PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic memorizing songs - is it also your achiles heel to performing

Perhaps I am just getting old. I wanted to play a song called Edmund Fitzgerald yesterday. I remember the song, and I can play the music from memory. The lyrics would be a ton of work to memorize.

Lyrics
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early
The ship was the pride of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned
Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland
And later that night when the ship's bell rang
Could it be the north wind they'd been feelin'?
The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
And a wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the captain did too
T'was the witch of November come stealin'
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
When the gales of November came slashin'
When afternoon came it was freezin' rain
In the face of a hurricane west wind
When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin'
"Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya"
At seven PM, a main hatchway caved in, he said
"Fellas, it's been good to know ya"
The captain wired in he had water comin' in
And the good ship and crew was in peril
And later that night when his lights went outta sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Does any one know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searchers all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay
If they'd put fifteen more miles behind her
They might have split up or they might have capsized
They may have broke deep and took water
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters
Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams
The islands and bays are for sportsmen
And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered
In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed
In the maritime sailors' cathedral
The church bell chimed 'til it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee
Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early

Cheers,
Billy

Try memorizing Alice's restaurant.

Well, you can get anything you want at Alice's restaurant. Not Alice, of course. I always get lost around the eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photographs...lol

It is funny about long songs and how difficult they are to memorize. I think I memorized Bob Dylan's 115th Dream after the first time I listened to it. Go figure.

Billy

I had a supervisor at work who could recite all of Alice's Restaurant. Odd things you talk about a lunch.

...Deb

My Achilles Heel is moving gear. I can play shows in a coma. We were fooling around at a rehearsal in 2021 and someone kicked off "Turn It On Again". I had last played that song in 1989. We went through it letter perfect and I played it like I wrote it. 32 years later.

EVERY musician should strive for that.

Now, for disclosure, the songs we were playing currently, I had charts for those! LOL!! In 1988 and into 1989 I played that Genesis song between 4 and 6 nights a week. Sheer repetition and rote memory.

+1000 to that, Eddie.

Mrs. Notes and I are equipment intensive. She plays guitar and synth, I play sax, flute, guitar, and wind synth on stage, and we both sing. It takes us an hour to set up, and about 45 minutes to tear down.

I tell my clients, we play for free, and charge you to move this gear around.

Another musician, who follows us once a week at our steady gig, gave me his impression of “Musician's Hell”

Musician's hell is having to set up and tear down your gear every day, but never getting to play.

I find it more difficult to memorize songs quickly than I did when I was young. Perhaps it's because I have so many already memorized that there is no room for more. Perhaps it's because I'm learning so many so quickly to keep the regular customers from being able to predict what we are going to play. Or perhaps it's (shudder at the thought) my age catching up to me.

Like Eddie said, play them enough times and you get them memorized.

All the songs that we play often enough eventually get memorized.

We learned Bob Dylan's “Like A Rolling Stone” about a year ago. We do it perhaps once a week. Getting the phrasing for the lyrics was the easy part. That came rather quickly. I've gotten to the point now where all I need to do is glance at the first word of each verse, and the rest come along.

Back in the 1970s, I saw the jazz great, “Mark Murphy” at a club. He was great. He asked the pianist of the house band if he knew a ballad, the pianist said, “No”. Mark asked if he would try if he could tell him what chords to play, and the pianist agreed. So Mark sang the song and off mic called out the chords to the pianist. That's a good memory.

But, when he sang Jobim's “The Waters Of March” he pulled out a sheet of paper with the words. He said that he always has trouble with “laundry list” types of songs.

In this day and age, I wouldn't consider the lack of memorization to be an Achilles Heel to live performance. Just a challenge. Read the words/chords/charts enough, and they will be memorized. The people in the audience just want to hear the music.

Insights and incites by Notes