art of the jam 13

this week's jam was preceded by a coupla days of uncertainty following the disappearance of lee allen's bass head from the wreck room after friday night's sally majestic-catfish whiskey show. luckily, it turned up a few days later, just in time for the little jam. according to lee, the responsible parties said something about having helped an of-course-nameless-and-unidentifiable muso load out and then going to meet him, um, at a whataburger, in the parking lot of which they fell asleep. whatevah. to err is human an' like that. but when you mess up, you 'fess up. dig?

one thing i learned in the course of following this sequence of events is that the police will impound suspected stolen property from pawnshops 'n' music stores if the gear is reported missing, regardless of whether or not the owner has a serial number. without commmenting on the intentions of _those people_, lemme just say that it suxxx when you can't trust ppl around where you like to hang out. (outlaw chef terry chandler's take on it: "that's why i surround myself with ppl i _can_ trust.") i know that in future. i'll def be keeping a closer eye on my "amplet" and indonesian strat clone.

the jam itself marked the return from the arkansas hills of damien stewart on drums, who had the extreme decency to bring his own drum hardware and replacements for some of the house kit's long-suffering skins. as a result, the drumsounds have new depth and power; hopefully, other jammers will treat the traps as kindly. besides damien, who tagged off with joe cruz throughout the evening, the lineup was down to the "regulars": lee, steve huber on violin, and me. a cat named bill joined in to add his highly idiosyncratic vocal stylings and stage moves to a coupla toons. he said he also plays gtr; maybe next time. dre was running some of his board mix into the monitors; i dug the fuller, warmer sound and had fun trying to get harmonic feedback off my signal in the monitor. set was long on jam "standards" (beatles, hendrix, meters, gloria gaynor, a led zeppelin medley), requests (failure's "daylight" for lee's lovely wife, a weezer toon, another by system of a down, "the devil went down to georgia"), and a few in-the-moment creations (including one that started out as reggae and morphed into central european folkdance, tentatively entitled "jerked chicken goulash" by me).

once school's back in, lee's talking about starting later, the better to accommodate the hordes of tcu kids that flock to the wreck room every wednesday night (we live in hope).