Last gig of the year! Yacht Rock ended the year at the Park Tavern. Instead of upstairs in that hellish room that made me so miserable, we were downstairs. They put carpet on top of the ice rink, and then put the usual stage up. Weird…we were on an iceberg. I didn't really notice it. In fact, we sweated pretty good, all thing considered.
I did not play as well as the previous night. My guess would be that the number of people made me uptight, or the fact that Bencuya was recording it. I dunno. The first tune was fine, except for a horrible wrong note I played--it was one of those things where I suddenly started thinking about what I was doing, and I couldn't think of the next note. I looked at the keyboard, and just hoped I was going to hit the right key. I was wrong. And thus the mind games began! The rest of the tune, I was thinking, "See! You got the first mistake out of the way so you can relax!"
The next tune up was Believe it or Not, and so I got jumpy about the synth lick at the end of the bridge. While I was gearing up for that (or quieting the voice in my head!), I managed to destroy the first verse…it's D, G, A, and D, but for some reason I started on A, and then I couldn't get myself in the right place--I was chasing the four chords around. Ugh.
We got to the bridge, and I was super tense, and then I played my big lick the best I've ever played it on a gig, and the adrenaline washed over me, and then I wanted to faint! Relief! The voice in my head switched to "See! You got it right! Who cares about the rest!"
Mark Dannells turned around after that tune and said, "I need a drink! I'm scared to death!" Maybe we should have played through that one in sound check.
The tune after that was More Than a Woman. I play the strings on EWI, and I really needed to catch my breath after the previous excitement, but there was no place to do so, so then I REALLY wanted to faint.
After that, things calmed down. We kind of settled into a groove, though I thought for a second Mark Cobb was going to flip out because he couldn't get the guitar out of his monitor. The crowd was good, though noisy, and they partied hard. For the band, I think it was a slightly above average night.
I was a pretty good on some of my newer stuff, like the bass line thing in Steal Away, and I added a missing string thing (ok, one note) on Escape. It was not a big sax night; there were seven originally on the list, and we ended up only playing four. My flute solo on Lowdown was the biggest bunch of crap I've played on that tune in weeks! It was really bad. I had diarrhea of the jazz flute.
I'm working towards adding another synth part in the build up on Lido Shuffle, and I've been practicing it slowly, but now when I play one hand instead of two, it sounds really lame. That's my big thing to get together for January.
The beauty of the Park Tavern gig is that we have to stop at a certain time or they get fined for a noise ordinance violation. I love that. Not that the band is likely to play a meandering set of encores anyway, but I like that when people ask for more, we have a reason to say no, and there's nothing we can do about it.
I packed up and split. Home by 2 AM!
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