Any genre…if you’ve been playing out recently, what are the tunes that you perform most often, especially from band to band? Please mention where you live as well…
(For live music fans, what are the songs you hear/remember being played (too) frequently?)
Here’s some of mine (South Florida):
Mustang Sally*
Walk The Dog*
Stormy Monday
All Over Now
The Weight
Dead Flowers
Chain Of Fools
Little Wing
Red House
Thrill Is Gone
Hey Joe
Knocking On Heaven’s Door
I’ll play!
I live in the very north of England and gig locally.
All The Small Things/The Lion Sleeps Tonight
I Don’t Feel Like Dancing
Billy Jean
Wake Me Up Before You Go-go
Brimful of Asha
Gay Bar
Kiss/(Get Your) Rocks (Off)
Blitzkrieg Bop/Whole Again
She Wants To Move
Sexyback
Hot in Herre
I Believe in a Thing Called Love
Shout
Those are the dead certs in a list of about 70, of which we’d play about 35 in a gig.
Guitarist in a covers band in Westchester County, NY - just above the city.
That’s What I Like About You - The Romantics
Save it for Later - The (English) Beat
White Wedding/Dancing with Myself - Billy Idol
Sedated/Rockaway Beach - The Ramones
Ring of Fire - Social Distortion’s punk cover
Should I Stay or Should I Go/Brand New Cadillac - The Clash
Love Shack - B-52s
Walkin’ on the Sun - Smashmouth
A bunch of others in that vein. **Mixo **- what do you play? I want to fit you into my mental picture with that blues set. **Made in Macau **- what do you play? Man that playlist is all over the map! I love the Nelly song Hot in Herre (that keyboard sample riff just rocks) but it is so different from The Ramones straight up punk - what is your band’s instrumentation?
San Francisco Bay Area, in an acoustic band playing in coffee shops…
People Are Strange (Doors)
Summertime (Gershwin)
I Talk to the Wind (King Crimson)
Across the Universe (Beatles)
Why Don’t We Do It in the Road (Beatles)
Changes (David Bowie)
Bungle in the Jungle (Jethro Tull)
Symphony #4, 2nd Movement (Tchaikovsky)
Mad World (Tears for Fears)
Whole Lotta Love (Led Zeppelin)
Can’t Find My Way Home (Blind Faith)
I Wish (Stevie Wonder)
Mother (Pink Floyd)
El Paso (Marty Robbins)
No Expectations (Rolling Stones)
Squeeze Box (Who)
I Shall Be Released (Bob Dylan)
Going to California (Led Zeppelin)
Norwegian Wood (Beatles)
Just 6 miles north of Washington, DC:
[ul]
[li]Bold Riley[/li][li]General Taylor[/li][li]Boston[/li][li]Blow The Man Down[/li][li]Paddy Lay Back[/li][li]When Bibo Went Down[/li][li]Wing Chang Lu[/li][li]Leave Her Johnny[/li][li]Farewell To The Gold[/li][li]A Sailor’s Life[/li][li]New York Girls[/li][li]Jim Jones[/li][/ul]All are traditional to one degree or another.
We’re 2 guitars, bass and drums. I play guitar. Both the other guitarist and I have a good set of pedals to adapt the sound to the song so the Nelly song has a overdriven sound by me playing the main chords and my partner playing through a wah to get the choppy keys sound. Then balls-out rock 4/4 time in the chorus.
We really like playing unexpected songs and abutting two apparently incongruous songs together. We also have a hard rule about the set; we must all enjoy playing it or it’s gone. Hence no real ‘standards’.
Maybe the gear discussion is for another thread, as is - of your set, what’s your favourite song to play? mine currently is Crying Lightning by The Arctic Monkeys. We need to see a young indie crowd before it gets played as its slower than anything else, but i loove playing that song!
MiM
It’s too hard to say definitively – I perform (less frequently and for less money these days in Portland, but I’m not a name player, even though my regular crew consists of some of the best musicians around). My book is made of originals, and things that aren’t really crowd-pleasers like classic rock anthems, but stuff from Martha and the Vandellas, and so forth for pop tunes, and a bunc of standards that don;'t get much play (“Blame It On My Youth,” “The Thngs We Did Last Summer,” “They Say it’s Wonderful,” “Who Can I Turn To?” and the rest of arguably better known standards). My heroes on piano are bebop and hardbop cats like Elmo Hope, Wyn Kelley, Frank Hewitt, Herbie Nichols, but some of the tunes get too complicated to throw out with a pickup band for my taste.
My MO is crowd-pleasing – that’s why I don’t practice much beyond playing 4-5 hours a day just messing with new ideas at my home “studio” (no baffles and only my live mixer and powered monitors, but at least it’s set up and basically takes up 20x10" of my front room. I play just stuff that, after sizing up the audience while hitting up (and, if she’s cute, on) the open-bar bartender at a private job), I think will resonate.
Every situ is different. Not much too add, but I do think that its’ important, if you want to develop a good rep to play to the crowd.
FWIW I guess I’d even play Mustang Sally if the crowd were drunk and “funky,” but, more likely, I’d do something similar like “Yes We Can Can” or “Get Out My Life Woman” or “Workin in a Coal Mine” – but I don’t have a vocalist I like in my list, so it’s all instrumental. A lot of Aretha tunes work fine as Instrumentals – “Think!” is a classic, “Dr. Feelgood,” “Nikkie Hokey” “Since You’ve Been Gone” and the Ray Charles (umpteen) classics.
IMHO the set list is made up on the spot and is entirely dependent on how the audience is reacting. A bunch of sunburnt hicks just off the tire-swing to the lake? Hell yes, cover some classic rock, even with only two instrumentalists and no vox – that will play. Cocktail party – bring out the old standards and maybe, as the night wears on, throw in “If Drinkin’ don’t Kill Me” as George Jones or “Let’s Go Get Stoned” and then jump up to a nice up thing like “Mess Around” or “Hallelujah I Love Her So,” or “I Got A Woman” – the tunes don’t matter IMExperience, more the vibe and being sympatico with the paying customers. Plus, if it’s an open bar, you can get a monster rum and coke, with like a pint of rum in a glass with a splash during break (not before playing! unless you pace yourself) or afterwards, if you make friends with a hired bartender. After all, they’re just the help like you are – it’s a kind of little thing you all can share, being just hired help doing different things for some dough.
Besides, I don’t want to split dough with some chick singer who’s gonna change keys every night and fuck up all the music – and her douchebag bassist BFF probably is part of the package. Goddamnit, if I bring the Hammond (a clone) out, I be playing bass. Maybe I’m a control freak, but there aren’t that many bassists in rock who really know what the shit’s going on. And those who are great with big ears want a bigass cut and probably a guarantee that your new squeeze Brandi will suck him off in the backyard of the garden party. Fuck that shit, I’ll “kick” bass even if I don’t bring pedals with LH, and keep some more scratch for me and my guitar man, and, if there’s providence and my one fantastic drum cat wants to show up, him too.
3x post – those pop tunes I don’t think of as covers. They’re a recognizable framework, and once the groov3e hits, you can has people jamming in their fold-up chairs, even though virtuoso moves are to be applied sparingly. Give the people a hook, close it with a tag, and then segue to another key, another tune when you or the audience wants something else.
Disclaimer: I’m not a hot shit pianist – I can play very well what I know how to do – but more important for my jobs is doing something crowd friendly and getting across that thing. Pay’s awesome, too! (Kidding!) I’d make the same per hour working a cash register, but it’s fun, and the only real work is hauling a bunch of shit and setting up the reinforcement for stage/FOH. But the nice thing is you’re in control of your own development – you can always find something interesting to work at. Not using stage time to try out imperfect stuff, but there’s a good balance of freedom to experiment within simple forms, like the Holland-Dozier-Holland type stuff, or a Johnny Mercer tune, or, bring people to a tear with “Come Sunday.”
Apologize for the enthusiasm – I’m working on my Xmas bag now and finally found a good number of them that works good. None of that Jingle Bells or Rudolph the fuck-face reindeer, but get back to church a la Billy Preston and New Orleans style rundowns. And the seasonal ones “It Ain’t Necessarily So” (with perc on Hammond, no drawbars), “Baby It’s Cold Outisde,” and, of course, “Blue Skies” (always one of my favorites since moving to Portland OR).
Riiiight. Dude, if you’re half as good as the game you talk, you are a hot-shit pianist (please hear that I am not trying to be snarky - you talk a great game and I doubt I could hold the stage with you… “um, Mr. Jaledin, can we just noodle some blues so I can solo using the one Minor Pent scale I know?” ;)). If anything, you could be too good for your own good, if you know what I mean - you can play so many styles, people don’t identify you with a single sound. Is there a risk of that? On the other hand, showing the flexibility to fit into any situation can get you a ton of work…
**MiM **- that all sounds familiar - you don’t hang in many guitar threads, but I seem to recall talking about your band before. Cool. And I hear you about using guitars and pedals to cop synthy and other tones. When we do Walking on the Sun, I play the main snarly Wurlitzer organ riff using my fuzzed-out guitar, and we do Lady Gaga tunes the same way, with big guitar choruses…gets 'em dancing, gets us paid…
I’m a performing musician, solo and with a band, but I don’t really play anything that’d count as a standard cover. I’ve never really had much interest in playing covers.
Playing a live on TV set on Friday (more impressive than it sounds . . . the live broadcast cuts to us in between newscasters) for a Christmas tree lighting thing. Songs include:
Silver Bells
Jingle Bell Rock
Mele Kalikimaka
White Christmas
Rudolph
Jing-a-ling Jing-a-ling
Everybody’s Waitin’ for the Man With The Bag
The Christmas Song
Deck The Halls
Run, Run Rudolph
. . . it’s not my favorite sort of collection of songs by far, and they’re all basic ‘sheet music’ arrangements (with a band; keys, guitar, bass, drums), but it’s a good gig.
Re-reading the OP, some of the songs we most often play out, that stay in our setlist most frequently are:
Get Back
I Want You To Want Me
Shot Through The Heart
Hit Me With Your Best Shot
Jessie’s Girl
Just What I Needed
Back in the USSR
Summer of '69
Here I Go Again
867-5309
. . . a sort of 80s focused collection of classic rock. Some of these we do all the time because the crowd loves them, some because we love them, and some because we go so long between rehearsals that keeping some simple crowd pleasers that we don’t need to practice much is a must.
Opera singer. I’m expected to have a core audition rep of 5 or 6 arias. I tend to keep a couple on reserve for specific situations, so I really have 7; 5 core and 2 situational.
Come Paride vezzoso from L’Elisir D’Amore by Donizetti Hai gia vinta la causa … Vedró mentri’io sospiro from Le Nozze di Figaro by Mozart Fritz’s Tanzlied from Die Tote Stadt by Korngold Avant de quitter ces lieux from Faust by Gounod
The confession scene from Dead Man Walking by Jake Heggie
Bob’s Bedroom Aria from The Old Maid and the Thief by Menotti Questo amor, vergogna mia from Edgar by Puccini
I live in St. Louis, but that’s more or less entirely irrelevant in this genre.
It would be pretty awesome to randomly break out into Freebird at the end of a long aria. Ignoring the fact that I’d never be hired for anything ever again.
On the other hand, now I want to write something and incorporate Freebird into one of the parts somehow (subtly, of course).
Actually, though, in the aforementioned Dead Man Walking, there’s a scene with several Elvis quotes, including the inmate and the nun jamming out to “Jailhouse Rock”. The confession scene includes a brief recap of that.
I mean, really: is there much difference between Wagner’s neverending, unresolved dissonances over the course of his operas and the neverending, unresolved lead at the end of Freebird?
I think Wagner would’ve been a great southern rocker
(but I bet when you see Aretha cover Nessun Dorma for Pavarotti at the Grammys, or see Bono do a little opera-type melismas in concert (he did a bit of this in the U23D concert, filmed in Argentina), you probably would prefer they kept to their side of the music spectrum…)
Well, part of my game is being able to hang musically with just about anyone. Latin’s a bust for me, though – not the language, ahole, the various styles. Just don’t feel it, even though I know what a clave is and all that. But I’ll do a bossa nova if I have to. Weird for a white guy, but church music is in me – granted, I have two black uncles and 5 white/black cousins and grew up listening to shouting music and, obviously, all those records. For piano that’s the equivalent of pentatonic scales for a guitar player – those inversions, voicings, and subs.
Seriously, the big secret among professional musicians is that no one is all that good (by the benchmarks of people like Jeff Beck, Herbie, Jim Hall, James Booker) – but you don’t have to be that good. Just good enough, and, equally important, genuinely like what you’re playing. I think that last one comes over to the audience – they can tell. Only good musicians can really tell who has big ears and chops – the audience only knows what comes over to them.
I was going to give a sample straight list, but now my finger’s are tired. But the reality is, it’s harder to remember that you know certain tunes than to have a set-list – that’s why I like to write down on a scrap paper what tunes would fly.
Here are some for a generic, just fucking-around three-piece instrumental, of covers:
Yes We Can Can
Mess Around
Do You Want Some Of This
Sunny
Heat Wave
Let’s Stay Together
Didn’t He Ramble
Yo Mama’s Got a Complex
Lovin’ Cup
Let It Bleed
Happy Birthday
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
Goodnight Sweetheart
A Little Bit O’ Soul
Junco Partner
Right Place, Wrong Time
The Green Leaves of Summer
Time Changes Everything
It’s hard to make a list because (a) it depends on the crowd and (b) I honestly don’t remember what tunes I know until it pops into my head.
X-Mas list:
that sad Guaraldi tune from Charlie Brown “It’s Christmas Time, Again…”
copy Dr. John’s arr of “silent night” – not note for note, because I keep the vanilla melody on there bc no vx
Pass Me Not (as in Billy Preston’s arrangement on VeeJay)
“Baby It’s Cold Outside,”
and a bunch of corny other ones. I could play that NOLA style all night, though, so any churchy tune is going to be funkified.
In other news, I actually have a good-paying job on Christmas Eve. It’s a weird night for a job, but my #1 guitar player is on board (I don’t know why, probably for the scratch), and I’ll still be done in time to hang with my own family (parents, sister, BIL, nephew, uncle, and inlaws in general) with a pocket full of Benjamins. I still don’t know why somebody wanted to pay for music on this “Holy” night, though. I guess I won’t show up drunk on Jew blood or Christ blood, though. Keepin’ it real!
