Josh Smith - More On The Live Version Of 'Triple J Hoedown'
This is the fourth instalment on the live version of Josh Smith's tune “Triple J Hoedown,” featured on his album, Live at the Spud, recorded at the infamous Baked Potato in Los Angeles. 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.
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00:00 Hey, Josh Smith here again. We're in our fourth lesson on Triple J Hoedown, 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 going
00:19 to play through an entire chorus, and we'll talk about what's going on. So it's basically
00:24 a blues. I'm going to play full 12 bars. One, two, three. Anyways, we play two of those
00:54 in the song, and of course I'm just making that all up as I go along, but I played a
00:58 bunch of stuff in there, and it would be different every night because it's an improvisation,
01:03 but basically I started off with open G stuff. So it went from kind of open stuff to a regular
01:15 blues chromatically with a little open string droning happening there. When we got to the
01:23 fourth, I played a cool old blues, country blues thing in C, which is really cool. And
01:38 I like to play that a lot, especially when C is not the one chord. When you play a lick
01:42 like that over the four, man, it's like this tension is so real that when you resolve,
01:53 it's a big moment, you know? So then we got to the 2-5-1, and I played an arpeggio from
02:04 A minor to D7, and then back to G. And I played a full chorus of blues like that. Then I do
02:19 another one. I ended it, of course, with the blues turnaround. That's because I like to
02:26 have something standard at the end for the non-musicians in the audience that they can
02:30 grab onto, because by then we're getting a little carried away with ourselves. After
02:35 that, we're back into the last theme of the song, which is back to the... We play all
02:44 three themes. And we finally end back up at the intro. And we rephrase the big lick. We
03:09 all end with that big downbeat. And 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 [laughs]
03:20 [music]
03:20 [music]