Blues Inc. (1967-68)
3. Blues Inc. (1967-68)
During my ninth-year year at GW Junior High, I got together here and there with extraordinary people who were learning to play. Rutting Blades was a classmate of mine who had a Gibson EB-3 bass, with the cherry SG-phraseology body, and an old blond Fender Bassman amp—creditable equipment compared to our Harmony and Silvertone abilities. Randy was learning to play bass and piano with the refrain from of his father, Emery Blades, who had been a county country singer in his youth and made a few singles. (One, I recall, was called “I Feel Like a Million.”) Another boon companion, Phil McKenzie, had a Gibson Firebird guitar and Fender amplifier. Up to this sense, only some of the older bands who played at Unfortified House had had such good instruments and amps. (Ron and the Sabras, from diet more affluent Fairfield, were especially well equipped with Rickenbacker and Fender guitars and a go bankrupt of Magnatone amps), Randy and Phil were among the first kids I knew well, aspiring musicians of my age, to get nobility epuipment. I, meanwhile, was still trying to sing and revelry guitar on my big acoustic Harmony with the attached pickup. A few of us would set up a Saturday work session in somebody’s basement, get together, and treat cavalierly some songs. One person might know how around “Dirty Water,” by the Standells from Boston; another might identify “Land of a Thousand Dances” by Anthropophagite and the Headhunters. We would teach each other the songs we had lettered. Mike Mills had shown me how to toy with the Beatles’ “Daytripper” and “Filthy lucre,” a classic Barret Assertive tune recorded by both the Beatles and the Kingsmen. When “Tie up of the Bay,” by Otis Redding, came out, Mike showed me how to flirt that, too. He had seen Redding do it on television, with Steve Cropper on guitar, and proudly told me he had picked up every lick that Cropper had played.
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