of old friends, great gigs and broken strings

Preparations for the weekend just gone began Thursday evening, when I sat down and restrung three guitars. Eighteen strings in total, and takes about three and a half minutes per string. It's a job I've done a thousand times before, although I rarely if ever restring more than one at a time, and all went well until I got to the last string of the last guitar; the high E on my Martin.

And the damn thing snapped.

In the greater scheme of things, it's completely inconsequential, these things happen. Though they don't happen to me very often. I can't remember the last time. My style may be ham-fisted when it comes to actually playing the guitar, but restringing one, I am a consummate pro.

So it was annoying. Very annoying.

The first of the two gigs that followed on the Friday night however was excellent. Our first gig of 2022, The Railway Tavern in Fishponds, Bristol, has long been one of my favourite venues so was the perfect place to start the year with the band.

I have a new guitar that I treated myself to just before Christmas, an American made Gibson Les Paul Studio; this was her second gig, and whilst we're still getting used to each other, I'm really enjoying the adventure, and the challenge of moving onto an electric. I think as I've previously mentioned, for the last thirty-one years (I've just done the maths, and shockingly, that's actually no exaggeration; I originally formed the band in 1991) I've gigged exclusively with an acoustic guitar. So it was about time for a change.

The lack of familiarity with my new rig is leaving me open to silly mistakes however. 

photo: tony bundy

At one point, having picked the guitar back up after having put it down for a song, I found I had no signal and couldn't work out why. Frantic pushing of buttons and frenzied attempts at problem solving followed over the next couple of minutes, eventually unsatisfactorily resolved by re-routing my guitar into another amp. Half way through the song that followed, I suddenly realised I'd forgotten the damn volume pedal, which I'd pushed to mute when I'd originally put the guitar down, as well as muting the signal via the tuner and on the amp.

photo: tony bundy

It sounds like a stupid mistake, and it was. But all too easy when you've got an albeit not unsympathetic but definitely heaving crowd of 150 or so (I'm guessing, but the pub was full) looking on and  all enthusiastically waiting for the next song. I guess that's the joy of live music for you, it comes warts and all.

It was a late night and, very uncharacteristically, I overslept badly the following morning. I'd meant to get up for about 0900 and go to karate, but after hitting the sack around 0430, completely missed my alarm and didn't emerge bleary eyed and baffled from under my duvet until just before noon. A horrible waste of a morning.

Saturday night was our second gig of the year, at The Old Restoration over in Cheltenham. Loki, a friend of mine and regular at the open mic night that runs at the Restoration every couple of weeks, opened for us with a terrific half hour set, and then we went on around 2130 and played through till midnight.

It was another great night. No broken strings, very few cockups of any note. Then, once it was all done and we'd finished a couple of extra songs for the encore, my daughter strong-armed me into playing American Pie for her and the retiring crowd.

So I picked by guitar back up, plugged back in, studiously pushed the volume pedal back up to full and unmuted the tuner. About half way through the second verse, with the guitar signal inexplicably very, very weak, I realised I'd essentially forgotten to turn the amp back on and all we could hear was the feed from the line-out through to the foldback and main PA.

Easily fixed, and it amused the crowd, but another silly mistake. And one I'm not going to make again.

Mistakes aside and easily forgiven, it was a fantastic gig, but another late night. I managed not to oversleep the following morning, however. As previously mentioned, there was no sailing at the club this weekend as they were hosting a Topper Open Meeting. As it turns out, this was a good thing. An old school friend of mine, Bayan, was flying out to Kuwait to escort his elderly mother home to live with him and his sister in Chicago, and the flight out from Illinois involved a layover at Heathrow before he could connect with an onward flight from there.

So I drove down to meet up with him for lunch, along with three other old school friends already in the UK; Vicky, Emma and Becky. Vicky and Emma I last saw at a small class reunion in 2009, but Bayan and Becky I'd not seen since we'd finished school out in Kuwait way back in 1990.

Needless to say, it was lovely catching up. Of course we all change and grow with the years, but in so many other ways we don't really change at all, but remain, fundamentally, the same.