John Hendow

Last Friday night the Dudley Manlove Quartet played at the High Dive in Fremont. This is one of the better local venues and has a terrific bar / kitchen staff, awesome sound engineer, and a generally great vibe. It’s surprising to me that more local bars aren’t like this; Seattle seems like a friendly and positive place, but so many bar employees seem to have a case of the grumps. At any rate, this was another outstanding evening of fun with the band and our friends. A few tasty refreshments were sent to the stage (many thanks!) and we had a great time rocking the hits.

I brought the telecaster as my backup guitar. Playing it during soundcheck was a treat and I considered using it during the second set. But I love the sound my of strat and just couldn’t force myself to switch. Guess that’s a good problem to have. I noticed during setup that the high-end noise is still present in the stage power at the High Dive. One of these days I am going to remember my VOHM and I’ll do some investigation. I can’t tell if I’m getting SCR noise or if it’s something in the line waveform. I usually dial down the gain and high end on my amp settings and it tends to make things work well enough.

We opened the night with “Forever In Blue Jeans”, which has a fun guitar intro. I worked the song up last week and was all set to play it in the key of A; in advance of the gig I sent an email to Steve to double check keys on a few songs and he told me DMQ does that song in Bb (!). So I reworked the intro without all cool open strings. We also added “Poison Arrow” which was pretty good. The guitar part on the studio recording is somewhat sparse with 2 chords played as harmonics but I occupied a little more space during the chorus, filling out the Em with a fuller chord texture. The balance of the set was material we’ve played together before. I have been using part of the solo during “Venus” to play musical quotes from other guitarists; I’ve played “Purple Haze”, “Sharp Dressed Man”, and others. For the High Dive gig I played “Walk Don’t Run” (which I transposed to the higher key). Mack was the first to recognize it. We seem to share the trait of being musical omnivores. Another amazing fun night with the Dudley Manlove Quartet. This is a great musical workout and I really appreciate the humor and joy of the other band members. I look forward to our next show at the Tractor Tavern on September 5.