Topic: New Tab Postings
A Million Vacations (1979) was the only one of Max Webster's albums to achieve platinum status (which it did in Canada). The band scored a handful of hits off the album with radio-friendly tunes such as the title track. The picture of Vacations to the right isn't the best or sharpest image I could find of the cover. But it did have one thing in its favour. There's one thing that irks me a bit about all of the Max Webster re-issue CDs. All of the covers of their CDs now have the text "featuring Kim Mitchell" prominently placed on them. This is not what the covers looked like when the albums originally came out. The band was Max Webster, not Max Webster featuring Kim Mitchell. Sure, I get it, Kim Mitchell's name recognition factor maybe helps to sell a few more old Max CDs. But couldn't they just put this text on a sticker on the cellophane wrapper of the CD? That would get the information out to people who might not know, but as soon as you took the plastic off the case, the CD booklet cover would look like the cover of the original release. Everybody's happy, right? But no, it has to be printed right on to the cover of all of the re-issues. http://www.maxwebster.ca/MW_sounds.shtml So I wanted to find an image of the original album cover as it's supposed to look. Yeah, I know it's not a big deal, but Max Webster were a band, not someone and their backup band. But regardless, this tab (done by request) was fun to do. And it was a little more involved than I thought it would be at first. Which shouldn't surprise me, because it is afterall a Max tab.
The tab:
https://www.angelfire.com/planet/zerofret/cantab/maxwebster-amillionvacations.txt
Audio:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpqxfY_MA6w
Posted by planet/zerofret
at 12:01 AM EDT
Updated: Wednesday, September 9, 2009 1:47 AM EDT
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Updated: Wednesday, September 9, 2009 1:47 AM EDT
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I see some people have posted video at YouTube of the rain-soaked Kim Mitchell show I was at a few weeks ago. You can really see the rain teeming down in some of these clips. Just watching them makes me feel soaked to the bone all over again. And reminds me of what a good show it was. 
The quality of the videos (and the sound) varies. Some are short clips, some are full songs. And sometimes it's hard to see him through the umbrellas. 
Among the three charting singles from Prism's self-titled debut album (1977, pictured) was the power ballad "It's Over". This track, as well as most others on the record, was written by the band's drummer/producer Rodney Higgs. Higgs was none other than Jim Vallance writing under a pseudonym. Why? Vallance himself explains it this way:
I had some delays while doing this one (none of which had anything to do with the tab itself...got a cold from a night out in the rain, among other things), but when I actually did get some work done on it, it went pretty quickly. "Just Between You And Me" is, of course, one of April Wine's biggest hits. It's from the 1981 album The Nature Of the Beast, their most commercially succesful album. Some really nice, melodic playing on this song. 
From Red Rider's second album, As Far As Siam (1981).
A victim of the rain, I'm guessing. He scattered a few Max Webster songs through the set, "A Million Vacations", "Paradise Skies", and "Battle Scar". It was great to hear those ones done live again. Fittingly, the only time the rain eased up all night was when he was doing "Paradise Skies". Bassist Peter Fredette -- he of the amazing voice -- sang the Geddy Lee verse in "Battle Scar". The show closed out with "All We Are" (where Fredette's vocals really get showcased), "Patio Lanterns", and "Go For Soda". I thought due to the weather, they might not bother with an encore, but they did come back out (not making people wait long) to do "Lager & Ale". The show finished up at about 11:30.
"The Party", from the Mutiny Up My Sleeve (1978) album. The story of this tab is of the I've-got-good-news-and-bad-news variety. The bad news is that I realized pretty quickly while doing the tabbing that I was never going to be able to tab the solo at full speed. So I decided rather than put in forty bars of guess work, I'd just leave the solo out. But I don't like doing that, so it motivated me to finally go searching the Web for a program that can slow down songs without changing the pitch. It also had to allow me to save the altered music and burn it to CD, since I can't do tabbing from my computer. I looked at a few programs, and a couple looked kind of complicated. I was basically looking for "Slowing Down Songs For Dummies", something I could use right away without engaging in a lot of manual reading. The good news is the third one I looked at seemed to be just the thing. Within just a few minutes I knew how to slow songs down and save them to my hard drive. Hurray!