Monday, March 02, 2009

Playa Dogs - Farewell Tour

Well, it's only been 3 weeks since we first took the stage at Bad Boys Beach Bar in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico and we've already had our farewell show. It reminds me a bit of when I played in a band Selvatone many years ago. We spent the better part of a year making a record, gigging, and promoting ourselves as much as possible only to plan out big CD release show. The show was a great success, and a tone of fun but it was also our last show! But that's a whole other story.

Back to the Dogs, or Dawgs, or even Dawgz as I've referred to them now on this blog. We spent this past week fine tuning a couple tunes that we played over the last 2 weeks, Smokin' In the Boys Room, and La Grange. But the best was yet to come. We decided to take on our most challenging and best song so far. Billy Idol's Rebel Yell. I used to play this song with The Misconducts, and we used to kick the shit out of it, but we never really learned all the little changes properly. That wasn't The Misconducts way. We liked to do songs our own way, but again that's yet another story.

Rebel Yell got better and better throughout the week, and as of Friday's practice it was really starting to take shape. We ran through it quickly Saturday afternoon and it was the best we had ever played it. That was until we hit the stage at Bad Boys Saturday night. We opened up with it, and it rocked. Not only was it the best we had played it all week, I think it was the best song we played over the 3 weeks of performing! We followed it with Smokin' and ended off for the third Saturday in a row with La Grange. It rocked! Special thanks to Carl for adding some mouth harp on both Smokin' and La Grange.

Unfortunately all good things must come to an end, and Eric (our temporary guitar player) will be leaving this Thursday, heading back to the home of those no-good outta be tossed out of the NHL, Minnesota Wild. He'll be back next year, and we'll be sure to reform then. In the meantime we're holding open auditions for a new guitar player. Here's the deal, you must rock, rock, rock! It pays nothing, bring your own chicks, drugs and/or booze. You must NOT live to play "Hotel California", "Old Time Rock n Roll", or "Mustang Sally". Other than that, all you need is to know a few chords and how to rock!

In all seriousness though, it was a lot of fun with Eric, great guy and even a better player. Hopefully our next axe man will be just as cool!

The memories will live on though, as over the last week of practices, I was rolling tape. Not tape literally, but you know what I mean. I've got several versions of all the songs we've learned down already except for Paranoid. We plan on getting together one more time this week before Eric leaves and hopefully we can lay down a good recording of all 4 songs. If it happens I will be sure to post some mp3's for all to enjoy.

And.... as you can see above, there were a few photo's taken from this past Saturday as well as a video of Rebel Yell! Apparently all the photo's of me were too obscene to publish so I never saw them. Either that or their weren't any, I'm not certain. The video is a bit rough as there were some camera malfunctions during the performance as per Rick:

"My camera would stop recording every sixty seconds, so I had to splice together five segments. Try to ignore the "hiccups" every minute "


None the less it's pretty good and shows us rocking out! Hopefully we'll be back at it soon enough, but until then long live the Playa Dogs!

No comments: