Today's gig was slightly different. The theme of the service was planning for the future, and reaping the rewards. Somehow gardens were mentioned as an example of something you plan, put a lot of effort into, and then reap the rewards later. We somehow decided on "Octopus's Garden" by The Beatles as our closing song.
To me, playing secular songs is different from playing the hymns and other sacred stuff. Also, we've been joined recently by a guy named Ryan who plays the piano. Shirley asked me if I could bring my synthesizer and play that, and Ryan could play the piano. I'd written up a piano part and printed it out, so I gave that to Ryan. As it happens, I'd been somewhat concerned that there's all those nice background vocals, not to mention guitar leads, and those weren't covered. This isn't "cover band" territory, but I still tend to approach secular songs the same way. I want the arrangement to be faithful to the original. But basically Michael would play the melody on violin, piano would comp chords, guitars would strum, and we even had Brian on his djembe (drum). Nice little arrangement, it would have been fine. But it bugged me how much more we could have. Eureka! With Ryan playing the piano, I am now free to fill in some other stuff, like the background vocals (on keys) and take the guitar leads on keys as well. Because I've been starved lately for songs to learn, and I actually enjoy to process of learning new songs and playing them, I jumped in. Practiced up a couple different solos, figured out how the pads and chords would work. I've been working on it, the one song, for two weeks.
That must have been what led to the "gig nightmare" I had last night.
You ever have one of those dreams -- nightmares for me, usually -- where you're back in school? Enough is familiar that you recognize immediately where you are, but there are tragic differences. For me, I usually can't remember what my schedule is; what room am I supposed to be in? What class is this? Did I do the homework last night? Sometimes the layout of the school is completely different, and I can't find where I'm supposed to be. School nightmares.
Anyway, I have gig nightmares. Get to the gig, but find out that the stage is actually a couple of pieces of cardboard on the floor; not only completely stupid but also not nearly big enough. Or I get lost on the way there. Or any number of other tragedies that don't make any sense, but in the context of the dream they do, and they're happening, and it's a fucking nightmare.
So last night, I dreamed that the band -- my cover band, not the church band -- had a gig. First one in months, because of COVID-19. We get there, and there's the stage, and a grand piano. Oh yeah, that's right; they said that there was a grand piano on the stage, and they didn't have any way of moving it, so I was going to play it. So I left my keyboards at home. What the fuck? We still have to do songs with synths and B-3 and stuff, and it's not like I could just play all those parts on acoustic piano. This was a tragic mistake, and there wasn't time to drive back home and get my keyboards, so I had to figure out a way to cover all those keyboard parts from all our songs on a grand piano. Actually, it was a pretty cool challenge. Obviously it wasn't going to sound the same as what people are used to, but the part will be there. It might even sound kinda cool played on a grand.
I woke up before we got to any of the good stuff. I guess I'll never find out whether the nigthmare gig ended in triumph or tragedy for me. "Octopus's Garden" went really well this morning, though.