Appliances-SFB: #2

Here's the second installment of the Appliances-SFB which is called, coincidentally, "#2".

One thing that might not be readily apparent to people who are new to A-SFB is that, in my opinion, our music was full of humor. That's not to say that we considered ourselves to be a joke, but we also didn't take ourselves, or the genre, very seriously. At the time, there were an awful lot of bands out there who appeared to be quite serious about the whole "rock" or "punk rock" image. White pancake makeup with black eye-liner, or whatever. Occasionally we would "dress up" (I believe there are some photos of me in leopard spotted stretch pants floating around somewhere- $5 on the clearance rack in the women's department at some store or other - how could I resist?), but it was in the spirit of having a good time rather than trying to be particularly cool. Don't get me wrong, we liked to "Rock", but we were also aware of, and enjoyed, the silliness of it all. I, for one, never felt particularly cool; I always felt like an outsider even among the people for whom we played, but I enjoyed playing and the people who came to hear us were almost always nice people.

I tried to use iMovie's built-in graphic EQ to bring the bass down and accentuate the guitar and keyboards. I think it helped some, but there's only so much you can do to fix a stereo mix, particularly when you're just throwing a file into some software and clicking on stuff, hoping for the best. It seems to me that some video quality was lost in the process, and I don't know what the explanation is, aside from the fact that I've read that iMovie is a "lossy" video format, whatever that means. I'll have to look into that.

So, here's A-SFB playing #2. Once again, the performance is not perfect, and I only have myself to blame for that, but I always tried to play spontaneously. If I had written parts that I played the same way every time, or if I was a better musician, maybe I wouldn't have made so many mistakes, but at the time I felt that it was better if I didn't know exactly what I would do on any given song on any given day. There was a basic structure to a song and I tended to try to play around with that structure without ever having my part set in stone. That's still pretty much my approach to playing music, for better or worse.