For about a year, from about Spring 2002 to Spring 2003, I played lead guitar
with local folk performer David Creamer. He's one of those guys who is perfectly
capable of carrying a show by himself (he sings, plays guitar and harmonica,
writes many original songs, and knows a ton of popular songs.. from "Big Bad
Leroy Brown" to "Material Girl"), but he got a band together to back him up that
included bass, drums, and lead guitar. His lead guitarist was unavailable one
weekend when they had two performances, so a mutual friend hooked us up (not
because I was known for playing folk, but because I can pick stuff up pretty
quick). David and I liked playing together, so for a while after that the band
had two lead guitarists.
The main things I liked about playing with David were that we had regular gigs
and the material was always fresh. Since he knew the songs and played rhythm
guitar, all the band had to do was follow along and do our thing. So all it
took was for David to know a song, and we could perform it on the spot without
so much as a rehearsal. Very fun. And David knew plenty of songs, so we were
often fulfilling requests from the audience as well as debuting new songs that
he had written. Actually, there is a good example of this sort of thing in the
recordings below. That studio take of "Seems Like" was the first time we had
performed that song together.
Eventually, the band sort of faded (I, for one, became too busy with school),
and David went back to solo gigs for a while (and organizing a weekly acoustic
show of local artists at a local bar) before departing from SLO. Last I heard,
he was living in Nevada City, CA, and working on an album with a new band.
I particularly recommend "Seems Like."
"Hush" also features Billy Cribbs on bass.