We did wind up playing at my 50th birthday rock and roll theme party. I hired a professional band for most of the night and they allowed our band to plug in our guitars to their amps to let us play several songs. It was fantastic and both Luke and Ryan who were really great guitarists joined us on stage in front of about 150 guests. A great and memorable night for all.
In Luke’ s first year of university, he co-formed a band called the Dee Dee Dums that played mainly blues and jazz and Luke wrote some of the songs. The other person in the band was another engineering student- Kevin Parker. Luke played the drums and Kevin played the guitar and during a song they would then switch without losing a beat. Mimi and I were at the AmpFest in 2005 when the band came in second place and then won third place in the state final of The Next Big Thing. Luke dropped out of the band to pursue his time consuming engineering studies while Kevin took the band to stardom, but he dropped out of university.
Kevin renamed the band to Tame Impala which is now a psychedelic rock focused and world famous as they have signed with Modular Records. They had national headline tours in many large cities globally including in New York, United Kingdom, Australia and elsewhere. Luke told me later on that the reason he dropped out of the band was that drugs were in the mix and he didn’ t want to be part of that. We do talk about some of the earlier music of Tame Impala that were songs actually written by Luke and there were no rewards given to Luke for these efforts by the band.
Ryan was also in a band in high school that played at some large school events. They were fantastic and their music was what Mimi and I liked with songs by Santana and other similar artists.
At Mimi’ s 50th, a couple of years later than mine was also fun and guests enjoyed themselves with dancing and karaoke in a beautiful venue overlooking the Swan river.
Mimi’ s 50th
Mimi and I had danced together for more than 20 years. For about 10 years we were members of the Perth Rock and Roll Association, where we learned to dance the style of Rockabilly. This was rock and roll dancing with attitude and not that queer like dancing we saw people doing at ballroom. We regularly attended dances and continued dance lessons for a long time and we enjoyed dressing up in 50’ s outfits and dancing late into the night, which for us was midnight! Afterwards, we took Swing dance lessons and joined the Swing Dance Clubs that had live 6 piece bands dressed in period clothing and played all of the 40s music with style. Wow, this was ultra high energy dancing where we got great exercise while having quite a bit of fun. Some of the other dancers were amazing to watch as they threw each other around in their period outfits usually involving Zoot suits and more. It wasn’ t too long after that Mimi developed arthritis of her knees so we stopped dancing. A few years later, we enrolled in a ballroom class that was less strenuous than our other high energy dancing. We learned some slow dances like the waltz, fox trot, rhumba and samba and laughed and laughed as
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