Ryan Williams IS The Bass Geek. That's not any kind of insult; it's a well earned title. The man runs, wait for it, TheBassGeek.net and is considered an authority on the Indianapolis music scene by no less than CNN, who interviewed during the Super Bowl run-up. Aside from playing in a number of bands and authoring books on subjects like learning to play bass, digital music, and MySpace, our man in Fountain Square co-hosted the IndianapolisMusic.net podcast for years, may or not have been Sweaty B in seminal Indy-scene band No*Star, and worked with Troy, Russ, Li, Oseye, Jonathan and others in the day. Today, he looks back, and he just might f'n rock us.
My first (and probably only, that I can remember) contribution to Shotgun Reviews involved a review of D'Angelo at the Murat Theater, notable both for the stellar live band backing him and for the woman of ALL ages (yes, Grandma, you too) trying to rip off his leather pants and finally see little D'Angelo.
13 years later, it's just like old times. Shotgun Reviews is helping launch a webcomic about music in Indianapolis in the early 2000s, and D'Angelo is just NOW starting to play shows again. Those were some fierce women.
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| He totally doesn't know I'm running this. -- Troy |
In the intervening years, I wrote a lot about local music and played a lot of music locally (and some elsewhere). Both Troy and I also left the hellhole where we worked and did some more meaningful and pleasurable things with our lives. So we've got that going for us. But it's the time for reminiscing, and that always involves weird stories that seem funny now, but may have taken a darker turn. So, I give you the story of this audition.
I'd just played a pickup rockabilly gig on a flatbed truck somewhere near Ravenswood for the 4th of July. I'm not saying I'll turn down a gig now, but I was new in town back then and certainly didn't have anything better to do, so my standards were ever so slightly lower.
That doesn't apply to the rockabilly gig, by the way, I'm just setting the stage.
