A Private Function on Capital City Club Patio Holds the Billy Batts Ensemble at the Bay Window

Always great to be back with the cats in the Batts - Brian, Mark, and Walter.  Real good souls who sincerely want to play and seem to like what I do without any grief.  It's supposed to be fun, and it always is with this lineup.  We have been proactively upping the ante on bringing in new tunes to have in our book.  This time out, we had agreed on 3 more: Cause We've Ended As Lovers (from Jeff Beck's Blow By Blow, a Stevie Wonder composition that was originally sung by Stevie's first wife and longtime collaborator Syreeta Wright on this 1974 release - that was one I had always wondered about back in the day), I Want You (She's So Heavy) (the Lennon minor blues with pre-King Crimson dirge-prog grunge-stomp tailspin from Abbey Road, natch, not the cool, funky Marvin Gaye ditty), and finally, Radiohead's Paranoid Android (quite the magnum opus of modern alt-rock, proclaimed by an elite few to be the Bohemian Rhapsody of the '90's).  Turns out that PA was the only new one we got around to playing.  The manager on duty really enjoyed it.  I learned that crazy bass line in 7 and somehow memorized the whole form after listening to it over and over.  It's not as bad as I thought it would be.  I guess I'm very late to the Radiohead party.  They are fun to watch via concert clips such as this one, or a decade later on this one, particulary Jonny with his guitar noises and then his keyboard pads.

We also ran through Dear Prudence, Unchain My Heart, Just Friends, In Memory of Elizabeth Reed, and, by request of more Allman Brothers Band, a rather faithful rendition of Midnight Rider, with Walt's vocal sounding eerily spot on to the Idlewild South track.  Good for me to remember the G minor in the chorus and the B flat during the solo section - I used to always black out during those critical changes back in the day.  It's like, "How well do you really know the song?"  That's what you have to ask yourself.  Can you talk somebody through it without your instrument in front of you?  Classic and southern rock are generally not the subject of this kind of discussion.  I always drift back in my head to playing Comfortably Numb and absent-mindedly (yet panic-stricken since it was a last-minute impulse move) jumping to the verse changes of Bm during the first guitar solo - of course, that solo is over the chorus changes starting on D.  Always best to be thinking ahead as to what's coming next.