Joe's Garage

Today's song is about rock bands. While the band in the song do pretty good for themselves, there are many that simply give up along the way - and having played in one of them myself, I completely recognize the beginning of the song. I am smiling thinking back to the days with Coma - three good friends making music just for our own sakes. It was fun and it was honest. We made music we liked - although I think I forced my inner Bono on the other two in my pretentiousness...

All I can say is that we covered Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd. Yeah... My idea. My favorite part is the line "There'll be no more aah aah aah" where the muted aah's that are lined up with the melody on the original became a bloodcurdling scream that forced itself to the forefront in our version. And my attempt at finding my inner David Gilmore. I was never really a lead guitarist. I wanted to be one, and I demanded to play lead guitar on quite a few songs - and the solos were ALWAYS long. And never really good. A couple were ok, but no... There is only so much you can do with the pentatonic scale and limited technical ability... BUT - like I said, it was fun. And there was a chemistry there. The last recordings we made were pretty good - the songs were getting better and better and we played pretty well together.

I have my friend Jørund Hitland to thank for the song today. I knew of Frank Zappa from before after having found the album Zoot Allures in my dad's record collection. But it was in Jørund's cd collection I found Joe's Garage, a rock opera about... Well, I am not always quite sure... But it follows Joe from his beginnings in a garage band that makes it pretty big - and he encounters all sorts of depravity and finds himself in jail before he finally gets out in act three and becomes a compliant member of society. While some of the lyrics are very immature, the music is spectacular throughout. Zappa and his band move effortlessly through various musical styles, and you can hear some of that even within the title track - it is well worth listening to, and the lyrics are pretty good as well.