"Tired of Waiting for You" revisited for solo guitar

[Jazz Padd]

I remember hearing this song a couple decades ago when it turned up on a TV show, and I began listening to it in the car while driving in traffic jams in Dubai. The idea of being tired of waiting seemed apt, and it was the lyrics that made it worth repeated listenings. After moving to Japan, the song lost its purpose living in a traffic-free rural area.

Then I heard Bill Frisell's instrumental take on it and realized there's something more to the song, beyond the lyrics that the original Kinks version, as iconic as it is, did not IMHO develop. No lyrics, just Frisell's focus on melody. It's more like applying a jazz ethos; it's not about covering a song as much as it is about using a song as a springboard for exploration and improvisation. Perhaps that's the sign of a good song, it can lend itself to a variety of contexts.

So I started fiddling around with it about a decade ago, just for fun on my Taylor acoustic to play at home and for friends. Applying something I learned from a Bill Frisell instructional video about playing "melody, melody, melody" (as he put it) and trying to grab a few notes here and there to hint at the chord progression, a minimalist approach.

About five years ago, I moved it to an electric, just a clean sound on I think it was initially a Tele, still enjoying the melody, with the lyrics and original context gone. It started to take on a life of its own, so I added some effectors.

I first played it live on stage as a solo guitar piece a couple of years ago and it was well received, so I continued working with it by using the melody as a guide to develop a longer arrangement than the original two minute ditty. I think it became an exploration of the potential of playing with open strings and harmonics, slowing down the tempo and making it more pensive, more patient, and letting the echo do some of the work. I also added a looper to make a vamp on the G to F and do some ad lib over that, originally using a RAT. And I posted that version here last year.

When I was invited to do a short set as part of an event at a local live house, I revisited the tune and used it as an opportunity to mess around with some other effectors, which led to the development of a mostly EHX board with a DOD Rubberneck (what a great pedal!). I used the Attack Decay to try to get a kind of backward sound, and SMM with Hazarai as an always on ambience. This version is faster, if not a bit rushed, and clearly the board needs a some further exploration. So I think I'll fiddle with it a little more if another opportunity arises to play it live.

The guitar for the present version is a Gretsch Chet Atkins "Super Axe" that I found in a shop on the famed guitar street in Tokyo, which I like because it has an on-board compressor and phaser. But the feel was a little different than the guitar I had been playing for several months prior to this live set, and so the fingering is somewhat clunky.

As an "amateur" guitarist (in the sense of Andy Merrifield "the pleasures of doing what you love"), I enjoy working with a song like this one, that has a lot of generative potential, but I'm not looking to perfect anything. To me, it's about seeing where something can be taken, or where it takes me. Over the twenty odd years I've been messing around with this one song, I also came to appreciate with a sense of awe what Frisell and others are able to do.

Perhaps all this verbiage will make what I've done seem anti-climactic, but I thought that perhaps other amateur players might like to read how I developed a work flow for arranging and playing a song. Thanks for listening!

Edit: Fixed typos.