The San Angelo Gig

posted on October 13, 2006 in Life Music // View Comments

For the sake of my cousin, an SRV lovin’ and talented lead guitarist in his own right, I rode three hours to San Angelo with him to play as part of his band at a citywide, all-church event. Originally it was meant to be a youth event; somehow it transpired to this citywide event with a somewhat much older demographic.

We’d practiced together one time about a week prior to this gig. I was also worried about the couple of original songs they wanted to do that I’d never heard. We arrived at the church with plenty of time to soundcheck and setup, but we did neither. I spent an hour or so typing our words for the screens in the front of the church.

When we actually get up to play our music, it was 10pm, and maybe 30 to 40 people were still at the church. We begin playing, only the lead singer’s guitar wasn’t working due to sound system problems or bad cables or divine intervention. He begins preaching and prophesying over the song we’d begun playing behind him, taking it slow so he could be heard but building to crescendoes at certain times to emphasize the points he was making (although my monitor wasn’t working so I never really heard what he said). We wound up playing 2 or 3 “songs” for two nonstop hours.

It was a very freeing musical moment in that everything I’ve been playing in the last year or more has been so structured. The looseness and creativity required of the music was very cathartic. So, all the worry about playing the songs well faded to nothing because we didn’t play them.

We also got done at midnight, then ate at Applebee’s at 1am, and returned to our bassist’s home a little before 2am.

BlakeAtwood.com