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It’s been a super busy week for me and I’ve had virtually no time for recreational music listening. It feels like October is this insanely busy time where we try to squeeze in a ton of activity in between the slower-moving months of the summer and the holidays (the invigorating fall weather helps with this), and consequently there seems to be something going on nearly every night after work. Alongside gigs and other social engagements, I was at the Sorry State warehouse until the wee hours of several mornings packing orders (thanks to everyone who picked up the new Zorn record!), and I’ve been cramming in a ton of practice for the two cover sets I’m playing on Halloween. Scarecrow is doing a full set of Misfits songs, and another group of friends is doing 45 Grave. My wife Jet is singing in the latter group and it’s her first time playing in a band like this. We’ve made a couple of practice recordings and I hear her listening to them all the time. It reminds me of when I first started playing in bands. I would tape every single rehearsal and most every gig—I probably recorded just about every note Cross Laws ever played—and I would listen to these recordings all the time, ostensibly to analyze them and think about ways to improve, but mostly just because I was so excited to be part of making this noise. Playing music with friends is still one of my favorite things to do.
I’ve done a bunch of cover sets over the years, and it’s always both socially and musically rewarding. For some of these, an existing band has learned an entire set of covers, but typically it’s an ad hoc group of people who come together just for one gig. It’s nice to play with different people every once in a while, and I’ve particularly relished the opportunity to play with incredible drummers like Eric Chubb (who played in our Adolescents cover band) and Connor Donnegan (who played in our Descendents cover band). Mostly, though, it’s the songs themselves that teach me the most. I’ve never been one to play along with records, really, and I don’t feel like I have much innate musical talent. What I learned about playing music I learned for the express purpose of being in a band, and I rarely learned more than I had to in order to reach that bar. When I started writing music—which was concurrent with starting to play music—the process was totally intuitive. While I might have had a certain sound in mind, I made songs by pushing notes and chords around until they made a kind of sense, sort of like how a sculptor takes a lump of clay and massages it into a legible shape. A lot of other people I’ve played with come to music from an analytical perspective, hearing things they like, pulling them apart to find out how they work, then tinkering with those plans to reshape them into their own vision. That’s never been me, though… I write music the same way I learned to paint, slopping it onto a canvas until it looked like something.
Playing cover songs, though, makes you realize how many ways there are to write a song. Learning a whole cover set even more so, because you really get an insight into particular songwriters’ processes, quirks, and preferences. Every band I’ve ever been in has composed the instrumental part of songs first and then added vocals and lyrics at the very end, but when you learn songs by bands like Discharge or the Misfits, you realize the vocals are in the drivers seat for much of the time. I remember reading that “Bullet” was a poem Danzig wrote as a teenager, the Misfits setting the words to music years later. Certainly, there’s no other way they would have ended up with the song’s ridiculously long bridge, where the band plays the same simple riff 17 (?!?!?!) times in a row. Playing “Hybrid Moments,” Jeff pointed out that the song is basically all chorus… three of them in a row with a brief connecting part to join them together. There’s so little to the song, but I think most people agree it’s one of the Misfits’ very best. “Halloween” is another one that blows my mind, the way the verses and choruses blend into one another, linked by this A chord so there are parts of the song where I can’t say definitively whether I’m playing the chorus, the verse, both, or neither.
Along with picking up songwriting tricks, playing in cover bands also helps develop your playing chops, and 45 Grave has been the most challenging cover set I’ve ever done from that perspective. That band could play! I remember when we did the Adolescents, I was nervous about all that downpicking, and when we did the Descendents, their melodic bass parts were a stretch for me, as I’ve always been more of a rhythmically focused player. But in both cases, with some homework, help from my more musical peers, and a lot of practice, I could eventually play, more or less note for note, what’s on the records. A lot of 45 Grave’s bass parts, though, are just over my head and beyond my playing ability. I’ve had to dumb them down to make them work for me, but I think (I hope!) I’ve done this in a way that doesn’t take away from the songs. Either way, I feel like I’ve learned a lot from getting deep inside these songs.
I always say I’m going to spend more time learning how to play other people’s songs and learning from them in this way, but I never end up making time for it unless I have the pressure of a show and its deadlines. On a long road trip this summer, I remember listening to the entire Big Boys discography in one go and thinking I should take the time to learn a bunch of their songs, as they’re a group whose bass lines I could learn a lot from. In fact, “learn a bunch of Big Boys songs” is still on my to-do list, un-crossed-off and taunting me. And then, of course, there are bands like Wire or the Fall whose bass parts I love, but whose style of playing and composition are totally different to mine, to where it seems daunting to even begin figuring it out. Taking the time to learn that music thoroughly would surely up my game as a player, but I guess there are too many orders to pack, too many books to read, and too many records to listen to at this point in my life. Maybe one day.