[30] The Train Song (Medley)

  This video is a 3-song medley, and so, in my As Live As I Can Make It project, these songs are numbers 28, 29 and 30.

  The completion of this video also marks the completion of Phase 1 of my ALAICMI project.  The job of recording the audio and video of all 30 of these songs has been very nearly 7 days a week nonstop for some 27 months.  This collection is just about everything (mostly my own originals) that I’ve been playing all my life.

  It’s truly been a lifelong project.  As of this writing, I now move to preparation for doing Phase 2 of the project.  With Phase 2, I will be going “live,” that is, I’ll be playing live accompanied by backing tracks that I’ve been able to make with these recordings.  That’s why Phase 1 was absolutely essential.  And, because I’ll be accompanied by my own backing tracks, that’s why I call this project “As Live As I Can Make It.”

  As I write this, it is February 17, 2023.  My plan is to launch Phase 2 sometime in April of this year.  I still have a lot of preparation to do.

  I recorded this as a 3-song medley because that’s the way I’ve always liked to play it.  Each part originated at different times, though, likely, not separated from each other by much time.

  The first song, called Warm-Up Piece in D on this video, is surely one of the very first things I’ve ever made up.  I know I was playing it as early as 1974.  I never gave it an actual title.  The simple and goofy keyboard melody that I've inserted into this song is new with this recording.  So is the break into the basic rock motif in the middle of the song, though even that is something that I’ve been playing since I was a bass player in a teenage garage band.

  The second piece which I've called Middle Part Transition, as I stated in the video, makes use of some of the chords of Alvin Lee’s song, I Don’t Know That You Don’t Know My Name, which is on Ten Years After’s 1969 album, Ssssh.  I always like playing those chords but never had an interest in learning to play the whole song (although, as I recall, other than the lyrics, those chords pretty much are the whole song).  The best thing I liked about those chords is how they seemed to just naturally lead me into playing The Train Song.

  The Train Song – Although I registered this song with the Copyright Office in 1981, I’ve surely been playing this song since the mid 1970’s.  I figured that all guitar players – acoustic guitar players, anyway – should have a train song of some kind or other, and this one is mine.

  The Train Song is the one and only song that ever was played on the radio, and that only obscurely in 1981.

  There have always been two things that have eluded me all my life:  One was that I was never able to put together a band.  The other was that I never found out a way to get my music heard (made all the more difficult without a band).

  By 1976 or 1977, I decided that what I needed to do was to record my music, at least so that the recordings could be used for demos that I could pitch to labels, who would then supply the band and the finished-quality recordings.  That was the reason that, in 1976, I purchased my Docorder reel-to-reel, so that I could record multiple “tracks,” so to speak (The Docorder wasn’t really a multi-track deck, but it had a feature that it called “sound on sound.”)

  Even that plan wasn’t getting me anywhere.  I then figured I needed better quality recordings for demos, and to get that, I would have to buy my own studio time at a professional recording studio.

  Well, so I had The Train Song that I had been playing for some time, long enough that I had worked out every detail of the rhythm, bass and lead.  I knew them all by heart so that by late 1980 or early 1981 I was ready to take it to the studio.  The engineer I had was great.  And I was fortunate to find a drummer who did a fantastic job.

  The recording turned out super.  I got scant radio play.  But otherwise, nothing.

  That’s still where I’m at today.  And, as of now, with the completion of this song, I’ve now recorded and videoed myself playing practically everything of mine that I’ve been playing over 45 years – in other words, practically all my life.

  So I’m an old codger now, and I’m still not giving up.  And if things weren’t already hard enough, now we have all this covid plandemic hogwash and Great Reset and New World Order bull going on.

  What now?

  I don’t know.  But the only thing I can figure now is that if I’m going to get anybody to hear my stuff, I’m going to have to take it live.

 Now, at long last, I’m able to do that.  That’s what’s next.

  At least, that’s the plan.

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