Jul

15

Digging into the Archives: February 22, 2002 - Mindflux, Live at Wack-a-Doo’s

Filed Under Music, The history of me 

I started thinking with my farewell show coming up, it might be sort of cool to actually dig into my archive and on this Tuesday and next Tuesday, release some of the old shows that I have sitting around on my computer or on CD. I’ve got 6 or 7 shows here or there. While these are all extremely rough and shows me in my early development stages and some of them I’m a little embarassed about? I’ll take it. Hell, these are all live, so might as well let them loose.

So here, I’ll start off with one from Mindflux: February 22, 2002 at Wack-A-Doo’s on campus.

Mindflux was my first band here at UCF, with Harry Ticer on violin and Lorn Miller on bass and backing vocals. We played shows from about January 2002 through November 2002, breaking up after being together for just about a year. We never really released any albums, but we did release a few live shows, including this one initially.

For this show, I remember there was a lot of anxiety from me. Wack-A-Doo’s just started a live musician feature on Friday nights and we were the first band to really do that at all. This was only like the second or third show for us, and we were still a little rough around the edges. Add to that the fact that a lot could have gone wrong.

See, Wack-A-Doo’s told us that to play we needed to play acoustic. I only had a regular acoustic guitar, meaning that I’d need a pickup for my guitar and couldn’t use my usual Epiphone Les Paul. Yeah, it was only a cheap Special II model, but it was all I used to that point. So with that in mind, I went to Sam Ash that day and bought a soundhole pickup for my guitar. And also with that in mind, I bought my very own microphone and stand, just to ensure that I’d have something that worked right and that I knew how it’d work. I’d learned with my limited show experience to that point that a microphone could make or break my voice, and I wanted to have that in my hands.

So with all of that in mind, I had dropped about $150 before the show, we practiced, and this is how it turned out. And from there, I think it’s only fitting to talk a little about the set:

1) “Entrophy” - This was the first song we wrote and had a moving solo/interlude section where we all were featured soloists. Fairly simple on the words and melody, it was something that I wrote on the fly to go with the riff that we wrote. The cool part is the interplay of the three instruments: its what we based the whole band off of.
2) “One More Time” - I always lead into it with that joke and yeah, I know it gets annoying just listening to it once there, but I thought it was good. By the way, notice something interesting about the guitar? I’ll explain shortly…
3) Change in Plans - I was a fan of splitting tracks initially to keep talking to a minimum before and after the tracks, so this is just a spot where we stopped and talked about the set.
4) “Wack-A-Doo’s (Breakfast at Tiffany’s)” - Just as it says in the parenthesis, this is a cover song. I thought it would be clever to joke about them being called “Loco’s” at one point, seeing the restaurant had just been renamed. Yeah, its not. I know. God, I was young.
5) “And I Said” - This is the oldest song that I still play to this date, and if you notice there’s actually a guitar solo. Notice the distortion? That’s distortion on an acoustic guitar. I was running my guitar through a Fender Frontman 25R amp, the same as Harry (our violinist) used and I just kicked on the second channel and let it rip. And yes, as you can tell from the recording, it wasn’t the only time that I did that during the night.
6) Thank You’s - Just another brief shoutout and thanks for the “venue.”
7) “Look At Me” - This one was still in development at this point in time of the Mindflux “career.” I had just written it about a week or so before and we had drilled the practice down and made sure we had everyone’s cues in place. As you can hear in the track before, I still hadn’t even learned the lyrics because I requested a chair to put them on. That’s why I think I mumbled the lyrics through half of it. Also, if you’ve heard my song “Naked,” you can tell that it eventually evolved and became that. They have a similar progression, minus the capo on the latter.
8) Request for an Encore - I think they looked over at us from behind the bar and asked us to do another. You can hear shouting for “Second Rate Superhero,” which I ignored. We hadn’t rehearsed it that much and I didn’t want to do two slow songs back to back. You can hear the word “Watchtower” shot out and then Lorn laughing.
9) “All Along the Watchtower” - A cover that we did well, we took elements from Dave Matthews and Jimi Hendrix and melded them together. The thing that always keeps me in awe with this recording is Harry’s solo that starts around 3:45 and goes till 4:49. The key phrase in that solo is at the points between 4:32 and 4:49 that closes it off. Why? If you go back to Hendrix’s studio version of the song, you’ll hear the same exact phrase between 2:16 and 2:31 with some elements from 2:45-2:49. Harry was a HUGE Hendrix fan and studied his phrases and transcribed them for violin and they were just phenomenally done. Because of this, his wah and distortion and other effects on his violin? He could pull off a hell of an impersonation.

That being said, I hope you enjoy this one. I’ll have another one on next Tuesday from an interesting show in my solo history… But for now:

Download Mindflux - ‘February 22, 2002, Live at Wack-A-Doo’s’

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    About The Site


    Thanks for stopping by, folks! My name is Adam J. Cohen, and I'm a guitarist/songwriter in Champaign, IL, recently relocated from Orlando, FL where I'm a UCF grad. Here, you'll find vignettes on my life, setlists and show reviews, and whatever else crosses my mind. Enjoy!