Carroll's 55th Street

11/3/2015

Encore, Encore, Encore - No Rich Means Larry on Keys

This was supposed to be a normal night of six man Deadstein but Rich alerted us that he wasn't going to be able to make it to this week's jam as he was finalizing his editing out in Colorado. This meant no Piano at the jam and none of the entourage that can sometimes accompanies Rich. Not to fret, he'll be back for next Thursday's jam and the five of us played on.

Wanting to rock'n roll I decided to open up with the Alabama Getaway into Greatest Story Ever Told. It was a good opener but it wasn't indicative for what would happen for the rest of the night. Not that the rest of the night was bad, oh contraire, it was interesting and good, but rather the song selection would eventually turn into an encore setlistt consisting of mostly songs played as encores. A very strange variation on the theme. I have been thinking that in the previous weeks it has seemed like we were playing many songs that were openers. So after I played the US Blues in the middle of the first set for Election Day, that was on this Tuesday, November 3, 2015, it got me into the mode of selecting encore songs. And I stuck with that mode for the entire second set.

It had been my plan to overdub the keyboard at home knowing Rich wasn't at the jam. What I didn't realize until I got home and listened to the recording was that my guitar was recorded using a cable that evidently had a significant problem. The track was totally unusable with static and noise on it so I had to spend a lot of time and effort overdubbing all the guitar parts from this week onto the final recording. That's a much more significant undertaking than overdubbing keyboards and/or even vocals. This weeks recording was a lot of work for me to do. I had to overdub the vocals, and for this week every song since Rich wasn't there to sing half the music. I overdubbed the guitar as well as playing the keyboards. It was a little sickening at times since we didn't play all that welll but I think all the work really enhanced the music and hid many of the blemishes. By the second set Scott's shoulder was bothering him too much to play on and Lee had to shoulder the load, pardon the pun, for the rest of the night.

I think I had some good moments on the keyboards overdubbing them.It started as a lot of fun , but by the end they get a bit monotonous in the mix. Nevertheless, I got some cool stuff going in the Getaway with a nice synth lead and playing some nice arpeggios and space stuff in the Corina and other wise using Writers as a electric piano and a B3 emulators for the organ sounds. In addition, the morning after the jam I woke up with a runny nose and was pretty much knocked out with a bad cold for the next three or four days. I did the singing on the overdubs when I still had the cold a a sore throat so that was quite a chore for me to do so I apologize for what is on recordings. In any case, Election Day 2015 came and went as we are kind of in a holding pattern waiting for the big one in 2016, but Deadstein and Company, we keep truckin' on and Freakin' Out.