Zappa plays Zappa Oslo 9 Juni

roarh skrev:

Trommisen var den samme ja. Joe Travers.

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Vidar Bol skrev:

Savnet Napoleon jeg også, han nye var flink han, men.

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Hello Friends,

Well it's that time again... time to hit the road. Since Australia we've had a plan in place for a new vocalist. It was a really good plan. An exciting plan! Have a great singer from a well known group spend  a month learning all of the songs for the next tour and then get together in LA to get down to business. With leather...

His voice on recordings seemed to be quite a nice texture, something that would easily fit right in to our rocking teenage combo. We had 2 weeks of rehearsals planned and we were pretty psyched to begin. Enter our candidate. All smiles, everyone is looking forward to the downbeat, excited to hear the new lead voice in the group. Within a few moments it became obvious that our candidate had not done any of the required preparation for this gig.

We had a few days to work with our candidate and unfortunately the results were not what we had hoped for. A week went by and we started to get very concerned... no complete songs had been learned. It was now very clear that this wasn't going to work.

We then had ourselves a new problem... how would we find a singer for the upcoming tour in less than a week. How would they even be able to learn the required material?  We made some calls and rounded up a few terrified singers. Imagine the call, "Hello, are you interested in auditioning for a really tough gig, with a highly critical fanbase - with a  5 week tour that starts in less than a week? Still there??? Ideally you'll need to learn 8 to 10 songs for the first week. You do have a passport, right?"

I told all of the singers that if they could walk in and sing the correct melody to "Inca Roads" without missing an entrance they would have a chance of being hired on the spot. The chances of that happening were quite slim considering we needed them to learn this  song in the shortest time possible. For some only a few hours...

A few very talented singers gave it their best shot. We didn't even make it through the first verse in most cases.

Things were not looking so good but then it happened.  A young blonde-haired guy walks in to audition, says he's heard the song before but never tried to sing until last night.

Joe rolls the toms and Billy initiates the classic marimba figure, first verse arrives - right notes, right rhythms, no mistakes! The song continues and gets increasingly more difficult. After the solo the vocal entrances are pretty tricky, once again no mistakes. After the interludes and keyboard solo we entered the home stretch - no-one made it this far before. The final entrance arrives and... He completes the entire passage on his own, not realizing it's actually split up into separate phrases between himself and Scheila. Ultimately making it much harder on himself because of the shear lyrical density.

After a slow mo "hollywood" triumphant hand-clapping sequence we hired the guy. Ladies and Gentlemen allow us to introduce you to Ben Thomas, our new lead singer.

He's got a lot of material to learn in the next few days but he's up for the challenge. We'll provide you with more details about Ben Thomas as we learn more about him ourselves. For now the most important thing is that he has a passport and is free for the next 5 weeks - oh yeah and the fact that he walked in and nailed Inca Roads.


See you out on the road,
DZ

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