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The Song You Hate Most to Play

Bassmanbob

Bassmanbob

Supporting Member
Nov 25, 2002
2,854
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Treasure Coast, Florida
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#1
We all have one or two of those songs the rest of the band likes to play, the audience loves it (so you play it), but you hate it.

What is the song you hate playing the most, and what do you do (if anything) to make it more tolerable?

Here's mine:

OK. I really like playing in the band I'm with now. We have a great selection of tunes, good musicians, nice guys, no egos and the venues are fun places to play. I really like the set list, even songs like "Mustang Sally"... and I can even somehow get into "Old Time Rock and Roll." But one song I hate playing is "Sweet Home Alabama." It's three notes (D, C and G) over and over until after the solo, I get to play a F once. It's also not a song that lends itself to fiddling around with extra fills on bass due to the guitar work so busy. It's become a band joke that some day I'm going to teach my wife to play it, so I can take "my union break." To make matters worse, we do "All Summer Long and go into "Sweet Home Alabama", extending the bordom two fold.

So here's what I did (and will continue to do from now on).
We started playing it two weeks ago. My wife was at the gig. Knowing the band joke, came running up to me at the beginning of the song. I motioned her to go to the front of the dance floor. So, using my wireless on my bass, I joined her on the dance floor while playing. The audience and other dancers got a kick out of it, the band started laughing and my wife loved it. Honestly, I stole the idea from the 'Dancing while playing' thread about a month ago.

Not a wild story, but it made "Sweet Home Alabama" tolerable.

What is your song, and what do you do?
 
#3
Bassmanbob-

Go the next step man! Teach her the parts!

That would be such an awesome schtick. Picture it: The song starts playing and she comes up and starts dancing. You go down into the audience with your bass and dance with her. Get behind her and transfer the bass to her, then she continues to play the song and ends up on stage with the band! That would make for a cool moment in the show. (meanwhile you cheer her on and grab a drink)
 
#5
Oh I forgot to say -

"Please observe the Skynrd free zone" I hate playing that stuff.

Oh and any set where all the songs seem to be in the same or similar keys and tempos. ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzz wha...? huh? Oh we're done? Seriously, if I can literally fall asleep and still play through the song (actually happened once) then we probably don't need it in the set.
 
#16
The middle of our set list, which includes a few silverchair tunes, cracker "low", "closing time", etc. Just shuffling G, C, D, with an occasional E and A in there. It's gets incredibly boring, and honestly all I do is vary the tempo up a bit for about 20 minutes.

Though If we are down to one guitarist that night because the singer doesn't feel like playing guitar while singing. I'll get crazy with it and do fills all over the place, hey there is empty space so I'm going to occupy it to keep myself from falling asleep.
 
#20
Passinwind said:
Moondance.

Typically I do a massively overblown Smoke On The Water quote during the bass solo. But then, I do tend to do that on many cover tunes I dislike.;)
Click to expand...

Funny Van Morrison story for you.

[FONT=&quot]Once, a long long time ago... We played a bar/student hang out where we were friends with most of the staff, including the DJs...They were all really psyched. Mostly (because they all told us), because they wouldn’t have to hear “Brown Eyed Girl” that night, and that the DJ’s wouldn’t get that request every ten minutes, even AFTER they’d played it.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]Being worth our salt, we took that as a cue to learn Brown Eyed Girl. We worked it into a 15 minute epic song, that started as a ska-rave-up, before dropping into a roots reggae feel and later on into a dub-wise jam. The crowd loved it. We ended up having to play Brown Eyed Girl for almost every local show after that. Luckily, WE found it a really fun song to play, especially once we could get the crowd to sing along, and we changed many of the lyrics to have local references.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]The people at that bar though, even though we remained friends…never really forgave us.[/FONT]
 

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