Bill Dutcher – Modern Acoustic Guitarist

Let’s face it…. We’ve all been ‘cornered’ and asked to play the typical ‘top ten’ requests that every ‘John Q. Public’ wants to hear, right?  The running joke with just about every working musician I’ve talked with about this is that there is this handful of tunes that are OVER PLAYED TO DEATH!  After all we’re all here as players to ‘broaden your listening horizon!’  I have nothing against Van Morrison, and while he’s laughing all the way to the bank every time the radio stations play that ‘tune about that girl with the certain colored eyes’, it takes a shotgun held to my head to get me to play it!  But what if you forget all the the words when your put on the spot for a request?…Ah…Modern technology!  Read more…

I played a wonderful fundraiser event last week in Michigan with a great player/friend of mine named Duffy King, and we took the ‘typical request’ phenomenon to the extreme.  We dared the audience to try and stump us with requests.  The only thing was that they had to put $100 in the tip jar for each tune….All proceeds went to the fundraiser by the way.  Well, as the night went on the tables starting challenging each other and people were putting $1,000  in the jar for EACH request!  I think we had close to $9,000 by the end of the night.  We got stumped on “Lying Eyes” by The Eagles.  We both knew the chorus but could not peg the verse structure.  So Duffy gets his I-Phone, Google’s the lyrics and chords, Sets the phone on the music stand and we totally winged it!  At the end of every verse he quickly reached over and flicked the screen to the next verse.  This really got a laugh from the crowd, not to mention from us.  Talk about thinking quick on your feet!  So the next time your  put’on-the-spot’, keep that Droid phone within reach!