.
I went out on Saturday to see some of those friends play a 10 year reunion show for their old group. My band and their band used to play a lot of shows together, and became good pals, so I went with a former bandmate to show some support. When we were there, we basically got harassed by several people, including a booking agent, to put together our own ‘reunion show’. So, it looks like we may be getting the band back together for a little one-off fun reunion show.
There’s a lot of organizing that needs to take place in order for that to happen – figuring out if everyone can do it, when, picking out a set list. a venue, re-learning the tunes, finding a rehearsal location, actually rehearsing, etc.
Two of us are pretty rusty, because we don’t play much anymore (one of them is me), 2 are currently playing in a band together, so they won’t have much of an issue, and one guy we can’t find (our last bass player). Fortunately, one of the guys flipped back and forth between being ‘lead singer’ and ‘bass player/shared singing duties’, so he’s going to go back to playing bass and splitting vocal duties with the keyboard player. However, it limits some of the stuff we will be able to play. Paul was an exceptional bass player, there pretty much wasn’t anything he couldn’t play. Mike just doesn’t have that ability, and when you throw singing into the mix, it makes it a little more difficult.
All in all, it’s going to be a lot of effort, and we’re not going to set the world on fire, but it should be fun. It will probably be 90% cover songs with 10% originals. We’re going to keep it simple in the name of trying to keep it clean and tight.
It seems like everyone is on board, so now it’s a matter of picking a venue and a date. It will be neat to play in front of a lot of people that I’m friends with now that have never seen me play, as long as we don’t really butcher anything. In the meantime, poker may take a back seat to re-learning guitar solos I haven’t played in 10 years.
