Rock and Bowl: A modest proposal.

So, I'm waiting for my coffee to cool and my Genuine Counterfeit PreEmbargo Cubans to arrive by UPS from my friends at JR Cigars, and I remembered something I brought up earlier in the week that needs more fleshing out.

One of the biggest complaints about the Des Moines music scenes is...okay the biggest complaint is there's a lot of sucky bands and too few venues. AFTER that, though, the biggest complaint is that bands are always tearing each other down and there's no comraderie. Overall, the scene suffers. Just take a look at the typical Craigslist bullshit that flares up from time to time.

Okay. The English have Soccer. There's all kinds of great stories of legendary British bands having a bit of footie for fun. Hip Hop has basketball. Death Metal bands have Dungeons and Dragons nights--okay, I can't back that one up...

This is all a bit too athletic for most bands I know. However, they all like to drink beer and hate golf. This leads to BOWLING! It's not all that athletic, but has enough individual and team competition to keep it interesting. You keep score, but noone takes it too seriously (unless your name is Walter Sobchak). And you can rent EVERYTHING neccessary so no intial cost is necessary. Plus there's that vintage thing for all those ironic hipsters out there.

Bands on Board so Far:
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Black Storm Alice
Porkins' Ghost
Superchief (at least one of them)

Spread the word! I'll make brackets and everything! Each band will be a team. This is just for fun for now. Maybe in the future, we can get some sponsors and have a championship or something. This would be a great opportunity to hang out and/or network in a mellow, not-so-loud, non-competitive environment.

I'm looking for feedback here, so I'm publicizing this post. We'll see what happens.

How Rock is Made

So another Black Storm Alice rehearsal last night. We've been adding new songs to the repetoire, and having mixed results. At the end of a frustrating bit, I just hit one loud note on the bass that just got everyone's attention (probably due to the Boss MT2 Metal Zone distortion pedal.). I looked at the drummer and we just took off: hammering this riff that just appeared out of the air. Soon, the guitarist caught on and Hanna started singing something I found out later was an ode to my Fender ball cap. 5 minutes later we all came to a stop like we wrote it that way. And in a way, we did.

I used to dream about being one of those songwriters who would sit in a little room at a piano, playing ditties and writing black dots on a piece of paper. Apparently, that is not me. My music comes in loud riffs that pummel you until your nose bleeds, but you like it. Sort of like getting your ass kicked by a really hot girl in a skin-tight pvc catsuit.

I fuckin' love playing the bass and being in a band. I can't wait to show you what we do.

I promise I'll make the next post clever and/or funny, but I just needed to get this off my chest.

P.S. The only bad thing is, I didn't record it. Next time, record everything!

Here we go again.

Thanks to Cam at his incredibly cool blog , and the beautiful weather, I'm experiencing a bit of a blog renaissance. Yes, I post a lot of stuff at my facebook (under LorenzInez) and my twitter (twitter.com/revduke67), but there's stuff that I like to write about and share that I don't feel comfortable sharing with EVERYONNNNE! and can take more than 140 characters to talk about.

Some of it will be funny. Some of it may sound like whining. Some of it may seem weird.

Let's put it this way, if you are offended by the picture at the top of this blog, you should probably leave now.

But I promise to not be boring.