Thoughts On The Preons Gig 3/7
Our gig in Ballard was pretty interesting. The venue Live Girls Theater showcases dramatic works by women, and is consistently reviewed as a great art resource in the Seattle area. Our performance was part of the evening’s presentation. Although we had a regular set of songs ready to go, we started playing sort of a quiet ambient soundscape as the audience began to be seated. This went on for perhaps twenty minutes before we began the set in earnest. I thought it was a fun way to begin the night’s music and allowed the audience and the band to acclimate themselves to each other.
The set included the first public performance of “drug song”, which almost always is the last song of the night at practice. For this performance it continued tradition by being the last song of the set. It has a very open landscape of d minor (Brad and I have been hinting at d dorian, and we may go in this direction) with a lot of room for a big trumpet solo. This is a song where I’m very tempted to play a guitar solo; a few months back I happened to have my guitar with me at reahearsal, and toward the end of the song I swapped out my bass and took a ride on the strat. I may need to start bringing my guitar along for this.
The only song of the night where I played Warr Guitar was “the dalles”. I wanted to use it later in the set as well, but switching back and forth repeatedly is bothersome when our set time is short. So it spent most of the set happily sitting on its stand being admired by the audience seated right next to it. Josh introduced the instrument by saying “we didn’t think John had enough strings on his bass so we made him get this Warr Guitar…”. Nice.
This show also represented our second public performance of “brave new world”, which resulted in a minor train wreck toward the middle. Josh and Brad seemed uncertain of the form at one point, and I tried to power through it by driving the root of the chord structure. After the song Josh acknowledged our gaffe to the audience. The Preons are totally transparent to our listeners, which is important. Mistakes are part of the music.
All in all, a good one. Lots of fun was had and we enjoyed the play as well.