Weekend!

I've spent a good portion of this weekend converting old audio tapes of a band that Joe J., John S. and I were in back in 1994. We didn't have a name for it at the time, but I'm now calling it Nick's Eef & Be Ho. That's the name of a place in Cambridge (Nick's Beef and Beer House) that we used to go to, but there were some letters missing from the sign. With a few permutations, that's what we ended up calling the place.

Funnily enough, I was talking to Joe tonight on the phone about the band, and what went wrong with it. We only rehearsed for about 4 months, and while we produced some workable arrangements of songs, both written outside the band and developed through some improv, we never went any further. Like a lot of things, it came down to young guys not really being able to communicate with each other about what was going on. My perception was that Joe wanted it to be a band that played the songs that he wrote. I personally liked the stuff we were coming up with by jamming, and wanted to develop more along those lines. But of course, we never talked about it in a real way. We may have talked around the issue at the time, but never confronted it head on.

And JP was a good middle ground for both of us. An excellent drummer, he was willing to work on most anything musically, and had a good sense of humor about life, even while he was going through a pretty crappy year or two himself. JP and I actually worked at the same place, actually two different places (the Mass College of Pharmacy and Boston University) at the same time. Good times.

So, rehashing old band politics from 1994 aside, it's actually a lot of fun listening to these tapes, with the distance that time gives me. Good playing in general, all around. I actually don't think I play bass as well now as I did back then. Although, put me in a band setting with a drummer, and I'll be interested to see what happens.

Some of these tunes will get posted over on my website, perhaps as early as the end of this week.

In other weekend news, Sue and I watched some movies here at home, and I went out to see "Capote" on Saturday night with a friend from work and some other people I didn't know very well at all. Great movie, it really showed the complexity of Capote, as someone who is a great writer, but also self-absorbed, and willing to use people for his own ends. I haven't read any Capote to speak of, but the movie does make me want to go read "In Cold Blood" now.

Other than all that, a good relaxing weekend.

NP: The fan from the computer