Ten Jam Sessions I Remember

I am blessed by having musical friends. That being said, I am cursed in that I never picked up a musical instrument. I regret it. My mother wanted me to be in the band when I was in grade school, but being an outdoor and independent type, I wanted nothing of it. I think part of the problem was the lack of cool instruments to entice me. If I could have learned guitar or something like that, or maybe even drums, it would have been more appealing. Trumpet, saxophone, trombone and tuba did not have the sex-appeal I required. But in retrospect, it was a mistake. Perhaps in the second-half of my life, I will acquire the discipline and drive to learn an instrument. Stranger things have happened. If I’d have known how much fun it is to get blasted and sit around with friends playing music, I’d have started in my youth.

So my musical aptitude is limited to singing, of which I can a bit (I’m no fucking Pavarotti, but who the hell is, except Pavarotti?), and playing the harmonica, which I picked up on my own. The harmonica is 5% aptitude and 95% attitude. If you are in the right key, you can’t really go wrong. It is the instrument for me, at least for the time being.

Here are some of my memories regarding jam sessions with my musical friends. They are in no particular order, so let’s post with bullets!

• The Return of Tony Bochicchio I think this must have been in 1991, when Tony Bochicchio returned to Ames for what I think may have been the Veishea festivities. What I remember most about this jam session was that Tony, who no one knew learned how to play guitar, sat down, played AND SANG one of the most moving covers of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song I have ever heard. Most of the time when we sat around, caught a buzz and jammed, we weren’t too serious about it, but something about Tony’s song got everyone listening and, I think, in the end, all were really moved by his rendition.
• Harmonizing with Kyle Horn I We were out at Kyle Horn’s place on South Dayton, this being before I lived there. Loren Christensen and Steve Kapaun were there, and Kyle suggested that we try a number from the Band, The Weight. After pulling off those harmonies, we tried something a little bit tougher, namely The Hollies, The Air That I Breathe, and we hit the harmony dead on. We probably could never do it again, but that time we hit it dead on. Then came probably the most memorable part of the evening as Loren’s then new bride, Karen, came out there in an angry mood to hustle her husband home. He was lying on the floor when she showed up, and he jumped up and was out the door, without saying goodbye, all in one, lightning-fast movement.
• Jethro Tull with Kyle and Kathy As I have mentioned in a previous post, Kathy Lynott came over to Kyle’s place with her flute, and we played Locomotive Breath by Jethro Tull. I think another Jethro Tull hit, Bungle in the Jungle, was attempted as well. For me, it is a pleasant memory, as it is one of the last I have of my friend, Kathy.
• Room 101 at Gilligan’s I don’t know if this really counts as a jam session or not, but it certainly felt like one. I was running the sound board for the band, Room 101, at their Gilligan’s gig back in the spring of 1987. Gilligan’s was a dive basement bar in a now-demolished building behind Welch Avenue in Ames’ Campustown. My theory behind running the sound board was, when in doubt, turn it up. I may have a bit of tinnitus from this experience, and since the band was too cheap to get a long-enough cable for the sound board, I plied my trade directly in front of the loudspeakers. Jim Anderson actually made a cassette tape of this show, which due to the extreme volume, didn’t exactly turn out half bad, even for a "ghetto blaster" recording. Note to Jim: convert to MP3! My biggest memory of the show: Will Sigsbee started the opening chords to Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven at the very end, perhaps thinking he would start an encore, but everyone else ignored him and continued packing up their shit for the evening.
• Largemouth Bass South of Ames Jim and Ivy were housesitting at a prof’s place south of Highway 30 in Ames during the summer of 1992, and Kevin Brocker, Jay Heydlauff, Jim and I did a bit of jamming in the basement. Since Jim and I had just seen the Laibach show at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago, the theme was very industrial, with militaristic drum beats provided by Jay, who, in a former life, was once the drummer for Dale Evans, Roy Roger’s wife. Isn’t that funky? I wonder if he ever met Trigger. Anyhow, the themes of the songs we were playing had themes to do with freshwater fish. I remember “The Bluegill Blues”, and a song called “Largemouth Bass”, which went something like, “We are the army of largemouth bass. We've got no worries and we've got no class.” You get the idea. Again, volume was key, and I remember our guitarist, Kevin, leaning back in a chair and screaming, “My head hurts!” before it was all over.
• Jamming with Loren in Bitburg When I was stationed the first time in Germany from 1993 to 1996, I had to good fortune to be able to hang out with my good friend, Loren Christensen, who was stationed in the Air Force at Bitburg until 1995. We would get together on weekends, drink a hell of a lot of good German beer (Bitburger, what else? When in Rome, or in this case, Bitburg…), and play music, with Loren on guitar and me playing harmonica and singing. I think that this phase really brought Loren’s guitar playing up to a new level, as he could play damn near any cover we tried at the end in 1995. I remember well one Saturday afternoon, when he had the keys to a new apartment he and his family were moving into. We went over to that empty place with a twelve pack and jammed the entire afternoon. I attempted to steer Loren a bit away from The Rolling Stones with some David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen.
• The Adelante Basement, post-Christmas 1988 Loren, Scott Peterson and I returned to Ames after spending Christmas with our families back on the farms. Ames without students was always pretty cool, in that some of the wildest partying went on during the breaks. I remember trucking up to Ames in Loren’s Ford Escort, which smelled horrible the entire time. Later it was discovered that he had hit some animal with the car, and that the remnants of the carcass were burning on his muffler. Yummy. We got up to Ames for a jam session with the guitarist from his erstwhile band, of which I can’t remember the name. Perhaps it was the infamous “Steve Garvey and the Love Boat Guys”. The choice of liquor for the jam session was a bottle of whiskey, which I remember was purchased in true, poor college student fashion, by dumping a cask full of pennies before the cashier at the liquor store. After 15 minutes of counting the copper, we had our booze and were ready to jam. The theme that afternoon in the basement of Adelante Fraternity was pretty much heavy metal, flavored by the long-haired guitarist, but some originals came out of the mix, such as “Give Me All Your Money”, a theme that considering the penny purchase, was rather poignant.
• Harmonizing with Kyle Horn II When I lived out on South Dayton with Kyle Horn and Leo Koster, we decided to have a Superbowl party in January, 1993. Leo was a pretty good cook (but unfortunately a pretty crappy dishwasher), so we feasted on wild game such as smoked Alaskan salmon and venison on the grill, as well as sampling some of Leo’s homebrewed concoctions, of which the best was his mead, which would have made a Viking chieftain proud. The only problem with the party was that Leo invited a lot of his asshole friends, too many, in fact, so that our invited guests, Kyle and I eventually decided to forgo the game for our haunts upstairs. Kyle got out his twelve-string and played some Neil Young, including Heart of Gold, to which I accompanied him on the harmonica.
• Kevin, Guy and Steve Craven on Main St. I remember this rooftop jam session for the spontaneous playing of R.E.M.’s Driver 8. Guy and I lived like plastic extras in some kid’s giant train set, right next to the double tracks in downtown Ames, and when the train came by, these gents decided to break into the song. I think I surprised them by knowing the words to it. You gotta like a train song with real trains in the background!
• The Main Street Afternoon Jams, Fall 1989 This was a time in my life when I was in transition. I had basically had enough of architecture school and needed to find something new. That something came about when I started learning German that semester. I decided that I should study what I enjoy, which in this case was the German language and history, instead of flogging myself with something like architecture, of which I got no further satisfaction, apart from architectural history. So, during this time of transition, many an afternoon was spent above Olive’s in downtown Ames. Loren would show up with his stash, we’d get high and play music the entire afternoon, sometimes to the dismay of my roommate, Guy, although Guy never really had a problem with partaking in Loren’s goodies. All in all, it was a hell of lot of fun, as is evident from the cassette tapes that Loren often religiously recorded of the sessions. Most have been lost to history, but I have kept a few, which is probably the reason that Loren never decided to run for public office. I could make a mint selling them to the opposition!

If any of you dudes out there remember any other jam sessions of note that didn't make the list, please comment!