Chemically enhanced!

Do not despair…..I will continue…..I must……I will be severally chastised by good friends if not.

What must I continue I hear you cry?.......performing in a band is pretty much the answer. Performing at all basically.

Its okay it’s not terminal. I have now discovered that my totally lethargy towards playing is in fact chemically based. No, I’m not popping anything that I am not supposed to, it’s just that I have a lack of a chemical called thyroxin in my system that has left me feeling like I have gone fifteen rounds with Mike Tyson and then not slept for a week.

They tell me that this particular problem is hereditary (thanks mum) but easily treatable although I will join ranks of those that have to take tablets every day for the rest of their lives.

Hopefully what I will end up is enough energy for three and a renewed passion to rock & roll. There are still many stages that need ripping up!!

You will be the first to know.

I’ll be back shortly I promise.

Laters dudes
RG

All of our Heroes

Last Thursday was a land mark for me. Not because we were performing to a sold out and packed Bristol venue but because I got to shake hands and share the same stage as one of my childhood heroes Bruce Foxton.

I have mentioned in these pages before that I have never considered myself to be a Bass player (my band mates would site that I claim this with good reason). To me the Bass has never been the ‘rock stars’ instrument of choice and thus I had to be a guitarist.

However; I was never any good at the twiddly twiddly bits and so I was always a ‘Rhythm guitarist as opposed to being a lead guitarist.

For some strange reason that I can never fathom virtually every band I have ever played in has been unable to keep its Bass players so Monkey boy would invariably find himself back on four strings as my six stringed contributions were rarely missed.

However; this is something that I have grown to be at peace with although just once in a while it would be nice for somebody (anybody) to pat me on the back and ‘that was a nifty bit of bass playing their buddy). Until that day, probably when hell freezes over, I shall content my ego with positive comments about my singing ability.

All this being said two men really stood out as bass playing heroes for me, well three really, the third being Geddy lee from Rush but I was never really a Rush fan apart from their two big hits and so I cannot count him as an inspiration.

These two giants were Phil Lynott from Thin Lizzy and Bruce Foxton from The Jam.

Both were phenomenal bass players who had very distinctive styles but who could also sing.

Phil Lynott was probably my first man crush and I even had an awful curly perm and grew a moustache at the 18 to look just like him. One down point, he was cool and black and I was dorky white. There is video footage of me performing during this period; however my wife showed this to our former guitarist who laughed so hard that it brought on a fairly severe asthma attack so I think this film is best left where it is on health & safety grounds.
Bruce Foxton was a vintage that I grew to appreciate more and more as I grew older and played bass more and more often. The guy quite literally is a genius.

His style is unique which allowed guitarist Paul Weller to go in all sorts of directions whilst Foxton held the whole structure of the song together. However; many of his riffs are so distinctive that within seconds of hearing them on the radio you know what the song is going to be and who is playing it.

So you can imagine carrying this man as one of my inspirations since I was sixteen years old made for a major jolt of excitement when we were asked to perform as support in Bristol for his band From The Jam last week.

I hadn’t felt as nervous as this since I had played to two packed houses at the Brixton academy…but it didn’t matter as I had lost my sun glasses (prescription) and I couldn’t see the large crowd any way.

By the time we had arrived at the venue From The Jam had sound checked and had disappeared off into the night to eat. I had a sinking suspicion that I would never meet the man himself.
Still never mind, at least we were on the same stage.
Anyway, we had a blinding gig marred only by the snapping of one of my strings (we had gone acoustic for ease of get on and off and I can get a little heavy handed when I am excited…..keep all comments to yourself please).

The crowd gave us a blinding round of applause and we were off and out of the building via the adjoining work shops straight into the main band that were getting changed.

I suppose the sight of witnessing your hero struggling with his flies would be a dampener on most but not on I who had quite unashamedly turned into a complete fan boy!

I stuck out my hand and said ‘we’re your supporting band tonight, it’s a great crowd’. He very graciously having ‘adjusted’ himself for modesty returned the hand shake. I then promptly blurted out “Thanks for inspiring me”.

His two band mates promptly sniggered and made some comment about Bruce being ‘really inspirational’ but he didn’t seem to mind.

It was a magic moment for me.

Just on a vanity note and something that made me feel a whole lot better. Bruce is in his mid 50’s but on stage he still looks 30 years younger/ however; up close the illusion is broken. He’s still wearing well mind so don’t get me wrong, but there is definitely no pretending on a face to face basis.

Maybe, just maybe….at a distance, with the bright lights on me, I might look like I’m still relatively young….if only I could lose a couple of dozen pounds into the bargain.

A few days later I e-mailed the venue owner and thanked him for the opportunity. I did happened to mention though, that I have always been a fan of Ian Hunter, formerly of Mott the Hoople, and that if he by chance ever happened to book Mr Hunter that he might just consider us again.

I’ve got a list you see, and I would hate to lose the opportunity to play with my heroes before like Phil Lynott they sadly move onto that rock & roll show in the sky.

The boys are back!

I do have to write in an apologetic state as I have promised you that I would endeavour to write at least once a week.

My excuse (.for that is all that it is) was that our guitarist, who also happens to be my son, got himself married.

Until you have experienced this particular delight you will have absolutely no idea the emotional and mental space it demands of the parents. I thought that having myself been married that it would be a walk in the park. No chance.

So sadly I have much neglected my blog.

I suppose that it was also synonymous with my lack of playing over the past few months as I had intimated in my last entry I had become fed up with the whole ‘performing’ thing was not in mood to be entertaining nor creative.

However; the sun has been shining and I have had a good healthy dose of vitamin D and am feeling generally at one with my inner rocker once more.

Also with the prospect of performing with my childhood hero ‘Bruce Foxton’ this week I feel the tinge of excitement that tends to inspire those of us that take to the stage for the edification of an adoring public.

All things being equal I shall return with the rockers pen and strip my soul for the delight of you lot!!

On another sadder note.

I often have a little browse through the statistics of this website just to ensure that I am not just writing this blog for my own benefit (if you left more comments I would know that you are actually reading what I am writing).

Anyway the stats show that a good deal of my readership come from Japan. You guys clearly love your rock.

In fact one of my first albums I purchased was the legendary Cheap Trick Live at Budokan…what a blinding album that was.

I have had friends who achieved nothing in this country and have had phenomenal success in the land of the rising sun. It is a land that clearly appreciates a good hard rock riff.

We in the West have been watching in awe as the news of the incredible tragedy of the earth quakes hit your shores.

It doesn’t mean much I know but please be assured that the prayers of this fellow rock lover are well and truly with you and I pray that the Phoenix will raise quickly from the rubble and you will be back rocking & rolling as soon as you are able.

We’ll speak soon.

RG

Revenge is a dish best served explosively.

I had received two comments from our support artiste at our last gig that I really appreciated and helped make my evening.
The first was that I “didn’t have enough wrinkle to be old enough to be Aaron’s father” always good for the fragile ego that one.

The second was that we were a really friendly band and fun to perform with.

I have always prided myself as being easy to work with and I have tried my hardest, as have my band mates, not to be too precious and to make friends rather than bad reputations.

It remind me of all the bands over the years that I have been involved in supporting and even those who then in turn ended up supporting us (beware the old adage, be careful how you treat people on the way up as you never know who you are going to meet on the way back down again).

On the whole we have had a great time meeting loads of new bands and artistes and only a few stick in my mind as being a right royal bunch of jerks.

Sadly our last gig at a well known Bristol venue a few years back did end up with both Support bands giving us withering looks, that they were indeed way too special to be supporting a bunch of losers like us.

One of the bands even decided that they were soooooooo special that they went well over their allotted time and ate royally into our time slot. Believe me that hurt, especially as we had worked so hard to get an audience there in the first place.

Subsequently as the venue allowed them do this we shook the dust from our sandals and have not returned there since.

Unsurprisingly it was the same venue where we were booked to support a well known signed folk rock act that decided that they would continue to sound check until the very moment that the doors were opened. The venue then chewed our backsides off for not being ready on time.

I am also reminded of the time we were booked to support a local band in Bristol only to be told on arrival that the band had no equipment at all, and I mean nothing; the guitarist had to borrow a plectrum (pick) from Aaron.
The drummer then set about resetting CJ’s drum kit for a left handed drummer only to break it in the process. Of course we didn’t realise this until about a third of the way through our set when the whole lot began to part company with CJ and itself and literally fell apart.
The band that had inflicted the damage on our equipment and kit then held court in the next room drawing the crowd away from our set.
I have said it before and I shall say it again…why do we do this to ourselves?

What we really need is a personality like our former guitarist Matt. He was once incensed that the support band having played to our audience began to pack up and were preparing to drive home. Matt stormed outside the venue and frog marched them back into the building and having removed their van keys told them that they were going no-where until we had played. We had been good enough to support them and they were going to return the favour by boosting our audience in support. I would never have had the nerve to do that.
Mind you our tales are nothing as compared to those who have had the pleasure of being ‘Road Crew’.

I once knew a guy who went from being a sound man onto becoming a road manager for acts such as George Michael. During recording sessions he would regale us with his tales of the road.

The funniest were of his memories of being on the road with a Spanish Heavy Metal band in Europe. The funniest account gave me hope that there is indeed such a concept as ‘justice’.

This particular band did not treat their crew with much respect at all to the point that they didn’t really budget the tour with such frivolities as ‘food’.

Now they do say that an army marches on its stomach and this is even more so for a road crew.
After a couple of weeks of this the crew had lost all its good humour and patience and were hungry, tired and fed up.

Part of the band’s show consisted of large pyrotechnics which had to be constructed by the only member of the crew who held an explosive licence, Bluey.

One night, fed up to the back teeth and extremely hungry Bluey got completely wasted before the gig and decided to take his revenge on his inconsiderate task masters.

Now bear in mind that each flash bomb only needed a tea spoon of this industrial strength gun powder for spectacular results, Bluey walked up each flash pot and poured a whole tub into each one, yes a WHOLE tub.

Then Bluey, satisfied with his act of vengeance curled up behind the mixing desk and fell last asleep and was totally unarousable.

My friend and his crew were then faced with a huge dilemma. Bluey was the only one who held a licence to handle this stuff. If anyone of them had as much as looked at the gun powder let alone touch it they could have found themselves being prosecuted under health & safety.
So they decided to leave it as it was and go and warn the band.

“Listen lads, it’s the last gig of the tour so we have decided to make it a spectacular one so what ever you do stay well away from the front of the stage at the point in the show where the flash pots always go off”.

The band gave an off hand reaction to this. They were leather clad rockers, nothing would distract them from doing what they did best….rocking.

However; despite their bravado they all began to look a tad nervous as the song in the show arrived that was normally accentuated by a controlled explosion of flame.

As the drummer leaned into a roll of the drums that announced the arrival of the explosion the band’s demeanour was now one of naked fear. With that my mate hit the detonation button.
Apparently what resulted was a solid wall of sheer flame 50 ft high and about 50 ft wide.

The band literally fell backwards into their amps and speakers completely blinded and sun tanned and the drummer fell of the riser into the orchestra pit behind.

My friend said that it was the first time that he had ever seen an audience turn as one and flee.

The explosion was so fierce that one of the venues officials called the bomb squad as they though the Basque separatists had been at it again.

At the end of the show my friend went to retrieve the pots and found that they had been blown clean through the stage itself and were now firmly buried in the concrete floor below and were going nowhere.

And the band who had suffered such retribution?
Well, they were all grins and thumbs up asking if they could do that again the next time they toured.
I suppose that once a Pratt, always a Pratt.

But it was a valuable lesson to me “Be careful how you treat people on the way up as they may have a bellyful of Jack Daniels and a dynamite licence”.

There and back again

The rock & roll life can be somewhat of a roller coaster ride at times. One minute you are riding high, heart beating fiercely, white knuckled as you race with the birds on top of the world and glad to be alive.

The next you are plummeting down towards the puddles of child produced vomit, loose change and pocket bric-a-brac that you lost the last time you screamed this way. Only to find yourself 30 seconds later hurtling back towards the stratosphere with the wind whipping through your hair and looking forward to another heady session of head butting seagulls.

I have experienced the rock & roll equivalent of this twice in one week.

The hurtling downwards experience was as we performed at the Louisiana last Sunday.

On the face of it all went well. The hard Core Punk outfit that had been supporting us had pulled out at the very last minute only to be replaced by the talented songster Julie baker who was a dream to work with and extremely friendly tuboot.

We also had a small but enthusiastic audience and they clearly enjoyed themselves.

However; for me my entire evening was back to front, upside down and yanked through a hedge backwards.

As we hit our opening chords of our first song something went horribly wrong and my bass nearly brought the back wall down. Clearly I have developed a technical fault with my guitar transmitter.

Anyway the sound engineer quickly solved the problem front of house and all was well. Sadly my onstage mix had been shot to hell. I was slowly being lifted off of my feet by a sheer wall of noise being produced mainly from Aaron’s guitar and my vocal in the monitor mix.

Being an old fart I normally wear ear plugs as I am becoming concerned at the long term damage I am doing to my hearing (it’s bad enough being as blind as a bat without adding ‘deaf as post’ to the equation). The trouble is with this level of volume the plugs were simply distorting the sound to an unusable mess and so I had to rip them out.

What I then experienced was the audible equivalent of leaping from a toasty warm bedroom window into the English Channel in January. Shocking.

My head was spinning and within almost no time at all I couldn’t pitch a note to save my life though saving my reputation at the point would have been of more value.

Now you would have thought that after 33 years I would have developed the communication skills to inform the in-house engineer of my dilemma and get him to ‘sort it out’.

Sadly this skill has always eluded me and in melt down situations like this I generally proceed like Bambi caught in the headlights of a forty tonne juggernaught on full throttle.

In the past my guitarists have wised up to my disability quickly and risking me look like a complete incompetent in front of the sound guy told him exactly what I needed on my behalf. This is a responsibility I have been more than happy to hand over to somebody else no matter how ‘retarded’ it may or may not have made me look.

Perhaps it’s time to pass this particular mantle on to the next generation and get my son and guitarist to communicate in that ancient language of ‘technical’ in that dark and mystical way to the shaman of sound and volume while I simply recite the time honoured incantations of “One, two, one, two, testing, testing”.

As it was I had to try and play, sing, pitch and remember all the words whilst my eyeballs were slowly being pushed to the back of my skull.

It was a losing battle and I began to get more and more lost in songs that I have been singing for years. This tragic outcome wasn’t helped by Aaron announcing to the crowd that ‘This is another song that the old boy wanted in the set, watch him mess this one up’. Maybe I need to have a gentle word with him at some point, preferably tooled up with a nice stout piece of two by four. You may not be allowed to smack your children any more for lack of obedience but there is nothing to say that you can’t beat them senseless at the age of 25 for humiliating their old man in front of a laughing audience.

Anyway, the long and the short of it was that as soon as the last chord had been struck I was off that stage as fast as my knackered old knees could carry me. Packing up was a daze and goodness only knows how I managed to drive home at the end of the day.

As I sat crashed in front of my television set with the tinnitus in my ears threatening to explode my head I pondered the premise that I may just be getting a little too old for this lark.

That was the bottom of the roller coaster ride. However; just as surely as you career downwards you normally whip straight back up the other side.
The slope back up came the following Saturday when my mobile phone rang.
“Hi Paul, this is “Gareth Chillcott here”. I instantly snapped to attention. I mean, this guy is rugby royalty.

Now from my blog stats it shows that the large majority of my readership comes from the US and South Korea (clearly you guys like your rock & roll down there) and so you would not have a clue who Gareth Chilcott is.

In rugby terms I wouldn’t say he is the equivalent of David Beckham (Lord no) but probably more of a Wayne Rooney (you’ve heard of him as he plays for Manchester United and it doesn’t matter what part of the planet you come from you ALL know Man United). Anyway, Gareth was a famous and much respected rugby football legend who played for England and who just happens to hail from Bristol and we are all very fond and proud of him.

Anyway to keep himself in his retirement Gareth purchased himself a music venue and puts on some of the best gigs in the South West and here he was phoning me and inviting myself and Aaron to support ‘From the Jam’ (made up of two of the original members of The Jam).

I was a big fan of The Jam in my teenage years and had rushed to get tickets when they had kind of reformed with a new lead singer. Talk about made up…..I get to play with my heroes and all the frustration and negative thinking of just under a week ago melted away.

The roller coaster at this moment has reached the highest point, the view is incredible and air is clear. For now at least I am going to stay there…….roll on the end of April.

“Now that’s entertainment”

Sid Snot Calling

I haven’t had a crack at the old promotion, well not big time anyway, since the Gutter Brothers game to Bristol. That particular exercise put me off of ever doing it again. Man but that was hard work and it consumes your every working moment.

I mean I almost have to sell my soul to Santa in order to get 93 souls though the door on that night and that was considered a really good turn out.

So you can imagine my delight when I discovered that I am once again tasked with hitting the campaign trail and that I have under one week to promote the dickens out of The Mudheads latest venture.

The Louisiana is fantastic little venue right in the heart of Bristol and we have generally always enjoyed playing there. However; this is something that we have done sparingly as our ‘fan base’ (cough) have the opportunity to see the beloved band of their choice for free almost any Saturday night they care to. So why would they want to pay five quid for 45 minutes of us on a Sunday night.

To see how we handle the band that will be performing with us that’s why!!

Somebody somewhere was clearly not looking at content when they pulled this evening together.

The band we are playing with and that will be opening for us have turned out to be, and I quote, Hard Core Punk. Having listened to their music on Myspace, the term ‘Hardcore’ is perhaps a little bit of an understatement. These guys could strip the graffiti off of a brick wall at half a mile. Aaron assures me that for their genre they are extremely good. However; to be honest, they frightened the life out of me. This was not helped by their EP cover which has a picture of a guy vomitting his spleen up.

This could go either one of two ways. We could make a lot of new mates, OR, and judging my the picture of the insane puker it is more than likely going to be this, a blood bath.

I wonder once again why I do it to myself.

Ah well, at least this guarantees that you’ll all tune in next week to see what happens.

Until then, “Those who are about to die salute you”.

A Dream Realised

Regular readers of this blog will already know that one of my life long ambitions for becoming a successful rock & roll legend is that when I arrived at a venue all the equipment was set up in place and plugged in ready to go. And following the gig a band of committed roadies would crawl all over the gear like a nest of ants stripping the stage bare and returning their haul to the warmth and safety of the awaiting haulage trucks.

This would all of course give me ample time in my luxury hotel suite to prepare myself mentally, physically and spiritually to deliver my rock & roll best to an adoring audience. Following the show I would be able to quickly retire quickly to my inner sanctum in order to freshen and cleanse myself for the following day’s extravaganza.

This dream is of course all complete clap trap and I have spent the last 30 odd years lumping around a variety of musical back breakers with the rest of the band in the name of entertainment.

However; this weekend just past I did get a taster of what it could be like (without sadly the luxury accommodation to go with it)

To say that my week had been a nightmare would be somewhat of an understatement.

Having parents that are still physically active can in its own way be a challenging prospect, especially when my fit and sprightly 75 year old father decided to take off for a good stout walk between Bristol and Bath along the cycle track that ran alongside the steam railways line.

Great idea that is until you catch your boot toe at pace on a piece of frost risen tarmac and bite a piece out of the track.

One heavy tumble later and a broken hip our late Queen Mother would have been proud of dad found himself flat on his back and wondering how the heck he was going to get himself the two miles back to the car park and civilisation before he froze to death.

They do say that the Lord looks after his own and in this case the ‘looking after’ came in the form of a cyclist who was also a qualified First Aider.

The long and the short of it, having failed to get an ambulance down the track or an helicopter close enough to the scene, my father became the first man I’ve heard of to be rescued by Steam Train (we never do anything by halves in my family).

So that was crisis number one. The second was when my very own partner in crime, the delectable Mrs Rock God found herself collapsed in a state of sheer agony and unable to move. Thankfully my level headed student daughter was on hand as I threatened violence most horrid to the poor emergency services operative if she didn’t stop making excuses and get an ambulance to my home immediately. Daughter number one wrestled the phone from me and without threatening illegal and painful reprisals got us the ambulance we needed.

Crisis number three the following day came from my mother who was clearly in the mind set that she was missing out on all action and developed an infection in her recently operated upon eye. The result, yet another trip to a local eye hospital.

By the lunch time of the day of the gig I was looking down the wrong end of a very black hole of stress. The thought of a long evening lumping and assembling musical equipment, performing and then disassembling it all again did not fill me with enthusiasm.

Thankfully I play in a band with two diamond geezers and they both realised very quickly that I had hit the wall and getting me to stand in front of an audience and actually remember who I was let alone what I was supposed to be playing would be miracle enough and they ordered me to stay at home until a car came to collect me.

This was one weird experience as we now have a very set routine on gig nights that starts at approximately 7pm for me and this was going to take me well away from that routine.

Saturday night, 8:30pm and I was sat in front of the television with a glass of wine in my hand all ready togged out in my stage finest.

Actually that gives the impression that I was relaxed and awaiting my chauffeur. In reality I was pacing a bit and the driver was in fact my daughter-in-law (well she will be in just over two months time).

I also felt a HUGE sense of guilt. Whilst I rested, my comrades in musical arms were having to do all the hard work.

I needn’t have worried. Sue collected me bang on cue and delivered me to the venue with about 15 minutes to spare and it would seem that I was not missed at all. In fact, I got the distinct impression that they rather enjoyed not having me in the way for once and had set up more kit than usual in less time than they normally would.

I sound checked……..tuned my bass and we were off!!

Two hours later, I had time enough to throw my bass into its case before I was grabbed by my temporary minder by the scruff of my neck and bundled back into her car and delivered back home to the arms of my loving wife.

I would like to say that we finished off the evening in true rock & roll style with much partying and rock & roll. But bear in mind the weekend we had both had (especially Mrs RG), we actually finished the evening in a truly un-rock fashion sat watching Escape to the Country whilst sipping a large glass of vintage scotch.

And my band mates? Apparently they took half the time to pack up as we normally would and didn’t miss me one bit.

I bet they would if I suggested the same arrangement next week.