Fuck! It’s Monday Feb 27, the second last day of Feb. I’m listening to playback of yesterday’s band practice. I say ‘practice’ because it’s the first time we’ve played together for about a month or more. The key to success in music really is practice, so it’s always difficult to get it sounding as good as you would like if you only play together once a month. I get it, we’re not 25 years old any more, people have lives outside of rock and roll bands. I don’t though. I don’t have a job other than this. What to do? Put up with it I suppose. It’s not that I’ve never worked at a regular job, I have. I just quit doing it one day and to hell with the consequences, which could have been poverty, but somehow I got by. Why am I saying this? I don’t know really, life’s a struggle, and if you want to play in a rock and roll band it’s a long way to the top as AC/DC so eloquently put it. I don’t want a regular job anyway. I’ve tried it and I didn’t like it much.
In fact I don’t like it so much that I’m going to quit talking about it right now. The band though, sounds good, despite the lack of practice. I did break out the Dingelicio and it was ok, apart from going out of tune all the time. I like it a lot apart from the tuning problem. Back it goes to the guitar gurus I guess. That’s something else I have no interest in. Setting up and fixing guitars. My old bass player Gary, called himself “an undocumented Luthier” which was pretty funny. He was good at it though, and fixed up a Chinese Gibson clone for me. At this stage I can afford the real thing, but I can’t bring myself to shell out $3k plus to own one. Now I am reminded of my friend Brad Buethe in San Francisco who, after a late night jazz gig, absentmindedly rested his very expensive vintage Gibson on the side of his vehicle, and drove off forgetting that it was still there. He never got it back. That is the kind of stuff that haunts you forever.
Speaking of haunting, on Saturday night at about three o’clock in the morning there was a loud bang outside. Just up the hill a car had collided with something, and was stranded on the side of the street with an indicator light flashing. It wasn’t too long before the cops showed up, but since there was no ambulance in attendance it seemed like the person(s) involved were either ok or had fled the scene. About 45 minutes later, and I was just going back to sleep, a terrible wailing started up. Someone was screaming in agony. When you hear that sound there’s only one thing that it could be, there isn’t any other reason. Some poor soul had died up there. The person wailing appeared to be his mother from the snatches of conversation that were heard. They were right out side this house at that point. It was a ‘he”, because someone was saying that. “Nobody had helped him” they said. I don’t know what happened. the “news” will probably get around to it next week if we’re lucky. The whole thing was awful and tragic, but this happens all the time, it just doesn’t happen so close that often, if at all.
My grandfather always used to say to me, “look after yourself” when ever I went out. I lived with my grandparents from the age of 15, but that’s another story. Anyway, please remember to look after yourself, you’re the only one of you that you’ve got.
Poor old Bon Scott. Nobody looked after him either the morning he was passed out drunk in his car.