PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Are there any songs that you are soooo done with?

As musicians we often talk about and play our favorite songs but I know everyone of us has at least one tune we hate so much that they are an instant "channel changer". I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours. So which tune does it for you i.e. tantamount to fingernails on a chalkboard?

Kars for Kids.
But seriously,
Fascination
Chicken Dance
In the Mood

I feel your pain, but on a sort of somber note . . . I will never forget playing a gig back in the 70's when this gent stepped up to the stage and requested Fascination. We kicked it off and before he waltzed around the small dance floor the 2nd time he fell dead as a door nail right in front of the stage. Of course there were many jokes amongst the band for the next year or so. The one I like the most was "we really killed that night".

And the Chicken Dance, well I am right there with you, the band should be able to shoot anyone who request that tune. Just my opinion.

A couple of my cringe when I hear them being kicked off tunes are, Blackbird, anyone playing I Can't Help Falling In Love With You on a Ukulele and of course every-time I hear some person OVER SINGING "At Last" and that is almost every time it is played.

Thanks,

You ain't the only one. Sometimes we had to play it two or three times a night. They paid so we played but we never liked it!

Mario,

re: the chicken dance: Thank the Good Lord it never was to big an item in my neck of the woods, we had the Mexican Hat Dance even though they weren't any Mexicans in the audience, and oh yes, or the freaking Bunny Hop!

We used to play it until I learned to say: "sorry, the drummer doesn't know that song".
I figured that anyone who requested that number wouldn't know any better

My father and mother where both 300 pounds. My sisters and I had never-ever seen them dance. My father was a very good musician (amateur) and my mother played OK. But they never danced - ever.

One year they went off to Italy, to the old-a country on one of those Senior Citizen tours. We were all adults then and mom fixed dinner and we wanted to share pictures and memories.

They came back and told us they learned to dance.

We wanted to see so my dad walked over to the record player (it was a long time ago), dropped the needle on the disk, and my 300lb parents did the chicken dance. My sisters and I were rolling on the floor with laughter. They were grinning at each other like teenagers as 600 pounds of fun did the dance.

The sight vaguely reminded me of hippopotami dancing in Walt Disney's "Fantasia".

Now I've never enjoyed the song, and we will only play it when requested but I've never enjoyed it as much as I did when my parents did it.

There are a few stupid songs that we play. None of them are painful, so we just do them. It's like eating baked potato chips. All bulk, no substance. Junk food for the ears.

I had a day job once as a phone repairman. I was testing out what it was to be normal and found normal to be overrated.

I got to this pole I had to climb. When climbing poles you are held up by about 1/16" of spike into a pole that has been climbed so many times before, the outer layer can give out. There are two kinds of pole climbers, those who have fallen, and those who haven't -YET.

Anyway there are 4 chain link fences (don't want to land on those, especially if you happen to have one leg on either side), a couple of galvanized garbage cans, and some bushes.

So I climb the pole, open the terminal to discover about 100 paper wasps had called it home. They were not happy about having their roof and walls removed and were flying around like crazy.

Now you can't do anything fast on your climbers, because the fences and garbage cans were waiting for a wrong move.

So I carefully climbed back down the pole. Fortunately the wasps never figured out it was me who was the home wrecker.

Chicken Dance? Yakety Sax? Beer Barrel Polka? Alley Cat? No problem. They are just notes, and the notes don't hurt.

Sometimes you just have to put it all into perspective.

Insights and incites by Notes

About every song on every set list for every band I played with.

Bud

ahh - Bud - I often have said "by the time I have confidently learned a song and can play it without any problems - I never want to play it again" - now if I could learn them faster and with less effort, maybe I wouldn't feel that way lol

Anything by Lynard Skynard. (Though they DO know all 3 chords!)
Anything by Led Zepplin. (I didn't even like them when they "were". Just loud.)
Anything by Jimmy Buffett. (He can't sing, he can't play, and he can't write.)
Anything by Tom Petty. (Nasal whining is NOT singing.)
The aforementioned At Last. If I hear ONE more mediocre singer over-emote that song....
Anything that has to do with drugs (Cocaine) or has gratuitous profanity. Show some class on stage.

Mustang Sally
Some Kind of Wonderful
Brown Eyed Girl

Most of the others are just single songs by the list above.

And my personal gripe, DON'T PLAY BEATLES SONGS!! You can't do them as well as they did, and that is disrespectful to the band that changed everything. The exception is Will Lee and the Fab Faux. They do it letter perfect, so they get a pass. The same "respect" should be paid to Georgia On My Mind.

Many of the stuff mentioned above like that stupid Chicken Dance atrocity I don't even consider music, so they aren't listed.

And all of the above is why I don't see cover bands.

Wipeout votes the former drummer.

well I thought Bud and Janice kinda got it right. But there actually were some songs I totally enjoyed playing on stage. If we didn't like a song, as a band, we'd simply drop it from our nightly set list. There were songs that the crowd would not let us drop.....


But I will say, mostly, and this is the short list of what immediately came to mind.....

Freebird
Toot toot (probably as bad as the chicken song which coincidentally, I don't think I have ever heard)
Swingin'
Old Time Rock & Roll
Wipeout


But I'm also smart enough to know who paid my bills, and that was a satisfied club manager and a bunch of drunk party people. So yeah, we played those songs practically every night and sometimes even multiple times per night to groans of "oh god no, not that song again"

Well here you go Herb:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xmV5uHWNag

Darn you Mario, I knew I shouldn't have clicked that link

Chicken Dance is a wedding thing in my area. Stay long enough and there will be a request.

...Deb

Only one? I played in wedding bands for years and sometimes we would have to play it 2 or 3 times or more.

Very understandable LOL

So you change the channel no matter what song comes on?

Or maybe just don't turn on the radio? LOL

Later,

At least 1/2 of holiday songs.
I hope J. Pierpont forgives me... Its just hearing something like Jingle Bells endless number of times is like wicked hypnosis. Makes me wonder, why there are so few "sticky" ones out of thousands composed holiday tunes... in the past 150+ years!

P.S. Just thinking of Jingle Bells, plants a seed in the brain. Now I will go all day singing it to myself. Dangerous...

I never listen to the radio. First of all, I don't want to listen to what THEY want me to hear. Second, I refuse to listen to commercials and that incessant DJ chatter. Third, I have a thumb drive with 2000 songs on it, and I can add and remove them as I choose. Fourth, the music I enjoy isn't on any radio station. Who here has even heard of Dr. Dog, Dawes, Vampire Weekend, Neon Trees and The War On Drugs? None of them were ever mainstream enough to make it to top 40 radio, so I'll never hear them on the radio. It's mainly the commercials though. I wonder how many people get that commercials on the radio, which we have all come to accept, are nothing more than the audio counterpart of pop-up ads on your computer?

As far as silly stuff like The Chicken Dance (Put the Hokey Pokey in there too), never gonna happen. I understand why they are requested though. Weddings are typically the only time in a year that the people who think the Chicken Dance and the Hokey Pokey is dancing. They just don't know good music from bad.