My rock and roll misadventures - 3 : Wah Wah B. Badd - cry baby !

This carries on from our last misadventure as Grass at Oasis,BITS Pilani , India.

The next mis(s) followed soon after. We were playing at the Crossroads festival , SRCC , Delhi University. Some of the additional stuff I remember preparing for this one were Proud Mary and Johnny B Goode. Kartik could sing those bloody well , especially Proud Mary. And Kim could play them note perfect.I was adding in improvised (for obvious reasons !) solos on both. That included using a Wah Wah on Proud Mary.

Backstory : The pedal I had was a Fuzz Wah Wah of 70’s-80’s vintage.I’d bought it from this guy who’d shown up with a friend one evening looking to raise some dough for a booze up. I did some dough raising of my own from my mom- in consideration for a brief lecture on life in general and how I was approaching it in particular.I shelled out 75 rupees (around USD 4 then) and there it was – my first effects pedal (and sadly also my last). It was lying around for a year or so though before I took it out for rehersal now . It worked well enough and filled in some colour into the blandness.

The gig was a different story though. There,the only Cry Baby-ing the pedal brought on was in the vulnerable deeps of my pysche.

Because my guitar inexplicably went out of tune the moment I stepped onto the damn pedal ! It was stunning. I carried on with the solo , what else was there to do ! Even tuning the guitar back after that track and unplugging that pedal away for the rest of the show weren’t enough. The guitar tuning effed up on me yet again as I was doing the second solo on Johnny B. Goode, our set closer.It was a really screwed up solo anyway where I just went up and down the Am Pentatonic blues scale in as many cliched phrases as you can think of. Add to that ‘loud’ and ‘badly out of tune’ and man , I plumbed some new depths there that day. The only saving grace was that the crowds that’d started at around 50-60 (ground capacity 2000-3000) had dwindled to around 20-30 by the time we were through ! Ha !

Another thing that dwindled was the band and it dwindled to nothing. Though Kartik and I continued to play together, that was the last gig all of us did as Grass. Did I hear you mutter a civil Not Surpised-And-Thank God ?

But I have never figured out to this day just what the hell that pedal did do to the guitar to set it off key like that.

Gaurav’s drawing up there is very much in tune though.

As for Johnny B Goode , many people have covered it but my favourite is the Judas Priest version. It’s punchy as they come. Check it out here. If you’re not into Priest – and I’m not either , by the way – just bear the initial screeching and then hear it take off. It rocks hard and it rocks well !