November 2024

Friday, November 8, 2024: Phoenix, AZ. Yacht Rock played a private event at a golf club in Arizona. Good gear from SIR in Phoenix--always greatly appreciated!

This gig...hmm. It got really cold once the sun went down, which seems to affect me more and more as I get older. I used to just be annoyed about it, but it feels like I'm getting closer to the point where I can't function when it's cold on stage. The hand warmers I brought from home helped, but I was still sitting on my hands to keep them from going numb.

Anyway, it was a strange party. Very few guests seemed to be there during our set.

Novmeber 9, 2024: Denver, CO. The next morning, we were all up early to head to Denver for a public show at one of our favorite venues, Mission Ballroom.

We flew on Frontier, which was a little bit of an adventure compared to our usual Delta flights. We ended up with twice as many bag tags as we needed, and Frontier wanted to cancel them all and start over, but most of the luggage was already tagged and on its way...everything turned out ok.

Panera breakfast in the Phoenix airport. Peter Olson and I sat here drinking coffee and talking for so long that we nearly missed our flight to Denver.

Made it. Apparently budget airlines don't get to use the terminal?

We were at the venue plenty early, so I went for a run before soundcheck. On the way back, a dog (on a leash and everything), swung around its owner and bit me on the butt! It left a mark, but more to the point, it hurt my feelings! It's me, Dave, friend of dogs! You got the wrong guy!

Anyway...great gig!

November 10, 2024: Travel day. Ooof. We flew from Delta to Salt Lake City, hung around for a few hours, and then flew back to Phoenix. Looooong day, something like 10 AM - 7 PM.

Here's my burrito on SLC.

We got back to the hotel in Phoenix, where I opened the sandwich I'd brought home from the airport, and promptly passed out for a couple of hours, and then woke up at midnight and stayed awake for a few hours. It was messy.

Monday, November 11, 2024: Phoenix, AZ. We had a day off here in town, so several us made the trek to the Musical Instrument Museum. It was ok.  Some highlights:

one of Joey D's organs, and a couple of saxophones from his collection

this weird whistle saxophone thing...kind of a "concepts of a plan"

one of Chick Corea's rhodes pianos

Eric Dolphy's alto

I went for a run (the running was really good in Arizona--flat, and good temperatures, and sidewalks), and then I took a car to an Indian restaurant. Our hotel had zero food nearby, so everything was a car ride. Boooooooooo. This really hit the spot.

November 12, 2024: Phoenix, AZ. We did the same golf club event again that we played last week, for a different audience, but it was just about the same turnout. More importantly, it was colder and later in the evening, and my hands went completely numb and it was awful. So bad, in fact, that I had to get help from some of the local crew to pack up my personal gear because I didn't have enough feeling in my fingertips to unscrew things. 

Even an hour after the gig (including about twenty-five minutes indoors), my fingers were still frozen. It wasn't until we were most of the way back to the hotel that the blood finally returned. I'm hoping that the band will rent me a space heater for future events like this one.

November 15, 2024: Niagara Falls, ON. International gig! We got up early in Atlanta and flew to Buffalo, where two vans picked us up to ferry us across the border into Canada. 

Peace Bridge!

Our gig was at the casino next to Niagara Falls in a beautiful performing arts center that they have. Check out the view from my hotel room!

hotel lobby

There was a food court, but we each had a $200 tab for meals, so I called room service, because why not!

The venue was great, the gear was just ok--I ended up with two giant, weighted action keyboards that felt weird to play on this gig. 

Plenty of people in the audience (including the Canadian guys who came to see us in Cleveland a few years ago and brought their same banner). Good gig overall!

Zach is leaving us at the end of the year. I'm going to miss him every day.

Our show was over pretty early, so after packing up and eating cake and changing clothes, we reconvened at the sports bar in the casino to watch the Jake Paul/Mike Tyson fight. The room was overwhelmingly pro-Tyson. 

Pretty lame event, ya hosers.

November 25, 2024: Atlanta, GA. I did some more flute and alto flute recording for the latest Soccer Mommy record. The charts that they had were really wonky, but the parts were easy enough. Good stuff!

October 2024

October 5, 2024: Atlanta, GA. It's crazy that our annual show at Chastain in Atlanta is no longer a big deal to us, it terms of the size of the show. These days, the Chastain show is a homecoming gig for us, and it's fun to catch up with our old friends who have stuck with us.

October 10, 2024: Atlanta, GA. We played a benefit for the Center for Hard to Recycle Materials in Atlanta. All of our meals were delivered in plastic boxes, and there were no recycling bins in the dressing rooms, so everything went into the garbage can. C'mon man!

It took me an hour and a half to get to the gig, which I think might be a personal record, definitely a PR for 2024. It didn't matter, though, because the load in was enough of a pain that things were getting to the stage for setup just as I arrived. 

 Ok gig. This room at Monday Night Brewing is a terrible space for a band. I bet it didn't sound too good, even with our top notch sound engineers. We did get to home at the end of the gig, though, which was nice (and it only took about forty minutes).

October 19, 2024: Atlanta, GA. I got a call on Thursday afternoon about filling in for a friend on a wedding gig, and since I didn't have anything, I thought "Sure, I'll do that." 

Maybe not a good idea on my part, as this gig was extremely casual in preparation and performance, and if you know me, you know I like charts so that the song parts and the form (hell, even the key!) are determined before the song starts. So, I made charts for everything--it was about thirty songs. Everybody on the gig showed up with their version of the thirty songs, and we played them, but if my version didn't agree with the version that the trumpet player was playing, it didn't matter--each of us played his own version. Are we going to the outro now? Whomever was playing the loudest dragged the rest of the band into the outro.

It must've sounded fine--the reception attendees were all very happy with the outcome, so maybe it's my own issue. At least now I know how to handle it the next time I get this call.

October 25, 2024: Chattanooga, TN. Back to Yacht Rock gigs. This one was for the American Cancer Society, in a tent on top of the art museum. 

Easy gig! Nice looking people! Plus, we went home that night! Chattanooga is all around pretty great.

October 26, 2024: Atlanta, GA. Back to the random wedding gigs! I got a text from an unknown person six days before this, asking if I was available. Well, yeah, on the condition that there would be charts provided, charts that agreed with the rest of the band. There were, so yeah, I'm game.

This gig was at a midtown hotel, on a rooftop space. Nice! The weather was pretty perfect. 

The charts--all on iPads, and all interconnected via a network, so when the leader would pick a song, it would pop up on the tablet. That's pretty cool. We quickly learned (the trumpet player and I were the only local guys on the gig) however, that the bandleader had a habit of switching to the next tune while we were still finishing the one we were on, so you'd better memorize the last two lines of music before they vanish! That was pretty funny. It was all very low pressure, so it didn't matter if the horns had to bail out. 

Other than that...hmmm. Wedding bands play some weird/musically inappropriate shit. Why not just play the song that way it was recorded? And why are there now horn parts on Don't Stop Believing? Why are there no horn parts on Sex Machine?

Over at 10 PM. The trumpet player and I ran to the elevator to avoid getting caught behind 150 guests (and we made it). I was walking the dogs at 11 PM. Easy night!

September 2024

We flew home from the end of the tour (Phoenix) on the morning of September 12, 2024, and a week later, we were back up and running. Here's how the end of September looked.

September 19, 2024: Atlanta, GA. We played a private event at the rooftop on Ponce City Market on rented gear. Getting to the rooftop is kind of a pain in the butt, between the parking and the need for someone to accompany you on the elevator. Once you get up there, it's not too bad, though.

Anyway, kind of a lame gig, and the backline guys weren't really on the ball, so we had to wait around (I want to say that they forgot to send all the wireless microphones? Something like that--they forgot an essential part of our show gear). So, it took extra time waiting around because they had to go back and get the stuff, then bring it over, park, do the elevator thing, then hand it over to Zach to get it going.

Another big factor in this gig--Nick got sick and couldn't sing at all, so the setlist was carved up to work around this problem.

not great, but edible--some kind of coconut curry thing

September 20, 2024: New York, NY. The next morning, we were off to the northeast for a few shows. First up: Pier 17 in Manhattan. I'm always about this gig, with a long history of technical problems and personal mistakes. Today was scary, but I made it through without any catastrophes.

Nick was still sick all weekend, so the setlists all worked around it.

ESPN has a studio in Pier 17, and a couple of the producers were cool enough to give us a quick tour in the afternoon.

helicopter pic from my run in the afternoon

the view off the back of the stage

within a couple hundred people of selling out

cookies!

September 21, 2024: Asbury Park, NJ. On the other hand, I always play well here, probably the relief of making it out of NYC. This was a fun one!

almost sold this one out, too

September 22, 2024: Boston, MA. We played in a different place--Roadrunner--than we usually do in Boston. I was glad we were indoors, as the fall temperatures are right on the edge of where I start to get uncomfortable. Nice room!

September 27, 2024: Indianapolis, IN. This one was a bummer. Hurricane Helen made landfall in the Florida panhandle headed for Altanta (and then up to Louisville, KY), so we flew out on the evening of September 26 to stay ahead of it. The band's love affair with Indianapolis goes back to our earliest days, so we were extremely disappointed that we couldn't play the show.

The night we flew out, the outer edges of the hurricane were in Atlanta, and it was pouring! I drove to the airport and pulled into the park-and-ride lot, which had the usual number of cars, but no activity--nobody coming or going, and most importantly, no park-and-ride shuttles!  I circled the lot until I found a shuttle, but she wasn't driving, just blocking an opening in the fence that could be an illegal entrance/exit. She said that the tower could see me, so if I would just go back to where the signs told me to park, a bus would come and get me. So I did. And stood under the tailgate of my car in a torrential downpour for at least fifteen minutes before I gave up and called a Lyft to get me from the lot to the terminal. Except...a Lyft driver won't come in the lot, so I had to walk in the aforementioned torrential downpour and the accompanying three inch deep rivers raging in the parking lot to the front gate, where at least I was out of the rain (but my socks and shoes were soaked, and my jeans were wet up to the mid-thigh). I waited on the Lyft guy, but then probably twenty-five minutes after I'd driven on the lot, a park-and-ride bus finally circled over to me and picked me up. I was thankful, but also awfully annoyed that it took so long. Plus, canceling the Lyft cost me three bucks.

So, yeah, we got to Indy just fine, spent the night, got up the next day and went to the gig. It rained and the wind blew all day, it was ugly, but it felt like nothing more than crappy weather.

nothing to do but practice!

It felt like the storm was going to move away enough that the wind advisory would be be lifted and everything would be ok, so we waited it out, but in the end, the gig was canceled, mostly because of the potential risk from the high winds. The state fair accident was weighing heavily on a lot of the local crew's minds (you can read about that here).

September 28, 2024: Atlanta, GA. We all flew home Saturday morning, giving me enough to time to go home and change clothes before heading to the Trolley Barn for a jazz trio gig as part of a private event. It was a really satisfying evening with two friends, Craig Shaw on bass and Kevin Bales on piano, both of whom played beautifully.

One scary moment on this gig: about thirty minutes into the night, a man had a seizure and collapsed on the floor. We didn't really know what to do, so I helped keep him on his side and tried to keep his mouth/airway clean until the EMTs arrived. That was nuts! After maybe ten or fifteen minutes, he had recovered and they got him on the gurney so that they could take him to Grady for further treatment.

September 30, 2024: Atlanta, GA. Home recording time! Mark Dannells sent me a song of his that needed a sax section sounding part, and he played some stuff into his computer that generated some kind of musical notation. Between the recording and the chart, I was able to tease out what the parts were supposed to be. It was a tedious process.

It ended up being four voices, so I recorded twenty sax parts, doubling everything so that he'd have blend options. Here's a sample of how it sounded.