Ladies & Gentlemen

Happy Thursday! I just got back from a Rolling Stones concert courtesy of Fathom Events, that crazy thing you see when you go to the movies advertising live opera and stuff.

Ladies & Gentlemen....The Rolling Stones is a concert film from two shows back in 1972 when they were touring for the new Exile on Main St. album. They've just remastered it and tonight was like a nation-wide (I dunno about anywhere else in the world) cinema re-release. Quite appropriately, the re-master of Exile has also been recently released. So it's a double flashback.

What a show! On the big screen it's something else. But without the screaming and raving fans and being able to see them close up. Wonderful musicians and performers. Great set list. My theater was pretty full, maybe like 130, 150 people, applauding each song.

There were literally less than ten people my age and younger. Everyone else was 30 and older. Mostly 45 and older. Mostly Mick Jagger's age. But still, imagine you're a 20 year old London kid who likes the blues, and fifty years later your little blues band still draws a crowd in a place like tiny Ventura, California.

Beth saw it, too, up in Oregon. She said there were like eight people all told. Haha.

Second best thing to going to a live Stones show, which I still have hope for, yet.

Been practicing my blues harmonica, or cross harp if I want to sound official. I can do it, just not consistently.

You see, diatonic harmonicas, which is what you're looking at most of the time you see a harmonica, are built to play in one major key. Mine, for example, are all in C. But by shaping the air different when you play, you can bend notes down to flatten them and get "blues" notes outside the key you're playing in. So to play cross harp on a C harmonica, you're playing in G.

Now my dad first gave me a harmonica and a little book titled "Country & Blues Harmonica for the Musically Hopeless" for my tenth birthday. I took to it enough that I learned some songs from the back of the book (I can still play you Camptown Races and You Are My Sunshine at the drop of a hat), and I even overcame stage fright to play Amazing Grace at a fifth grade music night. But I was perpetually stumped by this bending business.

So for 13 years I've played Camptown Races and You Are My Sunshine, and generally misplaced all my harmonicas from time to time. Then here comes along Mick Jagger and Brian Jones and their little blues band the Rollin' Stones, and now I desperately need to play the harmonica.

I set the piano to harmonica one day, armed with the info from a dozen youtube videos, and bent my first note. It only took thirteen years to do it. AND I WILL KEEP ON DOING IT AND NO ONE WILL STOP ME LOLOLOLOLOLOL.

Have a harmonica solo!

Or Champagne and Reefer.

Or of course, Brian Jones on harmonica. I realize now that it was this song I heard playing on Mick Jagger's birthday that first sparked the idea that I might get into the Rolling Stones. Thanks, Buddy Holly!

How about some sweet lap steel guitar from Ronnie Wood?

Or Clapton playing bottleneck?

And if you're wondering why I'm suddenly into the blues, remember this lil' show called Cowboy Bebop. I didn't know it at the time, but that slide guitar and cross harp was burrowing into my soul, just waiting for the right time to bloom.

Well, here we go.