Burlap and Blues, The Blues Blog

Playing guitar is awesome. It's more than just fun, for me it's an outlet, an
expression of myself. There are few things more fun than learning new licks
or working out chord progressions or learning a new song. But it's even more fun to get together and jam with friends. One of the most relaxing things for me is to jam for hours on end with friends and just make stuff up along the way. This is what Dan and Jeremy and I did over Easter weekend.

Saturday afternoon my friend Gabe and I headed over to Dan's house on the river. It's a bit out there in the boondocks but I think that might be part of what makes it relaxing for me - the house is out of the city and overlooks a real pretty stretch of the Tennessee river with the Appalachian foothills in the background. We got there early afternoon and thankfully we had a dedicated drummer and bassist this time so Gabe and I didn't have to put our very rudimentary drum/bass skills to use. We got set up and just jammed for about 4 or 5 hours with a few breaks here and there. The drummer and bassist had to take breaks but I didn't and Dan jokingly said that "as long as there's a beat Brian'll keep playin!" I suppose he's right, but I was just happy to be there! Everybody was in top form that day - Jeremy, as always, bringing the killer riffs, Dan playing some great blues harp fills, the bassist and drummer laying down a solid rhythm section, even Gabe, who insisted he was rusty, brought some great licks. Someone would come up with a riff and everyone else would fall in, adding some chords here, some
fills there, then the drums and bass would fill it out and we'd have a great jam goin. At one point Jeremy even had some nasty sounding slide work over a driving blues rhythm (and by nasty I mean awesome). The only downer was that we weren't able to get any pictures or video this time, but that's okay. There will be other times I'm sure.

As I said, jam sessions are great. There are few things more fun than jamming with a bunch of friends. Some guys bond over fishing, some over bowling, for others it's football - for me it's a good jam session with my buddies. But what I'd really like to do is resurrect Max's old plan. Before it fell apart, Max had a plan for a meeting at Dan's house for any and all who would like to come, a weekend long jam session for any who wanted to participate. I still think it's feasible sometime in the future and if there's serious interest in it I say we work it out.