This Weekend

May, June, and July are going to be crazy busy despite the fact that the bands probably won't have many gigs. So I'm trying to get some stuff done sooner than later.

Two weekends ago I think I got through figuring out tab for all of these:
1. Mirror People
2. The Light
3. Welcome Tomorrow
4. No New Tale to Tell
5. Here on Earth
6. Lazy
7. Waiting for the Flood

So I think that just leaves these left to figure out. So I'll give that a whack this weekend and hopefully wrap up my first drafts.
8. Rain Bird
9. The Telephone Is Empty
10. Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven
11. Earth, Sun, Moon
12. Youth

UPDATE: Think I've got the rest ready to go. The album really is kind of stupid simple.

It Begins Again

This past weekend I began learning the Love and Rockets songs. I don't even know if we're doing it yet...but it is always nice to be prepared. There's 12 songs on the record and I cranked out about 6 of them. I don't anticipate anything hanging me up with the remaining 6. It is interesting how even something that is REALLY simple can take a while to figure out. Just getting the structure of a tune takes a few good listens. They are taking longer to figure out than I thought they might...but not too long. It IS reasurring that I'm able to do it by ear though. I have chords for about 75% of them...but no bass tab for any of them.

The Pixies really was an exercise in correcting tab. 90% of the songs had bass tab on the internet and it was just my job to figure out the rhythms (which you can't really show in tab) and correct the mistakes. I put lots of work in on them for sure...but it is a different kind of work than learning something totally by ear.

So I'm glad that I'm able to figure out the Love and Rockets songs...even if they are really easy.

Love and Rockets

So I find myself compelled by external forces to investigate the bass stylings of David J. Why I can't say yet.

Love and Rockets is a band that I never paid much attention to. I was aware, as everyone was, of the song So Alive...and when pressed after the fact I suppose I had also heard No New Tale to Tell.

My biggest memory of Love and Rockets though is that there was the gang of half a dozen guys that I went to high school with. It was unclear if they were goths or druggies or what. But they made a big show out of being cool. One of them, who's name I forget but who always had long diagonal cut blond bangs hanging in his face, had a t-shirt that had the cover of Love and Rockets Earth Sun Moon album on it. That's how I remember him. Always.

Other than that I ignored the band. I knew that they were an off-shoot of Bauhaus...and that Peter Murphy was involved somehow. But that's it. And that's pretty much true...in that Love and Rockets is essentially Bauhaus without Peter Murphy. And a little poppier and brighter.

A quick listen and I don't think the bass lines will trip me up...and if they do we live in an age where you can learn to play a song from a video game: