Hootenanny

Met Brian and Rita at the marina office.  They are now waiting on a part to be delivered from NZ for their hydraulic line.  The guy who was supposed to fix it here was very apologetic, but finally gave up.  They will be here for another week waiting for DHL to ship it.

Brian says "Bring your guitar over in an hour." Sounds good.  Brian is the (near) deaf keyboard player that was part of our circle up in Savusavu.  We get along great musically.  He is one of those guys who has perfect pitch and I don't.  See? 

So at the appointed time I pick up the guitar and walk up the deck toward the dock.  The guy in the boat next door looks up and says "Hey!  I have a bass!  Can I join you?"  Holy wah - we may have a combo!  I said sure and pointed out Brian's boat.  The guy said he had some stuff to do at the fuel dock but that he would be over.

I trip happily over to Brian's boat and announce that I had invited another musician to join us.  Brian was all pumped but couldn't figure out how a bass would work on his boat.  I told him that it was probably an acoustic bass like a guitar.  Turns out that's the case.

First item of business is always making sure the guitar is in tune.  Brian has an electronic keyboard, so he's never the issue.  I pull out my phone, call up FenderTune and proceed to tweak the strings.  Except for the D string, third from the bottom.  I turn and turn the tuning knob and it doesn't change pitch!  Oh-oh.

After much consternation and close-order inspection of the recalcitrant tuning knob we decide surgery was called for.  So Rita finds a small Phillips screwdriver and I disassemble the tuning knob assembly.  We pull it apart and can find nothing wrong.  Gears are fine, they mesh.  WTZ?

Put it back together and find no improvement.   Now what?

I noticed that a tensioning screw seemed to be reverse-threaded.  This led me to the bright idea that maybe, just maybe, when the guitar was assembled in China that somebody had slipped a tuning knob assembly from the other side of the headstock onto the wrong side and that maybe there was a slip clutch built in.  So I re-strung the string going the wrong way around the peg.  Still no improvement, but now we could use a screwdriver to turn the peg (which we couldn't before).  Tuned up the guitar and Brian and I did 'Margaritaville' like I had never left.

Then the guy with the bass shows up with his wife.  They introduced themselves as Ollie and Heidi.  Ollie takes his bass guitar and makes a few practice runs.  Oh-oh.  Holy wah is this guy good.  Turns out he is a professional jazz bass player who teaches music theory at the University of Auckland.

Now imagine my predicament:  Here I am, old three-chord Dave sandwiched between two professional musicians.  And Brian says to me, "We'll follow you."  So we did 'Country Roads, Brown-Eyed Girl, Mr. Bojangles, Me and Bobby Mcgee, Piano Man (of course - Brian shines on this one).  Ollie starts suggesting songs that we've never heard of.  Then he does the bass run and says 'Sound familiar?'  No, pal.  

We managed to kill several hours with fits and starts of fractional songs; I was using my phone to Google lyrics.  Heidi did a very nice job on 'Hallelujah' and 'Summertime'.  Clearly I am out of my league.  I mean, I'm not even in the same ballpark as these guys.  Somehow they tolerated me.  And we're probably going to do it again.

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