A few weeks back, my old friend Gordon Smith, former bass player for White Hot and Blue called me up. Gordon had an acoustic gig in Wanaka that he wanted some support for. It was a living room concert at a private home out of town known as "The River House". I asked Mike if he'd like to join Ros and I, but he felt unprepared. Lindsay turned out to be keen, and revealed himself to be not just a rock steady bassist, but a fine guitar picker as well. After a couple of practices I thought hard about our sound and the material, and hit upon the name Dry Martini.
We practiced hard. We needed to. We weren't playing 12-bar blues any more. Well, not a lot. It was only a set of about 14 songs, but went from reworked ABBA to Bigbang's Norwegian Rock. Just so we don't sound completely Scandinavian, there's a little Eric Clapton in the set too, and even a Kiwi tune by the Muttonbirds.
We felt ready, having had a thorough dress rehearsal in front of Warren our critical-eared sound engineer, but come the actual gig, we were as nervous as hell. You could hear a pin drop, and the audience of about 30 were right in our faces. Happily, they warmed to us and we had a ball. That's not to say we didn't make a lot of mistakes. You could hear the nerves in our voices. I've never been so nervous on stage. The worst was a tune we just couldn't strike the right tempo on and had to abandon. I've never done that before, and so exposed to the audience, we almost died, but by then they had kind of taken us to their hearts, and they were very gracious, and we managed to laugh it off and move on. For the last couple of tunes, Gordy joined us to play some lead guitar, and helped us raise the bar. We had everyone clapping along on the Vidar Busk and Clapton tunes (Lovestruck and Big Bill Broonzy's Got You On My Mind).
I think they were also pretty generous because we were after all, just the warm-up act to Gordy. He got me up for a few tunes in his set, and that was even more fun. I think I learned that although I yearn for musical growth, my own brand of blues harmonica playing is still my strength, so the blues is going to muscle up in our set at future gigs.
I also learned that Gordy is a world class solo player - a fine singer and phenomenal guitar player. He plays some originals, a lot of singer/songwriter stuff from the likes of David Wilcox, with a few blues stomps thrown in for good measure. He has a new toy, a Digitech Jam Man looper pedal, which he used sparingly, but to amazing effect. We had a blast. So I guess my second band is Dry Martini. Or maybe Dry Martinis. We're still evolving.
