Wednesday, July 07, 2010

The High School Reunion I Will Never Have

Old friend Jim Lanza put on the weekend reunion show of my lifetime. I ran around in the Cleveland music scene as a young man and felt greater kinship with the folks in that bands and the supporting scene than with I did with my high school associates.

Jim assembled a showcase of around 10 bands that played this past Friday & Saturday nights in a dive called Now That's Class. The musical highlight was seeing Doug Gillard's guitar wizardry on display in Children's Crusade. Here's a great song of theirs called "Blue Venus Aflame".

Keep this in mind: While vocalist Fraser Sims wrote the lyrics to the songs, Doug wrote and recorded all of the musical parts. Everything, including the bass guitar and drums. Obviously, he couldn't pull that off live, and back in the day, Tom Miller played bass for CC, and Sean Saley played drums, as they did this night.