I taught three students today at the Guest House, each one different, a nice way to spend a few hours by the pool. Dave (65 from USA, living in Thailand) is working on writing a song, and he needed some ideas for how to open it up a bit and get away from just three chords. I gave him a bunch of possibilities to mess around with; here's how you could use the relative minor, here's what it would sound like to go to the lll chord minor a la 'Suzanne takes you down...', here's what you could do with the flat V11 chord to the 1Vchord to the 1chord, here's how it could sound if you use the minor 1V chord to resolve back home a la In My Life (Beatles) Stuff like that and he ate it up. If you don't know it, it's like, 'WOW'. If you do know it, it's standard issue songwriting, but someone needs to turn you onto it, and then you know... Dominic (62 from Canada, now living here) is a pretty good player who likes that old time stuff, but isn't yet comfortable with the use of the diminished chord, so I gave him two songs to work on: Paper Moon and Cheek to Cheek, both great songs with fairly challenging progressions, but stuff he can handle. He loved it and can't wait to go home and get comfortable with the material. Clo (25 from France, living in Scotland) is a beginner who is starting to finger pick and is very motivated to be a guitar player. It's great to work with different people and to get the equivalent of 3 days pay for a few hours by the pool. Crazy.
Pretty good night gigging in the bar last night, best song turned out to be 'Up on Cripple Creek' by the Band, as some guys stepped forward to belt out some harmonies and we got pretty funky with it. I'm also loving 'You Don't Know Me' which also sounded great. 'Talent Show' is part of the set as well, digging that song. Bhang Lassie gets a great response every time as well. Jeff has us playing the early part of the night, which is fine, but the stuff we're doing is way more interesting and swinging than what comes after, but hey, it doesn't matter, happy to have the gigs.
M and I had a really nice day today, including getting up early to go and get bus tickets for tomorrow's 5 hour ride to Sukhothai. Then we came back, she slept, I taught, had a little visit in the middle of the afternoon, some food, coffee and off she goes to work. Such is the rhythm. I'll be in the bar late tonight playing bass for Apple's set, then get out of there by 1am to get some sleep. She'll follow when her shift ends around 3am, get some sleep and we'll be on a bus at 12:45 pm heading south. Looking forward to something different.
Back still bothering me periodically, and I realize it has something to do with playing guitar, it's putting some kind of stress there when I play, so I'll need to get that figured out (as well as massaged). I'm getting more massages during this period of time than I've had in the rest of my life to date, and that is clearly one of the perks of living here. It's a beautiful thing, and hey, if I can help the local economy, it would be selfish of me to refuse, right?
Well it's 6:30pm, beginning to get dark, the weather is perfect (again) it's great to be in northern Thailand. And off we go....
