I think my days of playing in bands are done. I find it frustrating at best to get everyone on the same page.
That has been my situation. You come up in the ranks playing other peoples' songs. I figure if you're going to play another man's song, if you can't learn to play it at least as well as he did, why bother? If it's a record that doesn't rely too heavily on production values and effects and overdubs, you ought to be able to replicate it just by following the players and learning what they played, if your playing has progressed to that level. I learned to play songs by playing along with the record. Not as in jamming with the record, but learning the parts as they were played on it, and sounding like I'm in the group. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times when I played with other musicians who could play songs the way they were supposed to go. The rest have played songs the way they misremembered hearing them. That's really frustrating for me. I can hear it. Why can't you hear it, too?
When I play "Superstition" it sounds like Stevie Wonder, not somebody improvising on a vamp in E flat. When I play "The Second Arrangement" it sounds pretty much like Donald Fagen. When I play the Rhodes part on "I'm Not In Love" it is indistinguishable from the Rhodes on the 10cc record. When I play the bass with "Come Together" it replicates Paul McCartney's playing, phrasing and dynamics. To play anything else on that song is gonna be a train wreck. If you're going to play "Rosanna" on the piano, you'd better be able to keep up with the guy on the Toto record.
It just seems to have worked out that I've never met anyone else who could do that consistently, if at all. Now, I'm not the world's best anything, but I can play, up to the limits of my ability, exactly what somebody else is playing on the record that made the song famous. Otherwise, if it's beyond my skill level, I don't bother to learn it. I won't be playing any songs by Yes or Rush or King Crimson or The Tubes, for example, because I'm not there yet, and I may never get there. But I can play hundreds of other songs the way they go, all from memory. It was something I wanted to learn to do from when I was in the single digits. Too bad it's a skill set that is going to waste. Let's compare it to school: if my ability places me in Grade 11, I'm not good enough to play with the guys in the doctorate program at university, but playing with guys who are in Grade 6 is a waste of time. We're not on the same page. In a lot of cases, we aren't even in the same book. But I don't know anyone else who's in high school, and that has always been the case.
Most baffling experience I've had: I used to have a friend who was learning to play guitar. Once, at his house, I played "Mother" on his guitar along with David Gilmour on "The Wall." When it was done, he said to me, "I can't play with you anymore." Within a week, he'd sold his guitar and he never played again, and we drifted apart as friends. All because I was at a more advanced level of playing than him. Instead of working to get there, he figured he might as well hang it up, and drop me as a friend while he was at it. Sad.
Still, the best compliment I've ever received was "I can't tell if it's him or the record." That's one of the reasons why I do it.
