Finally met with the Forest Ray guys last night. Peter on guitar/flute/harmonica/vocals, Simon on rhythm guitar, and Miles on drums. I've been practicing the tunes a bunch at home and felt pretty good about them, but ended up bringing my notes just in case.
The trip to Northgate took almost 45 minutes. A fender bender on the shoulder on I-5N added about 15 minutes to the drive, which was quite lame. I got there and went in the Silence-of-the-Lambs type basement (re: like a labyrinth) and got plugged in. Peter had a Bassman 100 going out of 2 15" speakers and the sound was thick.
We started with Pass Me By, which to me, is the easiest tune. One riff throughout, with a couple differences in the chorus. I stayed pretty true to the record, but added some embellishments as one does. I didn't get any stink eyes or anything, and listening back to our recording, it was passable. Not bad at all.
In going through the songs on my own, I sensed/deduced/learned that many of Peter's songs are Intro > Verse > Chorus > Intro 2 > Verse 2 > Chorus 2 > Bridge > Intro 3 > Verse 3 > Chorus 3, or some variant of that. He also has long sections, often twice as long as I might expect, but I'm catching on.
I asked him about playing style and he seemed pretty chill about what I was doing. I think as long as I'm listening to him and serving the song, I'll be good. That said, I stayed pretty basic overall. I was a little bummed at one point, because I was relying on my notes. I would've gotten some practice time yesterday, but we had a little incident at Mom's house that I'll post in a separate blog.
As it stands now with Forest Ray, there were no red flags. I think someone was a little "chemically altered" when I was there, but it didn't affect me or the music so I'm not worried about it. I did see the big silver/grey van we'll be in; looked like a large 4 row Ford of some sort.
The guys all seemed pretty cool. Miles is going to be great fun to play with; he did a good job taking cues from Peter and leading me. We had a couple of song endings that I knew nothing about, but was able to follow the guys and do what they were doing, so that was cool. Simon was really solid on rhythm guitar, and apparently he knows all the bass parts, so when I got lost, he'd plunk the notes until I figured it out.
Looking forward to building on this one practice and memorizing the tunes. So far so good, we'll see how practice 2 on Thursday goes.
