Josh Smith - More on the Live Version of “Triple J Hoedown”
This is the fourth installment on the live version of Josh Smith's tune “Triple J Hoedown,” featured on his latest album, Live at the Spud, recorded at the infamous Baked Potato in Los Angeles. Last month, we looked at the section that precedes his guitar solo and features drummer Gary Novak and Josh freely improvising on the groove with no strict adherence to any chord progression. Here Josh talks about what he plays in the tune’s solo section.
Transcript
00:00 Hey, Josh Smith here again. We're in our fourth lesson on Triple J Hodown, my tune from Live
00:09 at the Spud. We're up to the solo, where I've built the solo up from the open section into
00:14 this 12-bar blues with a 2-5-1 turnaround, and I throw it all at this solo. So I'm gonna
00:19 play through an entire chorus, and we'll talk about what's going on. So it's basically a
00:24 blues. I'm gonna play full 12 bars. One, two, three. Anyways, we play two of those in the
00:54 song, and of course I'm just making that all up as I go along, but I played a bunch of stuff in
00:59 there, and it would be different every night because it's an improvisation, but basically,
01:04 I started off with open G stuff. So it went from kind of open stuff to a regular blues chromatically,
01:16 with a little open string droning happening there. When we got to the four, I played a cool old blues,
01:26 country blues thing in C, which is really cool. And I like to play that a lot, especially when
01:40 C is not the one chord. When you play a lick like that over the four, man, it's just, it's like this
01:45 tension is so real that when you resolve, it's a big moment, you know? So then we got to the 2-5-1,
01:58 and I played an arpeggio from A minor to D7, and then back to G. And I played a full chorus
02:17 of blues like that. Then I do another one. I ended it, of course, with the blues turnaround.
02:22 Just because I like to have something standard at the end for the non-musicians in the audience
02:29 that they can grab on to, because by then, we're getting a little carried away with ourselves.
02:33 After that, we're back into the last theme of the song, which is back to the...
02:39 We play all three themes. And we finally end back up at the intro. And we rephrase the big lick.
02:59 We all end with that big downbeat. That's Triple J "Hoedown." There's a lot going on
03:15 in that song. I wrote it a long time ago, and I'm just glad people like it.
03:19 [Music]
03:26 (whooshing)