Thoughts on the Dudley Manlove Quartet Halloween Performance 10/31/2015
Every year, the Dudley Manlove Quartet performs a big Halloween show. During one of the sets, we pay tribute to another band by dressing up as them and performing several of their songs. This year’s honored artist was Elvis Costello. He has written so many fantastic songs that it was difficult to select our favorites. I wrote out charts for the following songs, which was mostly a straight-forward process.
- Alison
- Every Day I Write The Book
- I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down
- Oliver’s Army
- Pump It Up
- Radio Radio
- (What’s So Funny) ‘Bout Peace, Love, and Understanding?
The most difficult transcription was Alison, owing to the gorgeous jazzy style of John McFee’s guitar work. There are always plenty of online tablature transcriptions for popular songs, but they’re often incomplete or incorrect. It’s faster for me to just write it from scratch, and that also helps me internalize the part. It took me a few revisions to get this one sufficiently correct.
The performance was a blast. Our audience brings a lot of Halloween spirit, and really dresses up. There were some fantastic, funny costumes. The show was sold out, which always happens on Halloween. We arrived to the club in the midst of a massive rain storm, which made for a wet load-in. Once we got through with our soundcheck, the rain had let up, and we all walked to a local restaurant for dinner together. Upon our return, the room was full and abuzz. We played two long sets, and dug into some back catalog material. Definitely a good night.
For this show I decided to use my Xitone guitar monitor rather than the EA VL110 cabinets. The Xitone has a great, immediate sound, and having my guitar coming from directly in front of me is nice. The AxeFX rig sounds amazing every time, and I love getting compliments from the FOH engineers about my guitar tone. At the end of the night, we prepared to load out – and discovered the massive rain storm was back! I parked directly in front of the club to make load-out as quick as possible, and still was completely drenched in the three minutes it took to load the car. Good thing my cases are waterproof!
Our next public show is New Year’s Eve at the Triple Door. I’m certain it’ll be another wonderful night.