Jam Night Metal Takeover

(Cross-posted to The Hallway)

So last night Sabrina and I dropped by the Jam night at Piazza Joe's just because there was no cover and we're cheapskates, turns out it was the most hopping place in town. The regulars were there for the most part, people I don't know and e.co who has been pestering me to start playing guitar more seriously again who arrived a little later.

They started off with the usual rock stuff, sounding pretty good but without a bass player to keep things rounded up the guitarists were getting a little all over the place, and the drummer seemed a little timid, following the guitarists rather than setting the beat himself and making them stick to it rather than vice versa.

Then the metalheads arrived. They came from Summerside, the apparent hotbed of metal and hardcore punk on the Island. They had the requisite jeans and black metal T-Shirts (the colour, not the subgenre) and they had their gear which was piled into a big old Caddy that they drove to Charlottetown just to play at the jam night.

“Is this as much distortion as I can get?”

Usually metal and jamming are like oil and water. You can bring a stopwatch to a Metallica concert and no one would question the idea that playing a song exactly as it is written is the standard by which most metal performances are judged. Rock and jazz jamming is a completely different philosophy, where players are expected to come up with something new on the fly, and if something sounds practiced it can even sound out of place.

This gave the night a very interesting contrast, where the regulars would jam for a while, then the metalheads would come up and play “Search and Destroy” or “Fade to Black” or “Cowboys from Hell”, which got a great reaction from the crowd, (even Sabrina turns out to have some closet metalhead leanings. Her quote of the night: “maybe I shouldn't have sung 'Master of Pupets' at the top of my lungs it's making me cough.”)

The players started mixing together, and did a pretty good version of “All Along the Watchtower” with more distorion on the lead part than one normally hears. Then they start into “Crazy Train” and one of the regulars suddenly starts playing all the lead parts, including the flashy bridges and the solo, as good a facsimile of Randy Rhoads I've heard since my guitar teacher who would play old Ozzy and try to explain to me that this solo was ‘really really important’.

The metal fan closet doors were being thrown open that night, to be sure. I'm definitely making time to start playing guitar more seriously again. I was never one to want to play in front of people, I only did it a couple of times and then it was doing classical guitar stuff, but remembering how much fun it is to just play around and find interesting little patterns and riffs and go with the flow of playing with other people really gave me a charge.