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Meanwhile! Now the side project, "Shabbey Road", which I wondered would ever even be a thing, has become the "A" project.
When a couple of middle-age Americans with acoustic guitars get together, there's a bunch of songs they do. Songs that are required knowledge for any middle-age American with an acoustic guitar. Where, even if you don't know it by heart, if someone writes the chords down you can play it. "Amie", and "Take It Easy" and "Moonshadow" and "The Boxer" and "Truckin'".
Then if you can manage some vocal harmonies, it's interesting enough to keep doing just for fun.
This, to me, is not an act I would be a part of, partly in that I don't have an acoustic guitar and partly in that it's a little too "on the nose". You can play some songs that are obvious but not a whole set of them.
So when some of my musician friends were starting to do that, I thought well that's fun, but not something you would gig with. They invited me to play bass; and little did they know, the addition of bass to plain old three acoustics makes it sound twice as interesting. (Bass players understand this principle...)
So they really liked it when I came over, and I didn't mind playing these old songs. And then they started to add weird stuff in, like some Cure, and with my bass in, "Train in Vain", and a little more Dead, and a sprinkling of interesting new country...
And then they invited this singer Judy to practice one night and she pretty much nailed it. She could do Janis and she could do Fleetwood Mac. It was like wow. That works great. And then she started to add old blues songs in, and it was all sounding great.
So with Judy, this suddenly became a thing, and they booked a gig, and brought 25 people out; and it went okay; so now, they want to add a percussionist and make this more officially a thing.
And I guess that's the story of Shabbey Road. The true story, from my perspective. Right now we are all of varying amounts of various kinds of experience. By six months from now I think we will be pretty damn good.
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