Here's a little geometry humor to start us off before we get to the music: Parallel lines have so much in common. It's a shame they'll never meet.

.....and on to the jam summary. Thirteen brave souls ventured forth this miserable night, with temperatures in the 30s, a steady, heavy rain and nasty wind. Vin, WendySue, Arlene, Jen, Ken, Larry, Tim, Janet, Bill, Marianne, Sam and Scott are all going to receive medals for bravery for coming out in this weather, all for the love of music and comradeship. (I placed the order with a company in China. The money will come out of our annual dues.) At this top-notch jam, we played 94% of the songs quite well. The theme was the WEATHER. Most of the songs had rain in them.

1. Rhythm of the Rain, the Cascades, 1963 (Ken)

No mistakes. Great song. You Who fans might remember the scene in the movie Quadrophenia where this song was playing at a sedate party. Someone ripped the needle from the record and put on the raucous, irreverent My Generation. The message from the Who was that the Cascades were a tragically unhip group, without a shred of rock and roll credibility, who put out the sappiest of records. I'm going to boldly defy Pete Townshend and his band of noisy troublemakers and declare my fondness for the song.

2. Top of the World, the Carpenters, 1973 (Arlene)

This was the first of two Carpenters' songs we did. There was one spot towards the end of the song where the instructions were to cease playing for two lines then resume. It was pretty effective. I don't remember Karen and Richard doing that. Did they? Must look that up on YouTube.

There was a band which came out of Iceland in the late 80s called the Sugarcubes. This was where the pixie-like Bjork got her start. They were an odd bunch and never had a wide following. Do we have any Sugarcubes fans out there? They had one stupendous album titled Life's Too Good, but they aren't everyone's cup of tea. They are the most unlikely band ever to do a remake of a Carpenters' song, but they remade Top of the World. It's surprisingly faithful to the original with only a little bit of silly mischief thrown in at about the two-minute mark.

3. Bring Me Sunshine, Jive Aces, 2012 (Arlene)

Arlene, how many times have you suggested this one? We're going to have to set a limit. It always goes off well. Though the song is modern, it sounds like something from the 20s or 30s.

4. Have You Ever Seen the Rain, CCR, 1971 (Arlene)

We did a good job on this solid standard by John Fogarty and Creedence.

5. A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, Dylan, 1963 (Janet)

This would be impossible to mess up, even if we were playing with crippling hangovers. It was a C F and G. Each verse went on for light years, and there were a lot of them. We were at the library from 7:30 to 9 PM, and we were doing this song from 7:35 to 8:55. It was verse, chorus, verse, chorus.......on and on into the distance, Hey, Mr. Nobel Prize Winner, did you ever hear of a bridge? The lyrics are weird and interesting, often unintelligible, par for the course for a Dylan song. (I recall having to read a poem in Catholic school called Lord Randall. It began, "Oh, where have you been, Lord Randall, my son? And where have you been, my handsome young man?" Is this where Dylan took his inspiration?) My favorite line is a great description of bleakness, about a place "where black is the color, where none is the number." The man did have a way with words, perhaps good enough to overlook "a voice like sand and glue," to quote D. Bowie.

6. I Am a Rock, Simon and Garfunkel, 1966 (Tim)

Jen saw Paul Simon outside of a movie theatre in Manhattan once. He was short. This was a guy who could really write. The protagonist of the song had his heart broken and refuses to allow anyone to get close again. This lyric is the opposite of Elvis' Can't Help Falling in Love. Elvis is the fool who rushes in. Paul is the wise man with his guard up, yet friendless and loveless. Which is the better course of action?

7. Blowin' in the Wind, Dylan, 1963 (Janet)

Arlene secretly hates this song. I wouldn't go quite that far, but to borrow a word from my tenth grade German class, it is a bit ausgespielt (played out). However, the lyrics are poignant, and Peter, Paul and Mary had blended vocals which could make Mafia captains weep. I still have never gotten an answer to my question about the main point of the song: What is the answer that's blowing in the wind? Is the answer obvious or elusive? Very very easy song to play, by the way.

8. Sunshine Superman, Donovan, 1966 (Tim)

Ah, here was a breath of fresh air from the past two ponderous numbers. Donovan Leitch, the Scottish hippie, the UK's answer to Bob Dylan, had some trippy yet melodic hits from '66 to'69. This was fun, and dead easy, using only C7 (to start!), then F and G7.

9. The Rain, The Park and Other Things, Cowsills, 1967 (Dan)

These chords, while correct, were several times in the wrong spots, making a pretty easy song more difficult. This, along with Hair, were their two monster hits. It wasn't our fault that we played it imperfectly, and we overcame much of that imperfection with gleeful enthusiasm.

10. Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, B.J. Thomas, 1969 (WendySue)

Dr. Uke did this chord sheet. He's almost always on the money, a bit fussy for my tastes sometimes, but this was a good one. We've done this at least once before, because I remember writing about the scene in Butch Cassidy where Paul Newman is riding Katherine Ross on a bicycle as this song plays. I mention that only to repeat that Katherine Ross should be on the list of the Top Five Great Faces ever to have come out of Hollywood.

11. Stormy Weather, Ethel Waters, 1933 (WendySue)

Here's a nice one, with a few unusual chords, none of which were particularly hard. This is Dr. Uke at his best. It's a pleasure to see the chords exactly over the correct lyrics. Perhaps being a doctor he appreciates precision. Though I am largely a fan of hippiedom, I don't excuse this sloppy, long-haired attitude of throwing chords on a page willy-nilly and hoping for a good outcome. While his bead-wearing dorm mates were sitting cross-legged, listening to the Jefferson Airplane and smoking the funny stuff, Dr. Uke was at the campus library, immersed in scholarship, sweat dripping from his brow onto textbooks, preparing for a career as a no-nonsense physician and producer of accurate chord sheets for ukulele players. Dr. Uke, thank you for your hard work. (Are you accepting new patients and do you take Blue Cross Blue Shield?)

Look at these chords: D# diminished, A7b9, A7 augmented 5, C7b9 and C7 augmented 5. (Hint: a cheat for the D# dim is a B7 played the cheater's way, in the shape of a G chord, but moved up towards your chin one string. I've come to love B7. Beautiful, distinctive sound.) All those chord names may sound like gibberish, but if you look at the sheet, you'll find they're pretty simple. For example, that A7b9 and the C7aug5 are the same chord. I've also seen it spelled as G diminished, C# diminished and Bb dim. WendySue will recognize it as the second chord of her signature song, "Ain't She Sweet".

The only time we fell down was near the end, at the bridge. No one knew how it went save for WendySue. For those who like this song, I recommend going back to it, playing it slowly and carefully, and paying attention to the subtle beauty of those oddball changes.

12. Rainy Days and Mondays, Carpenters, 1971 (WendySue)

This was the second Carpenters song we did. It didn't go well. I noted down that the chords were hard, but I just played it again and they weren't impossible. It was a little hard and maybe could have been simplified a little. We used Dr. Uke again. Karen Carpenter sang like an angel.

13. Singin' in the Rain, Gene Kelly, 1952 (WendySue)

Dr. Uke was a little fussy here. We played F, Am, Gm6 and C7. Though they were not hard, it was unnecessary. When I was small and Ma Turner taught me a couple of ukulele chords (I never knew which ones they were), Singin' in the Rain was one of the three songs I was able to play. I remember playing this with only two chords. In this case, you could have gotten away with just F and C7.

14. I Wish It Would Rain, the Temptations, 1968 (Dan)

My second pick is another that didn't go well. It was A D to E7. The chords were misplaced, meaning that a literal following of them would lead to cacophony. Also, the phrasing of the great David Ruffin was not easy to do as a group. As we began, Sam said, "Oh, this is like the 12-bar blues." I wish I had learned some music theory when I was young. As a middle-aged bloke I have zero patience for that sot of thing (nothing to be proud of) and am not willing to work hard to learn it. My nephew recently spent about 20 minutes attempting to explain relationships between chords, the tonic, subdominant and dominant (also called the one four five), and though it was kind of interesting, and we were bonding over music, it did not truly sink in. I've spent 57 years growing a skull this thick and things have a hard time penetrating. What clicked when Sam made his comment was the George Harrison song from the Let It Be album, For You Blue. At one point in the song he says, "Them are the 12-bar blues." That's one of the songs I like to do, and one of the few I'm able to do without any sheet music in front of me, using A7 D7 and E7. These have become my three favorite uke chords to use for stuff like this, and it seems I could go on indefinitely and never make a mistake. One of the first times I did it I was amazed that my fingers seemed to know where to go independent of my brain, as if possessed by a musical demon. In the Temptations song, the A and D are not sevenths, but it's the same idea. I probably would have done better if I had only the words in front of me and changed chords when the spirit moved me. I sensed that not many of us actually knew this song. As an experiment, I wonder what would have happened had I tried to sing it by myself, no one had the music in front of them, and everyone was told to start on A, then change to the D and E7 when they felt it come around. Would that have been a big mess, or would some of us intuit the appropriate moments and be together on it? I wonder. I wah wah wah wah wonder.

15. Here Comes the Sun, George/Beatles, 1969 (Scott)

Our penultimate song of the night was lovely and inspiring. Scott and Vin were able to do some of the tricky note-picking. Everyone knows and loves this song. If anyone in the Long Island Ukulele Strummers Club does NOT love this song, now would be a good time to skulk away and cover your face in shame. Even people on Mars know Here Comes the Sun and sing it in groups at Martian barbeques, NASA has reported.

This would be a good time to mention Sam's bass playing. He has an electric bass guitar, not an acoustic bass ukulele. That is technically cheating, but he's gotten special dispensation from the Ukulele Council of Elders, because the bottom-end sound lends so much to the depth of the songs. I have an old Peavy bass amp on permanent loan from a guy I know and have always had humming problems. I brought it in and the humming magically stopped when Sam plugged in. In my cynical mind, I believed that calling an amp a bass amp, a guitar amp, or one suited for an electric piano was just a way for the music stores to make you buy more stuff, stuff you don't really need. An amp is an amp is an amp, I thought, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein. Well, whaddya know? I guess I was wrong. My electric ukulele never sounded good in the bass amp, but the bass DOES sound good. It's so easy to be cynical in this rough and tumble world, always ascribing the basest motives (aha--a pun!) to people's actions. My apologies to Long Island's purveyors of musical equipment. I concede that a bass amp IS the appropriate amp for a bass guitar. Cynicism is sometimes just a lazy habit of thought.

16. Rhythm of the Rain (again)

We ended where we began. This time we sped it up, not quite to the level of happy-ukeyness. I vote this my Top Pick for the evening. We were mistake-free and it all sounded smooth. These are the songs I keep a lookout for. Most of our jams have at least one. When I think of songs to do in a public performance, I'm not looking for ones we had the most fun with, necessarily, but ones that came off without any mistakes. The ukulele gods guided our fingers to the correct spots, and through this Divine Intervention produced an error-less result.

Two non-musical notes to mention are that this jam was in an overheated, airless cellar chamber, and at least a few of us suffered therefrom. Lastly, Arlene wanted me to mention that Larry did a "mitzvah" for WendySue by giving her a spare laptop computer. If mitzvah translates as "blessing," what does bar mitzvah mean, we wondered. If only we knew someone who has been recently bar mitzvahed, we could ask him, drill him on his Hebrew comprehension.

For our next session, we're going with Arlene's suggestion: DAYS OF THE WEEK. Two immediately spring to mind: Friday On My Mind by the Easy Beats (1967), and the Cure's Friday I'm in Love (1992). Very catchy stuff. I encourage Janet, Tim and Marianne to think of some things you'd like to play. I don't want all us old-time members to hog all the fun. It could be a topic or theme, or something like the songs of Buddy Holly or Linda Ronstadt (which we did in the past), or some genre of music that you like.

-- Dan.