4th Jam: Multitasking

Date: 2/18
Location: Mt Prospect Studios

Jim: Guitar/Drums
Mike: Bass
Kevin M: Vocals
Ryan: Guitar/Drums

Kevin C had an unexpected conflict, and John was out of town, but we still got a solid groove going.

We kicked off on The Door and played through that a few times. Work on an intro was deferred to when we had a drummer. We did work on the stop in the third refrain. It looks like a long tradition of tweaking The Door shall continue, much to the benefit of Mike's and my sanity.
Mike mentioned that we should work the Outro dynamics more. I offered up my volume pedal, which amusingly did not serve this function very well.

We jumped over to Stooge next, and ran through it a couple of times with Kevin. Jim hopped on drums for the second go through, and we hit the Outro hard. A few times I had thought we were wrapping up, and Jim just kept the groove going. My failed attempt at using the volume pedal in the Door did have one benefit. I switched over to wah, and played wah guitar over the Stooge groove, with sick results. I wouldn't have thought to put a clean wah sound in there, but it worked.
Mike started messing around with playing 3's over the basic riff, and eventually came up with this locrian groove: A-Bb-C-D-Eb. We still have to figure out where to stick it in, but it should spice it up some.

Our search for a cover led us down much the same path of aborted Stones covers, Fire, before finally settling on "something from Weezer." My knowledge of only "Say it Ain't So" led us to launch into that. It held together on a once through, then somehow became a reggae grove, and we went through half the song again with the new feel. I wouldn't recommend ever doing that again, but it was a solid change in feel that everyone picked up quickly.

I hopped on the drums long enough to revive some 5/4 stuff Mike and I have messed around with in the past. I'm hoping to pull this into a track, possibly "Save Me."

We then launched into our coup d'etat: the Baba O'Reily Superjam. I kicked it off playing the basic keyboard part on guitar while sitting at the set. You can probably see where this is going. Jim came in with the guitar part, and I "quickly" jumped on drums.
For some reason, I had decided to sing backup while drumming. Unfortunately, the mic was at eye-level by the time I sat down, so during my Garth Algar drum solo I whipped my head into the mic. I sometimes play up minor injuries, but that mf'er hurt!

After that, we listened to the RM disc and picked out Far Side and Tomorrow to put together next week. Fresh Air was mentioned as a future possibility, and Mike brought up Damaged Goods.

Jim mentioned brining back the jam, possibly with the Crazy Days riff. I'm all for that, especially when it leads to new song ideas, but we also talked about putting together set songs for possible gigs in the future. Little did I know what that would lead to...