Well it wasn’t the same without you Paul, for one none of us were brave enough to attempt any Racer X/Mr Big songs.
There were only 5 of us, cerealk, welshpete, ving, devo and me.
Towards the end a friend of Simon’s showed up and sat behind the drums for about an hour so that was quite cool.
I had the VBK that I got a month ago, welshpete had his 7VSBL, Jon had his moded Washburn P2 and a new custom made Chandler strat with hot rails in the neck and middle position and what looked like Bill Lawrence L-500 in the bridge.
I think it might have had an active preamp or something because there were two 3 position switches in addition to the 5 position
pickup switch.
Very solid guitar but the neck was chunkier than an Ibanez/Jackson/ESP fan can tolerate.
I’ll give you one guess as to which guitar you think Simon brought in.
Steve didn’t bring a guitar this time because logging an UV1000 case all the way from Oxford to Denmark Street to Kennington and back to Oxford didn’t seem like a very good idea but he bought a gig bag from Denmark Street so he won’t have any excuses next time.
As always I was the worst player there and by quite a wide margin.
I always turned down the volume control on my guitar so the other can’t tell how bad I actually am.
That didn’t help much as low volume can’t disguise the badness that I emit.
We had some fun playing a bunch of songs including Stevie Wonders’ Superstitious, Back in Black, Hard to Handle and a few others with a lot of 12 bar blues impro in between.
After the jam Pete, Steve and I went to Simons place for a cup of tea and some of Steve’s Fire Garden honey on toast. :P
Steve and I also raided Simons extra guitar bits box and made off with a few of the goodies there.
We also watched the video of Clive, James and Simon burning the 777DY aka Jem777BBQ and a video of Cradle of Filth playing Ozzfest with James headbanging most of the time.
Simon also played for us all some old footage of Steve on stage with
Frank Zappa in NYC(’81) and a bit of the Frank Zappa tribute concert with Steve, Dweezil and Mike Kenealy trading licks.
All in all I had a great time and I want to thank Simon and Pete for organising it all and esp Simon for being a great host after the jam.
Me and Steve must have stayed in his house close to 4 hours talking guitars, music and having a great time.
Thanks a lot Simon, it was great.
ilia
p.s. forgot to say that I took some pictures and I'll be sending them to Simon or Gabe so they can post them on the Jemfest mini jem jams page.
