Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

arcati crisis

Better (excerpt) – Arcati Crisis, Live @ Rehearsal

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I keep crowing about how we have a new bass player in Arcati Crisis, but what I have been slightly mum on is that Jake the Bassman is also a formidable singer. He was the other baritone in our erstwhile professional acappella group, and one of my go-to companions for heading out to open mic nights.

Gina and I being the hardcore harmony freebasing addicts that we are, it was only a matter of time until we used Jake to upgrade one of our duets to three-part harmony.

Behold, our first successful attempt on “Better,” with harmony as arranged by Arcati Crisis with the help of my dear wife, E:

When I first started learning to play music I had a free guitar tab notation program, and I would spend endless hours entering my favorite songs into it. In many cases I was notating them in ways that would be unplayable by one, two, or even three guitars.

I didn’t care. I wanted to hear the harmony. I would set the midi patch on “vocal oohs” and pretend that a group of singers were crooning the song back at me. How amazing, I thought, that people could make chords with their voices like I do on my guitar.

(This perhaps explains my obsession with acappella groups.)

That version of Peter barely knew what notes were portrayed on a treble clef, and couldn’t hit one if his life depended on it.

Fifteen years later, three part harmony, exactly like my speakers sang to me back in the 90s.

I love making past versions of me proud to be grown up :)

so many songs, so little time

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Tonight we held a marathon acoustic Arcati Crisis rehearsal with the addition of our old friend and new bass man, Jake.

As we learned last year with Zina, it’s not the easiest thing to onboard a new band member – even when they’re the most instinctual player and consummate professional. As the bandleaders, we have to know our stuff cold. Every rhythm, every transition. Anywhere we’ve developed a bit of sloppy shorthand with each other will fall apart when the new instrument hits it – especially with the force of Zina’s drumming!

As opposed to Zina (who started from just two songs that had drum arrangements and learned our entire repertoire in eight months), Jake has the benefit of existing fully-notated arrangements that imply a certain amount of bass action. Sounds great, right? Yet, Jake has both Gina and I competing with him on low end rhythm, because at many points we act as each other’s bass player.

Two steps forward, two steps back.

(No, that does not mean we’re covering a Paula Abdul song. If only. I’ve proposed that cartoon cat action at least once a year.)

(Also, FWIW, bass isn’t as obvious as drumming or adding harmony. A new bass part can sound perfectly fine for weeks until it’s turned up just a touch, and you realize it actually clashes with everything.)

Last week we learned out of the blue that we’re responsible for a three hour long acoustic spot next Saturday in Collingswood, so Zina got the night off while we attempted play every song we can even vaguely claim to know – which turned out to be 30 – with Jake playing bass on as many of them as he was able.

To put that in perspective, on the current never-ending U2 tour that boasts different setlists every night to date they’ve played a total of 61 full-length unique songs, along with a vast number of medley’d snippets.

Three hours later and I am completely spent – mind, body, and voice.

I fundamentally don’t understand how bands keep more than 30 songs in repertoire. Even rehearsing two or more times a week, it’s just a monstrous amount of material to keep fresh.

Of the 30 songs we eeked out around 25 solid versions – most with Jake. The giddiest success was “Better.” After weeks of misses and curses-under-breath, we nailed 11 out of twelve three party harmonies. We finally clicked on “Brother John,” “Real End” has transformed (again) into our best pop song, Gina and I delivered a close to note-perfect “In My Life,” and Jake made “Under My Skin” giddy and new again.

(What were the seven bum tunes? Mostly covers, though we fell apart repeatedly on “Hyperbole.” Specifically, we bombed “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” and I was overwrought and flat on “Across the Universe.”)

We have one more three-hour rehearsal left, and then our show. I’m sure we’ll be fine – after all, we’ve done this three-hour thing before, and we had a lot fewer songs back then. But it will also be our first trial-run with Jake helming our low end. It sounds fine in our parlor, but who knows how it will turn out in the wild?

Also, it makes me wonder how we’re going to achieve on of our big goals for the 2011-12 season of AC – learning a new song every month. Are we really ready to be rehearsing 44 tunes by a year from now?

I guess we’re about to find out.

it’s a glam rock life

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At about midnight on Saturday Gina and I were having some issues.

At that time we were on the third song of our full-length, fully-electric Arcati Crisis set at Fergie’s pub.

Actually, we were about four minutes into trying to start our third song, my one-minute and six-second tune, “Glam.”

In case you are bad at rock math, 4:1 is not a very good prep-time to play-time ratio.

On the left side of the stage, one of Gina’s two lowest strings was a hair out of tune. On the right side of the stage, I was playing the opening riff to my own song in the wrong key (which sorta made Gina’s ever-so-minor tuning issue a moot point).

Even in the moment I was struck by the Alanis-Irony that after six months of preparing for our big electric debut we were having the kind of rock-stoppage that regularly felled us a decade ago when we were acoustic teenagers, all while our brand new drummer looked on, bemused.

That’s rock for you. You can practice all your high flying solos and set up an awesome effects chain, but rock has some basic requirements to fulfill and one of them is playing in the same key as each other (unless you want to play more experimentally and/or with a lot more distortion than we do).

You don’t think about this stuff when you watch a pop band play their new single on Saturday Night Live. They have guitar techs. The drummer has a click track in ear so they can cue samples. One of the guitarists is actually playing into a midi sequencer so it doesn’t matter too much if he’s a hair out of tune. And on every chorus the singer is doubled by a ten-track, four-part harmony pulled right off of her record.

That shit is way above our heads.

Of course, if one of them forgets what key the song is in they’re still in trouble, so I suppose what I’m saying is Gina would do fine on Saturday Night Live, but I would be immortalized in my own Ashlee Simpson moment.

But not really. Because I am a freakish perfectionist, and we had played all of these songs hundreds of times already, and we already played an awesome sneak preview date and teaser set and two awesome songs, and I was not about to let me forgetting for three measures the song was not actually in F ruin my night.

The upshot of this story is that the gig was awesome. The whole “Glam” snafu was barely a blip. On our third try we just started the damn thing, and after the eight seconds of dischordant intro all of our issues were over. We proceeded directly from that into a raucous debut of our cover of “Moonage Daydream.” Then we played Gina’s brand-new “Song for Mrs. Schroeder” for the first time, and turned in pitch-perfect versions of “Apocalyptic Love Song” and “Love Me Love Me Not” to end our first set.

I even hit the little hammer in the last verse of “Love Me Not” I had missed in our last few rehearsals.

Over an hour later we closed the night by launching into one of the most awesome, hard-rocking versions of Gina’s seven-minute epic “Brother John” that we’ve ever unleashed.

When it was over we said thank you, doled out sweaty hugs to our friends that had hung around until last call to catch every song, and got paid.

And then I drove a car inside of the Philadelphia city limits for the first time ever – at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning – and I didn’t even kill any drunk douche bags on Walnut.

In sum, the “Glam” incident barely even ranks. I’m only devoting precious digital column-inches to it as a reminder that the stupid crap that happens to me in the middle of a show only has to matter if I let it.

Otherwise, it’s eight painfully out-of-tune seconds out of a three-and-a-half hour gig, and that is a really effing good out-of-tune to awesome ratio.

Intuition (an Arcati Crisis adventure)

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I listen to and look at my favorite bands and wonder, “how do they do that?”

I don’t mean the rock star posturing or the songwriting. I’ve figured both of those things out, to a degree. They come with practice (in the mirror).

I mean the intuition. The knowing where a song goes, and how to construct the arrangement of thrumming bass and pounding drums that surround the initial guitar or piano that lie in the center.

I’ve always assumed Gina and I have some special magic in that regard in the the peculiar alchemy of our harmony. And, well, we do. It’s the intuition of best friends. We know each other so well that when one of us teaches a new song to the other it’s like we’re adding an extension of our own hands and voice. There is less and less of  us asking “is this part okay?” and more of   “yes, that!”

That hasn’t been our experience with other musicians. That’s not to say we haven’t played with some brilliant people who have made indelible additions to our songs. It’s just that the additions tend to add too much.

(A notable exception being Dante Bucci, who is invariably a perfectly intuitive collaborator in any setting on any instrument. Also, our friend Chaz arranged the definitive percussion for “Apocalyptic Love Song.”)

As a result, I assumed that there were only two kinds of potential bandmates – people who play well because they understand context (the Rolling Stones know each other, Gina understands me, Dante understands us, Chaz knows our influences) or because their bandleader dictated each note to them.

(That latter seems like an ultimate bit of hubris – why invite another player you respect and not trust them to do anything? But musicians can be freaks of control, and we’ve all seen bands run that way, so it’s certainly a valid angle (which is why we don’t (and may never) have a bass player).)

Now I understand that there is a third category – that an intuitive player can find their way inside of a song instead of adding layers to its exterior. Sure, practice helps. But, the intuition is an intangible. It’s either there or not.

Zina is there. Every one of our songs takes three plays. One to hear how we do it. One to try a few things. One with our new drum arrangement. Fin.

That’s not to say that she doesn’t continue to change and adapt her playing, or that we don’t ask for some tweaks here and there. It’s just that she hears it – us, the song, our gestalt with each other – and then she joins it.

I’m amazed every time. Now I understand my favorite bands a little bit better.

Want to hear the new drummed up Arcati Crisis spectacle, complete with rapturous Gina guitar solos? You can attend Dorian’s Parlor on Saturday 3/12, or just catch us at Fergies Pub on Saturday 4/2.

You Sound Like a Vulture (an Arcati Crisis adventure)

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For the past few months Gina and I have been rehearsing with Zina, who is also the drummer in E’s band Filmstar.

It started as a speculative exercise – what would Arcati Crisis sound like with drums? We got our answer pretty quickly, as Zina is a ridiculously fast study. We’re already eight songs into drumming up our repertoire, and last night Zina polished off “Bucket Seat” after only a second rehearsal of it.

“Bucket Seat” has been one of my favorite songs from the moment I finished writing it in 2003. When Gina and I made Arcati Crisis formal in 2007 it was the second new song I brought to her to add to the repertoire, and in minutes she found the off-kilter chords that tangle with my staccato diminished stabs. Now the song sounds nude if I play it solo.

Zina was proving to be equally as intuitive on it. After our first run with Zina we fine-tuned a few spots and ran it twice more. It was solid, and we were playing it at the right tempo, but I felt like it was over too quickly.

I turned to Gina. “I think you need to play a guitar solo out of the fast part after the key change.”

One of my favorite aspects of the drumming process is that rather than constrict arrangements around our guitar playing, drums have opened up more space. Zina’s rhythm takes the burden of the two of us. These are songs we’ve played literal hundreds of times, but we keep finding new spaces inside them.

That said, nothing’s structure has really changed yet. The songs are all the same shapes they’ve always been. We haven’t added any funky breakdowns. Or guitar solos.

“A solo?” Gina asked, a little tentatively.

“Sure. You know, like what you play in the intro. Try it.”

We tried it. Gina stopped after four notes, two of which were pretty cool. “It doesn’t quite fit.”

“Yeah, but if you keep the two that worked, and descend…” I started imitating her guitar with my voice, wailing a solo. “raw wah, whear wheh wah, rah weh wah,” I paused for a breath between phrases, “and then a lower ascending line.” I climbed back up the scale, “until it resolves!” I shouted, wheezing and wailing until I reached a bent note at the top.

I finished my performance and looked at Gina expectantly.

“You sounded like a vulture,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“You want me to play it like that?”

“Well, you know. That’s the general shape of it.”

She regarded me skeptically while Zina looked on from behind the kit, bemused.

“I could draw it for you,” I offered, “like David Bowie did for Mick Ronson on ‘Moonage Daydream.’ I could go get crayons.”

“Oh, sure,” Gina mimed with her hands what I assumed to be an elaborate David Bowie crayon drawing, “that might work. Or we could just try to play it a few times.”

And that was how “Bucket Seat” acquired a guitar solo.

You can stream or download our full-length Live @ Rehearsal, Vol. 4 LP for free. Hear “Bucket Seat” and other rocked up Arcati Crisis songs at Dorian’s Parlor Neo-Victorian ball on Saturday March 12. There will be steampunk costumes. We’re also working on a ninja weeknight gig for February. Stay tuned.