Minutia, and an Idea

So I wrote a Gnarls Barkley review. It's under this post. I added some links. I'm gonna write about how great they are, and why they are as great as they are, some other day. I removed some stupid, melodramatic posts from a couple of years ago, in case people actually start coming here. No one wants to read that. Since I deleted those two posts, I also want to point out that the title of this blog is from a Matt Good song, "Near Fantastica" on Avalanche. It's a good song. Pun possibly intended.

This morning, I was sitting on the subway, on my way to work, when I had a fantasy/daydream/vision/whatever which may just point me towards my true calling.

I want to start a Tom Petty cover band.

I think this pretty much encapsulates the degree of fame or notoriety that I crave. I want to play and sing in a Tom Petty cover band. We'd play at bars around Brooklyn. Maybe we'd peek our heads out into Manhattan occasionally. We'd be popular because Tom Petty writes great pop and rock songs (which is the hard part) and our perfomance would be solid.

In keeping with typical cover band form of deriving the name from some aspect of the original band - like a play on the name, or one of their songs or lyrics - we'd be called The Insiders, after the duet Petty did with Stevie Nicks. It's a good song, and it would be a staple of our repertoire, assuming I could find someone to sing with me.

And I would sing. In high school, at nearly every show we did, we played a little-known Tom Petty song called "Crawling Back To You." Little-known referring here to us, mainly. And Jon and Ryan were the only ones who really liked it. This song (and the one or two other Petty songs we attempted but never really played) was pretty much my domain - I would sing Tom Petty. Ryan and Keith sang everything else. I hope it was because I was good at singing Tom Petty. I still think I'm good at it. Obviously, we'll find out when I start the band. We'll play that song too.

I thought about what we'd play. He's got a lot of hits, and a lot of terrific songs that weren't huge hits. It would have to be a decent retrospective of Tom Petty's career, but we'd have to stay current, since he's still releasing albums. I might try to bookend the set chronologically (play a few early songs at the beginning, later songs towards the end) although the main portion of it would not organized as such. A typical set list might look a little something like this:

Anything that's Rock'n'Roll

Breakdown

Honey Bee

American Girl

Free Fallin' (We're playing at a bar. We'd get kicked off if we didn't play it)

You Don't Know How It Feels

Out In Cold

Walls (it was a hit from the movie "She's The One")

Jammin' Me

I Won't Back Down

Runnin' Down A Dream

Saving Grace (as of now, it's his most recent hit, so it would be fairly fresh on people's minds)

Encore! (Although there likely wouldn't be an encore, because we'd be background music at a bar until people see how great we really are)

Insider (BAM - assuming I can find someone to sing Stevie Nicks' part)

Mary Jane's Last Dance (off-topic - I once saw a video of a guy with no arms playing this song on the guitar with his feet)

But there's plenty more to choose, and we'd obviously take requests too. The good thing about his brand of simple, stripped down rock is that it's not particularly difficult to pull off. In fact, the only thing I think we'd have to pass on is "Don't Come Around Here No More" - simply because it requires a lot of work. I, along with a lot of other people, love that song, of course - but the synthy instrumentation, vocal pyrotechnics, and lady backup singers would be hard to do well.. The important thing is for a cover band is to do justice to the source material. We won't be able to take too many liberties, for the most part.

I really think this could work. I'm the only member so far though. Maybe Ian would be my drummer.