Barbara Anne Band
01 Jan 1992
My brother-in-law Kenny Vail who is a member of Ninth Hour was quite an amazing musical influence on me. And he did a pretty amazing thing for me. When I first started playing electric bass and starting learning Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Black Crowes, etc tunes he offered to me a chance to jam with him and a guitar player friend of his Scott MacLeod. Kenny plays bass, guitar, and is an excellent drummer so he played drums for this little group.
It was such a valuable experience for me and one of many situations where I was given the chance to play with more experienced musicians than I and soak up their knowledge through musical osmosis and association.
Kenny gave me a list of tunes that we'd play and I set off to learn them before our first meeting.
Now having taught many students who were at the level I was then, I know why this was such an important experience. You see, a lot of kids when they first start playing start by learning riffs...parts of songs..bits of solos...the cool parts of the song. Rarely do they sit down and learn an entire song from start to finish...let along a whole list of tunes.
Getting that list from Kenny and sitting down and learning those bass parts from start to finish forced me to take my bass playing to that next level of an actual functioning bass player who could play in a band. I was only 14 and I was keeping up with these guys ( I think anyway ) and playing through the tunes. It was great!
The band wasn't actually called the Barabara Anne Band but that's where we rehearsed...above Barabara Anne's hair salon on lower Queen Street. I think Scott's mother worked there or owned it and it had a great rehearsal space upstairs. We'd play a bunch of tunes and take a break, grab a pop from one of those ancient pop machines where you slide the bottles along a track to get them out. We'd go upstairs and sit on the roof for our break and man I felt cool...even though I was always wearing my ever so cool Wind River sweaters! Glad I'm out of that phase!
