Jackercrap

This past weekend I went to Philadelphia (aka Dehli) for band rehearsal. This is where the drummer for my main band lives with his wife and kids and two cats and grasshoppers. The bass player and I live in NY. It might seem kind of strange to you that we are in a band with someone who lives two hours away (with good Traffic starring Michael Douglas). If we were in a band with a drummer in NY we would probably rehearse 2 or 3 times a week for a couple hours. The rehearsal space we would use costs $20 an hour so that would come to $80 or $120 a week split 3 ways. I’ll just say that the average would be about $30 that each one of us would spend a week on a rehearsal space. The reality of rehearsal spaces/practice rooms is that you are strictly in a time is money situation. That’s not a very good situation to be especially when you’re trying to be “creative” and connecting with other people on a musical level. (I hope that wasn’t too “deep” for you.) You’re also not playing on the equipment and instruments (if you’re a drummer) that you usually play with.
So…for us to drive to Philly it costs about $40 in gas and tolls roundtrip, which is split between the two NY people. We stay at the drummer’s house and generally eat all of our meals there. I’d say we’re looking at about $20 that we’re each spending a week so that we can rehearse. Plus, we rehearse in the basement of the house whenever we want between 10am and 10pm for as long as we want. Since we wind up rehearsing a good amount in the weekends that we’re there we only make this trip every 2 or 3 weeks. We don’t have to worry about clearing out for the next band or fiddling with equipment that isn’t ours. We can play and write at our own pace without constantly thinking about the money we are paying to rehearse. I think what’s most important is that we can and do spend a lot of time just “hanging out”, watching movies, throwing kids around and just doing like um whatever. I know that with some of the other bands that I’m in we rarely ever socialize outside of rehearsals and shows. Hopefully, you can see that our situation isn’t that strange and maybe even preferable. Also, can you see the sailboat?

A schooner IS a sailboat stupid head!

We don’t have a show until late October which is nice since we’ve been playing a show or two a month. We’re taking the opportunity to work on some new songs without having to make sure that we’re ready with older material for a show. We’ve got some songs coming together that I’m really excited about. Besides writing and rehearsing we didn’t do anything out of the ordinary over the weekend. This time we watched Street Trash and enjoyed the crap out of it. They hadn’t seen it before and I had forgotten how many great lines are in it. Maybe I’ll do a proper review/rant on this movie down the road even though where we’re going we don’t need roads.

I’m playing a few shows in Chicago over the weekend so I should have some sort of mildly interesting anecdotes and photos up here in the coming week.

~ by jackercrap on September 14, 2009.

Posted in Music In My World
Tags: Back To The Future, Chicago, Dehli, Gopher, Michael Douglas, Philadelphia, Traffic