The Making of a Dad Band

One of my outlets on a regular basis has been to get together with a few friends to play guitar.  We actually started playing together 11 1/2 years ago, a mark that certainly gives me pause about how quickly time has passed since we first started gathering in the basement apartment I was in at the time. We had religiously stuck with the routine every week on Thursday nights. over the course of that time, doctorates were completed, musical trends came and went and I slowly discovered 1990's alternative rock, which I had essentially missed due to my travels or only discovered via the back door route of covers played by jazz pianist Brad Mehldau.

Those evenings were simple affairs.  We'd unpack, play our first three songs and order pizza that we could normally count on having in another 30 minutes or so. There were musical discoveries, challenges that would turn into benchmarks of progress as we found a way to master them, rules about forbidden groups or songs. I still, after all this time, refuse to waive my Eagles veto.

We have seen our circle expand and contract over that course of time and we are at a solid core of three despite our open door to additional dad-players, especially those with drums or a bass. Obligations expanded as one of our trio became a Dad. He furtively missed a Thursday while he was getting acquainted with his daughter. A few months later twin daughters arrived for the most talented of our trio.

The weekly ritual disappeared with those demands but we are working our way back into a routine of at least a month. Those night continue to be blessed with as much conversation as ever, but the talk turns to the kids where it once turned to music trivia and whether or not our mention of certain musicians at certain times coincided with their deaths.  I assure you we have never played Boney M and probably only mentioned them in reference to their contribution to the Christmas muzak we had grown familiar with.

The nights are less frequent and the pizzas even less so. Guitar is now on Fridays instead of Thursdays and there is a dram of scotch rather than a 2 litre bottle of soda water, which we named "flavourless" in mild self-deprecation of the pop we played as well. Over the years the conversation has continued to be good as we have marvelled at the achievements of those we have played, occasionally cursed the slow wheels on the studio recorders the Beatles used, made copious references to The Big Lebowski, Spinal Tap and Christopher Walken's seminal appearance on SNL.

Those things are balm and magnet that keeps us together as regularly as we come together every couple of weeks. We muse occasionally about performing for an audience and conclude that it will most likely be at a birthday party. If that is the case, we will have to hurry up and do it while we are still cool to the kids. It amy be nothing more than a distant goal and one that would require a bit more work that our intermittent meetings might allow. There may be an unplumbed symbiosis that we would unwittingly draw upon, or a sense that the stakes playing without a net would be minimal or minor compared with other things that we have grappled with over the last decade and change.

The one thing we all share is a desire to pass the baton on to the kids, especially if any of them take up an interest in bass or percussion and share our fondness for Crowded House, Talking Heads or R.E.M.  All of the kids are exposed to music in various ways and taking lessons and their progress probably give us more pride than any progress we make with more esoteric chord progressions that were beyond us when we all began.