My youngest daughter was asked to fill in for a local band for halloween eve, apparently their bass guitarist was double booked. They were looking for a bassist with some stage energy, yeah, she has that. A set of around 8 original songs, there was one cover, they'd given her a month and she dutifully committed them to memory. She asked my wife and I to go, my wife wasn't going to be able to stand around in a loud venue in Perth Northbridge, but she doesn't ask unless it's important to her so I bought a ticket for myself. (I quite often do get an invite to her various gigs and I generally go.)
The local live music scene has always been important to me. Well, that it exists - I don't get involved anything like I should. Before my daughter was gigging the only live music I would go watch were the gigs that I was playing in. I'm more of a creator than a consumer, but even still, I should be more in touch with what's going on in the local live music scene - it is important to me.
Now being a halloween eve gig it was dress ups, everyone who went there was encouraged to dress up. I have two dress up costumes in my closet...Beetlejuice as in Michael Keaton/the movie...and a Star Trek Next Generation uniform. Whilst the former would have been more fitting, since Patrick Stewart died on the day the event, I opted for the Star Trek uniform.
Parking was a drag, I ended up walking through a length of the dodgy end of Northbridge...dressed in a Star Trek Uniform...but I survived. Actually a lot of cops around there on a Friday night. The venue only had around 50 people in there, the band was a warm up to the warm up to the main show. Some pretty impressive costumes in there. I was immediately 20 if not 30 years older than everyone else in the room, but that's fine. I stood up near the front and rocked to the beat.
Some great original music in there, more my style than some other bands I've heard her play for. I wanna say late 90's vibe, kinda ballads, a few gentle/hard/gentle/hard rock juxtapositions, there were two songs I was getting Paul Kelly vibes from, but with a bit more overdriven guitar. Definitely a guitar driven sound, the main singer/guitarist on a strat definitely not afraid of fingerstyle, which was impressive for a left hander (that's a joke my left handed friends) and there was a lead guitarist on some sort of Ibanez, yay, guitar solos aren't dead. The drummer was looking after the bangs and crashes, insanely, wearing a tube man costume. That was impressive in itself. When asked later "how did you do that?" the answer was "I don't know". Lead guitarist was dressed as a Fallout Vault Dweller, main dude was a Sonic Hedgehog? I have no idea what my daughter was.
But there she was jumping and rockin' and playing pretty complicated stuff, I was chuffed to see her as such a seasoned rocker at only 18. No small feat memorising so many original songs. She said she stuffed up a lot, but it didn't show...although the sound wasn't mixed great...I looked around for the sound guy "come on man, turn up the backup singer mics! And why isn't that bass KICKIN'?!"...and there was no sound man. Must have been a sound check/set and forget job. "It's just the openers." Boo.
Good show. Spoke to the main dude songwriter, Luke, my daughter calls him The Old Man because he is 25. Oh, sooo old.
Got a selfie, see above.
Some takeaways:
- I should go to more local gigs - they are fun.
- Always take hearing protection - I'm glad I did - I use the passive ER20 Etymotic plugs which take around 20db off but keep a flat frequency response, they are okay.
- After the set, someone said something to me and I shouted out "Rest in peace Captain Picard!" Which fell flat, like nobody knew who Captain Picard was. I didn't hang around the whole night - my daughter reported back later "Oh, when they did the prize for the best costume everyone said "the old man dressed as Captain Picard! Where is he?!"" She replied "Oh that's my dad. He had to go home. He's old." (someone else got the prize.)
- I need to install some strap lockers on her bass guitars. She jumps around so much and wears the bass low with the neck up that it comes perilously close to falling off. I looked around, I'm going to try Dunlop Straplok on them.
- You are never too old.
- Thanks for all the Star Trek Patrick Stewart 👍
