“Disappointment”- piano rehearsal with Berke McKelvey, March 1, 2012
I wrote and cut the songwriter’s demo of “Disappointment” on March 1st, and had my first rehearsal of it with Berke four days later. We weren’t working that night, so no John Clark on bass yet (I’ll bet we tried at at Joe’s Beach Bar aka the Barley Neck Inn, the next night, well before we should have -they must’ve hated it!
I’ve been working this way for years, teaching it to one guy at one rehearsal, and then another guy at another rehearsal, because it’s hard to get the whole bunch together all at once; with the Philharmonic, 9 guys, nearly impossible (you could probably count the number of full CTP rehearsals we’ve had since the band started on one hand, and in fact that was the whole premise behind the Philharmonic was to see how much you could get done with charts and individual rehearsals.)
In fact, maybe the single most wonderful thing to me about the Three-O is how much we’ve been able to rehearse together with all of us there (well, except for Jodsworth The Valet, who’s frequently busy with the InterWeb assignments and other highly specialized Valet-like activities), and how much we all relish these opportunities. You might not believe this, but a lot of guys just don’t like to rehearse much!
Anyway, this was a rehearsal with just Berke, and we always have a ball. Berke quickly came up with this fabulous piano figure, probably my favorite part of the arrangement, that we edited down even further. Nowadays, it’s more and more of a search for stillness -the Philharmonic was a great way to learn restraint! So we ended up, as we do now and then lately, with lots of stretches where the keys lay out.
By the way, forgot to say last time where this lyric came from: it starts out in total despair, because a good friend of mine was telling me about his best buddy who was dying of cancer and at that point really had no hope and was just waiting to die, pretty much, and was just kind of bitter and pissed, like anyone would be who’d been dealt such a hand. So that was my starting point, was thinking about him trying to make sense of his situation. And then of course I ended up writing about myself and songwriting and all that bullshit, because it’s really all I can do to stop thinking about myself for a whole verse.
Anyway, so this is basically Berke’s first day on this one… lovely ringing stuff at the end of the bridge and in the third verse, and of course that brilliant opening figure… we must not have worked on it too long, as he sticks with piano right through (I’ll bet if we’d worked another half hour, we would’ve started lobbing assorted anachronistic sounds into that ridiculous bridge, as you’ll hear the Philharmonic’s keyboardist, Cliff Spencer, do in Chapter Three)…
I always like to watch people create, but usually it’s annoying to them, what with me breathing just over their shoulder and stuff, so thanks for this.
Michael Dill