Wednesday: we (Yacht Rock) had a big rehearsal in preparation for our upcoming two night stand at the Variety Playhouse. One night is regular Yacht Rock stuff, but the other night is the Reagan Rock Prom, so we're spending our time learning lots of wretched early eighties stuff. Yuck...stuff like Break my Stride and True. We tackled eight tunes in about two hours.
Wednesday night I played a Rolling Stones tribute rehearsal. That was pretty easy--a couple of solos and I was done. It was deafeningly loud, though. I bought a little Mackie SRM150 as a baby monitor (if you recall from my previous blog post). It worked really well at throwing some sound back towards me. Up against 2 guitars, bass, drums, and a keyboardist (plus vocals in monitors), I needed some help.
Thursday: Yacht Rock night. Evidently, it was fight night at the 10 High! Some guy stepped on stage at the end of the night and Mark Cobb flipped out, demanding to know where our security guy was to stop the guy. It turns out he was upstairs rolling around in the street with another security guy and some drunk--they were trying to hold him down until the cops showed up. He'd taken a different drunk fighter upstairs, which is how he'd ended up there in the first place.
Playing-wise, things were pretty good. I practiced that afternoon, so I felt really confident going into the gig. Somehow, I overlooked Human Nature (which bit me in the butt), but most other things went pretty well. I played a really horrible chord on Really Love to See You Tonight (instead of G minor for the first chord, I played A/G!), but other than that I was ok. Bencuya recorded it. I'm hoping it sounds better than I remember.
Friday: A two gig night it was.
I loaded in to the Park Tavern for the Yacht Rock gig. I set up and soundchecked and split. At one point, I was playing Lonely Boy (of course), and the soundguy kept turning it up in the PA because he wasn't getting enough signal from me. He moved me to a different line in the snake, and suddenly there I was! He had the gain open all the way and the channel fader up all the way. Needless to say, I was so loud that I bet Andrew Gold could hear me in LA! My apologies to LA. Anyway, I just kept on playing, indifferent to the damage the sound was causing my ears.
From there I boogied up I-85 to the Park Tavern to intercept a Yacht Rock gig already in progress. They'd started with a Zepplin vs. Who Rock Fight, so I only missed around eight songs. It was packed, though! Very cool. I played the last 45 minutes of the gig.
Saturday: Yacht Rock played a wedding in Seaside, FL, in the Florida panhandle. It was pretty cool. We were in a tent between the hotel and the sand dunes--a really sweet setting. The crowd wasn't that into it, but the band had fun in spite of them. The gig was at Watercolor--where The Truman Show was filmed. Mark Cobb was flipping the beat around at the end of the night (backbeat on 1 and 3), making me squirm with delight.
Sunday: We are off until tonight, when we make our debut at Spinnaker in Panama City Beach. My family is here on vacation with me, braving the oil!
I hate to say it, but I'm a bit nostalgic for Florida. I lived here in middle school and high school, and I was happy to move to Atlanta and get away from all of this. Coming back, I see so many reminders of those years. I miss it much more than I ever thought I could.
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