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Heritage Owners Club
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Making progress


mark555

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A new year starts and we are back to getting the show on the road. Our new drummer has settled in and is now a part of the band fully. For a couple of months I have been very dubious about his commitment to the band, that he was just testing the waters and seeing how it goes with us - if he liked it he would stay, if not he would clear off and get another gig elsewhere when it came up. So, we are now a permanent set up as a band and I feel that I won't be having to get a new drummer again and bring in a new band member, which can be a real pain.

 

The key to getting the band up and running will be consistent rehearsal, every week, our plan is to get four new songs down every week until we have thirty. We are half way there now, having had weeks of cancelled practices last year for various reasons, the band had a meeting last night and we have set a date for our first gig, which is Saturday February 26th. We practice at the church the bas player and I belong to, and we get a very nice facility free of charge, so we feel that it would be nice to make our first gig a free concert for them. The venue of the concert will be the larger centre the church has which has a hall within the building which is seperate from the chapel area and seats about four hundred people, it has it's own very nice stage with lights etc, so hopefully, with the right publicity we should get a really good crowd.

 

I have finally found a role for the 555 in the set list, I tune it to open g and play the Stones songs in the set, which is great. By the way, One of the Christmas gifts I got was a fantastic leather guitar strap - black at the front, red leather at the back, red leather piping down the sides and double red stitching. Really high quality, made in Australia. So, the new strap has been dedicated solely for use with the Heritage - I always believe a really good guitar deserves a really good strap.

 

So, we are now just finalising the date, we should get the official approval for putting on the gig by the middle of next week, which means we now have to get a name for the band. We were going for 'The Alligators', but it turns out that it is a very common name for bands and there are already two bands that could well be playing the same circuit we intend to get on with the same name. So, we are in the process of trying to come up with something that suits us. One name we have come up with is 'The M62's'. The M62 is the motorway that runs just north of our town and runs all the way from the east coast in Hull to Liverpool on the west coast. As three of us played in the same band some years back and the gigs we played seemed to be in towns along the motorway. In fact we have played in both Hull and Liverpool at either end of the M62, so we thought 'The M62's' has a certain ring about it. The other name we thought of was "Route 62", being a parody of Route 66. We do not have any roads classed as Routes here in England, so it's a bit of humour - the only problem is that I don't think too many people will get the humour.

 

So there we are, we are now well on our way to gigging. A date has been set and a plan put in place, we just need to go out and find some paying gigs now.

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Nice entry, Mark. Enjoyed the read. Nice that you've reached stability w/members. You're prep for the gig reminds me of the scene in the movie 'The Commitments' where they play their first gig in a church (fun movie if you haven't seen it - they have drummer problems as well... as does every band).

 

The strap sounds nice. I, too, like a good strap for a good guitar. Finished the Keith Richards book over the holidays and watched 'Ladies and Gentlemen...', which is a '74 film when Taylor was on 2nd guitar. Their peak period I think. Ya know you have to take off the low E on the 555 now :)

 

Hope the practice and gig goes well. Looking forward to reading about it.

 

Cheers,

Randy

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