Muffin Bottoms [not] Just another WordPress weblog

I was doing a round of “Bad Memory Lane” with a friend of mine and decided to blog some of it, here:

I’ll never forget when my band Majestic was one of the 10+ warmup bands for REO speedwagon at navy relief carnival one year. I think I was 17 or 18. You know, summertime, flatbed truck for a stage, huge sound system, huge crowd…

We ran out of songs and both crowd and stage manager seemed to want more. So Aerosmith’s Dream On was one we’d never done as a band but each of us had done it in other bands before.

We went for it, completely unrehearsed.

I went all the way up the neck on the intro’s lead guitar solo that I had memorized note for note.

Then on my way down I spaced completely out and got totally lost. Now what. I just kind of floundered around each and every note that exists in overly emoted triplets working my way down toward the lowest position where I knew I could just fake it in the right key from there. But I still couldn’t find my way down for the longest time. I’m sure it was a minute or less but felt like hours.

It was embarrassingly horrible. I’ve never been that far off on anything before or since I think. Then I just picked up the low stuff at the end without even trying to make it look or sound like I meant it.

We finished the rest of the song almost flawlessly, and that was that.

I hurried my ass off to get my Lab Series amp and Fender Strat into my car where I was going to just go home and hide without even saying goodbye to anyone.

But I couldn’t get out of there! Everyone I knew came up to me telling me how great and inspired my solo was in “that Aerosmith song…” etc.

What???

I just humbly thanked everyone and kept how I felt about it all to myself for years.

I think it was a guitar lesson a week or two later where I learned that if you master the first few notes and the last ones and maybe a middle lick or two you can do whatever the hell you want otherwise as long as you’re in the right key and no one, not even other guitarists will think anything besides that you wailed, because that’s as much as anyone’s brain can keep track of anyhow.

hahahahahaha