Daron's Guitar Chronicles: Vol 4

266 JUST WHAT I NEEDED

JUST WHAT I NEEDED

I didn't get to San Diego until the next day and was actually an hour late returning the car, but if it mattered I didn't hear anything about it.

From the rental car place by the airport I took a cab to the venue. It was yet another one of those round places that looked like a UFO landed in the middle of nowhere, and then they built a parking lot and stuff around it.

The crew and the equipment were there, the rest of the band was not.

I took the Ovation out into the middle of the hall, another sports arena set up for a concert. I found the edge of what would have been the basketball court, where the seats started to slope upward, and just sat there and played whatever came into my head, listening to the sound getting swallowed up by the space.

I think I played for about an hour. I wasn't in the mood to write anything down. I worked a little on "Thin Ice," but just on riffs, licks, stuff for the bridge. And played a lot of other things I knew, and some I didn't.

I can hear music in my head sometimes. I hear things in the shower, in the road noise, in the background of other songs. Other times I have an abstract concept of something and I don't know how it's going to sound until I start playing. If I don't spend the time just playing, I won't uncover those things. Sometimes I hear one lick and I can imagine the whole song that should come before or after. It wasn't always like that. In the early days writing with Bart and with Roger I had to dig a lot deeper to get to what I wanted. But at some point it all got closer to the surface, whether because my playing got better and I was in better control of it, or because I knew what I wanted.... or both... I don't know.

Bart tried to sneak up on me, but I heard him coming. I turned around to see him coming down the stairs of the seating bowl.

He sat down in the row behind me and leaned on the back of the seat next to mine. I kept playing, but quieter, so we could talk.

"Michelle got off all right?" I asked.

"Yep. Put her on a plane this morning," he said with a yawn. "Too early, but there you go. How you doing?"

"Good. A little time away cleared my head."

"That's good." He nodded along with what I was noodling at. "I think we were all ready to get out of Los Angeles."

"And we'll be out of California by late tonight." I paused and stretched. "Did you get a nap on the way at least?"

"Oh yeah. I picked out a bunk and everything. It's got my drool on the pillow so it's mine for sure." He laughed. "You're sure you're okay?"

I stopped playing and looked at him. "Why, do I not seem okay?"

"You seem perfectly, okay, I just didn't want later for you to think no one cared." He smirked.

"Haha. Yes, I really am fine." Getting laid certainly did take the edge off a lot of my worries, anyway. "What time is it?"

"About forty five minutes to sound check," he said. "Carynne wanted me to remind you to eat. There's food in the green room."

"On my way," I said, standing up and slinging the guitar across my back. "She gets really cranky when I don't eat. Wouldn't want that."

So I ate something that wasn't memorable and washed my hands, and went out to the stage for my usual warm up.

How about something a little classic rock? I found myself in The Who, "Behind Blue Eyes," which has a really gentle but intricate-sounding guitar riff to start off, one of those riffs that every high school guitarist has to learn and play a million times. Bart hopped in immediately, and by the time we were repeating the opening again, Ziggy jumped in with a very Ziggy-like interpretation of the words. I mean, it was mostly there, but he only knew the song from us having listened to the tape a few dozen times on the last tour, and in the end the three of us broke down laughing before we got to the part where the drums would come in. Which was just as well, because I'm not sure I remembered that part anyway. So there was Chris, sitting there with sticks ready, waiting, and then just cracking up with the rest of us when it became clear that moment wasn't going to come.

"Okay, for real, what are we checking with today?" Bart asked, when he stopped laughing.

"What haven't we done in a while?" I asked. They all gave me their blank looks, which meant they wanted me to pick. I delegated. "Chris, you pick."

"How about Wonderland?"

"Good idea, yeah." While we played it through I tried to remember when the video was supposed to be done. Wasn't the plan to have the single drop while we were on the road? But when? No one had mentioned it at all while we'd been in LA, which made me wonder if the plan had changed and no one told me. I decided I was better off concentrating on making the show that night great than worrying about business details that were out of my control anyway.

The show, by the way, kicked ass.