West Desert Grass
"There is nothing to it. You only have to hit the right notes at the right time and the instrument plays itself."
-- Johann Sebastian Bach

Past Jams

May Jam Session

For our May Jam Session we met out at Wild Bill's Bar, owned by Robby and Carla Fields. We started out with a potluck lunch with plenty of good food. There weren't quite enough people attending to eat it all.

May was the first Jam Session combined with the Tooele group. We met some new people and heard a few new tunes. Hopefully we will be able to combine more often and teach each other some of our favorite tunes.

Because we had a larger group than usual we decided to try our first Band Scramble. We put all of our names into bowls, according to the instruments that we play and randomly put together bands. Each band has 15 minutes to get a song together and then perform it for the rest of the group. Those that are unfortunate enough to be able to play multiple instruments probably got to play in more than one band. It turned out very well and was a lot of fun.

Jim Robertson, from Dugway, brought over a hammer dulcimer to play with. We didn't get it in on any of the songs we played as a group but it was pretty fun to goof around with.

One thing that was a novelty for some of us was the sound system. This is the first time that we've played with microphones. It was cool. So, the mics and the band scramble had everyone so entertained that we never got around to doing our circular jam. As a result, we forgot to play our song of the month, which was "Battle Cry for Freedom". We'll have to try next month.

April Jam Session

For our April jam session we met at the Larsen house on Friday, April 8. Our numbers were a little sparse to start out with but after playing for a while we had a good crowd. We had a couple of new guitarists attend and some vocalists as well.

For the April songs we decided to learn, first we played through "Little Maggie" a few times and got it sounding pretty good. This is one song that is better with lyrics, so we encourage the vocalist to continue coming. The other song we learned for April was "The Battle of New Orleans (Eighth of January)". This is a fun song but we probably need a good vocalist that knows all of the lyrics and also a bit more practice getting it to sound good. We'll have to keep working on this one at future jams. There's actually an amusing story that goes along with this song if you take the time to look it up.

Another new song that we tried out was "In the Jailhouse Now" from the "O Brother, Where art Thou" soundtrack. It's also a pretty fun song to play. All we need is a good yodeler to finish it off.

We decided that there was enough interest in doing a float at the Dugway 4th of July parade on June 30 that we could put something together. We'll probably get a flatbed truck and throw up some haybales and just play some familiar tunes. Everyone wear flannel shirts and overalls if you have them!

In order to give MWR some support and hope to receive a little back as well, we decided that we would probably have some future jam sessions at the bowling alley. There's a large room in the back that they would let us practice in for no charge. It also comes with the advantage of being able to buy some food to snack on. We're planning on meeting there in June.