Alembic Guitars Club
Alembic products => Owning an Alembic => Fun Stories => Topic started by: ajdover on March 10, 2006, 05:16:48 AM
-
Folks, Pics of me playing a gig with the Burkha Gig here in Baghdad at one of the compounds here. Enjoy.
(http://club.alembic.com/Images/394/26030.jpg)
(http://club.alembic.com/Images/394/26031.jpg)
(Message edited by davehouck on March 10, 2006)
-
Cool!!
-
Glad to see you're having some fun, Alan. Stay safe and rock on!
Cheers,
Kevin
P.S., are those the Baghdaddies!
-
Kevin,
Yes, I am playing with the Baghdaddy's in the pictures.
Alan
-
Alan, what was the setlist?
-
Do a badass bass solo with that alembic & watch ben-laden come out dancin!....
-
Zvi,
Set list included:
Hot Blooded - Foreigner
Wild Thing - The Troggs
I Saw Her Standing There - Beatles
TNT - AC/DC
Some Aretha Franklin Tune I Can't Remember the Name of
Straight On - Heart
Brown Eyed Girl - Van Morrison (yes, we had to do that one)
Johnny B. Goode - Chuck Berry (yeah, that one too)
Eight Days A Week - Beatles (I sang this one - talk about high adventure)
Come Together - Beatles (thankfully I only did backing vocals on this one)
Somebody to Love - Jefferson Airplane
Sweet Child 'O Mine - Guns and Roses
Rock n Roll - Led Zeppelin
Twist and Shout - Beatles (made all the more amusing by some girl who kept dancing in front of me and at one point touching my chest - I guess she thought it was funny or something ... hey, look, I touched the bass player everybody!)
Black Velvet - Alannah Myles
Hard to Handle - Black Crowes
Mustang Sally - Wilson Pickett (I should get a medal for as many times as I've played this one!)
Anyway You Want It - Journey (yet another scary moment with me doing backing vocals)
And a host of other things.
I'm going to try to get some more challenging things bass-wise into our repertoire. Definitely some Who if we can make it happen. I'd love to do Yes, Frank Zappa, King Crimson, etc., but I just don't think the people who come to hear us would want that. We have a female singer so we tend to do a lot of things she can sing, which is cool - she has a lovely voice. We also have a male singer, but he is currently on R&R in the States - we did this gig without him.
Keavin,
I figure if we can get Bin Laden out dancin', it will be that much easier to snake a 2000 pound JDAM up his, ahem, fourth point of contact, if you know what I mean. ;-)
Alan
-
Nice setlist (despite the burned-out standards). There are actually a few songs there that we're going to use in our upcoming project (more on that when it's official).
As for more challenging material, you can always tack jams from specific songs onto the end of standards, do some alternative or deep cut medleys, or wedge a couple of them between popular standards. Worst comes to worse, you'll get some puzzled looks sandwiched between familiar fare.
And send Osama my way for some initial preparation. I promise to send him back to you in usable condition. ;-)
-
Zvi,
Yeah, I know, burned out standards. We get a fairly diverse audience - from folks in their fifties down to 18 year old kids, so we tend to do a lot of different kinds of things. We're already looking at jams and the other things you discussed. I just want to do some more challenging things - most of the stuff I listed I've done in previous projects. They're not bad tunes, but I'd like to do some different stuff if possible.
Somehow, I don't think Osama would be useful for much of anything in the event he ever came your way .....
Alan
-
By the way, that cherry red finish looks fantastic onstage!
-
The tunes many musicians would call burned out standards are the tunes that always get the audience jumping around on the dance floor. Nothing wrong with that!
-
Alan -
No Who tunes? You couldn't get them to learn at least Pinball Wizard? I know you're dying to do one or twenty or so. At least The Who covered Twist and Shout - with JE singing.
If you're gonna do TNT...I mean....come on....
Mike
-
If you're gonna do a Who tune, I nominate Naked Eye
Bill, tgo
-
Guys,
What can I say? We try to appeal to everyone, so our set list reflects that.
This being said, I have told the rest of the band I want to do some Who tunes. I'm thinking:
Summertime Blues (from the DVD; yeah, I know it's not originally a Who tune, but their version is awesome)
The Real Me (might be hard without the horns)
Won't Get Fooled Again
Happy Jack
A Quick One
And many others.
I'd also like to do some Primus, Rush, Led Zeppelin, Stanley Clarke (fat chance of that one ever happening), Emerson Lake and Palmer, early Genesis (Watcher of the Skies, Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, etc.), but unfortunately, most of that stuff the average person just can't dance to. And you know how it is ... they all want to dance for some odd reason. Why can't they just all sit and listen? ;-)
If anything changes, I'll post the tunes here.
Best Regards,
Alan
-
Alan, getting people to sit and listen is so '60's and '70's. Not that I'm not into doing that. The current climate for entertainment does not exactly suggest to people that if you ACTUALLY OPEN YOUR MIND & LISTEN YOU MIGHT UNDERSTAND WHAT IS GOING ON. But then again I also believe that since learning music at an early age is not encouraged like it used to be, that is why people just don't care. I play in a Zeppelin tribute and we have to play song's like D'yer M'aker because it makes the f*****g girls happy. Not Thank You or The Rain Song which are some of the most beautiful love songs written but they would not know because they really can't comprehend with great musical art, or art for that matter. It's always the guys at our shows that freak when we play those songs than the girls. So tell me who's really in touch with their emotions? Oh crap, I better go I'm fixing to get Freudian--ahahahahahaha!!!!
-
Adam,
I think I can sum up the state of music and the general public's appreciation of it in this simple sentence:
Outkast wins a Grammy for Hey Ya.
'Nuff Said,
Alan
-
Alan,
Hey man, it's a cover band. You're in friggin IRAQ, for goodness sakes. I'm sure you and everyone else in the band has a list a mile long of what YOU wanna play, but as you said, you have to tailor your setlist to what your audience wants to hear, or you don't get work. Simple as that. You know the drill.
That said, I recommend Pinball Wizard. It's a song everyone knows, relatively easy to play, and your audience will easily endure the 3 minutes it takes to play it. Doesn't show off a lot of your bass chops, but it does sneak a Who tune into the set.
By the way, Real Me works just fine without horns or keyboards of any sort. We do it all the time that way and it works as a balls-out rocker. Up the tempo a little bit. Turn the distortion up. Yeah...it works.
And I like Hey Ya. Cool bass sound. Doesn't deserve a Grammy, though.
MB
-
Sheik Yerbooty!
It's just so cool you're playing over there (talk about being on tour), and that people can jump around to some live music as relief from what no doubt can be a stressful job. It must be a nice taste of home for a lot of 'em. And you get to play an Alembic. I bought my Epic when I was fresh out of boot camp. Keep safe, keep rockin.
-Jack
-
Alan, I forgot in my selfish rant to say Thank you for what you guys are doing over there. Take great care, our prayers are with you all. Oh yes, Dinah Moe Hum is grrrreeeat!
-
Adam/Jack/Mike,
All good points. But I've got to disagree on the Outkast thing, Mike. Hey Ya? Give me a break!
Mike - Our singer has suggested The Acid Queen, Pinball Wizard, and Who Are You as tunes to do. Needless to say, on a scale of 0-10, I gave them an 11 as to whether we should play them or not.
Jack - Your comment reminds me of one of my favorite Zappa albums - Sheikh Yerbouti.
Adam - Dinah Moe Humm, Dinah Moe Humm, where's this Dinah Moe comin' from, I done spent three hours and I ain't got a crumb from the Dinah Moe, Dinah Moe, Dinah Moe Humm.
As Zappa once said, you are what you is,
Alan
-
Is crumb what he was saying? All these years I thought it was something else. LOL
Rich