Friday: Another installment of Please Pleaserock Me at Smith's Olde Bar. For this one, we went up against the Main Street Exiles (Rolling Stones tribute). They were ok; we were good. I think we won! It was (as usual) an easy night for me. I probably spent as much time drinking beer and taking pictures as I did on stage. Still fun, though! Paul Poovey on trumpet with us. He played very well, as did Dannell's brand new awesome guitar (P90s are sweet).
If you're lonely you can talk to Wheat. Hell yeah.
Saturday: Yacht Rock played a birthday party in Athens at the Hotel Indigo. This one took a while to get going. It seemed like there were probably only fifty people in attendance…kind of a strange gig for us. Still, they were into it. The stage was really small but acoustically very dead, so the sound was good, though Dannells' P90s were a bit noisy. He's thinking about switching them out for some noiseless P90s.
Bencuya's Fantom is starting to do that same thing that mine does--loose knobs are making adjustments to the sound parameters on their own! Not cool. Roland needs to talk to us about it. Mine has actually been behaving a bit better recently. I would still like to have a technician go in there and make sure everything's cool, since my go-to repair is to press hard on the knobs.
I think I'm giving up on the synthetic reed idea. I tried a still harder tenor reed, and it still didn't feel good. I tried a harder alto reed, too, and though it didn't choke like the softer one, it felt weird, too. There's something about the resistance and feedback that doesn't feel quite right. I wonder if it's something I could get used to? Dunno. For now, I'm going to stick with cane.
We had some sort of wiring issue with the van--smoking wires in the left tail light. Hmm.
Sunday: We got back into town from Athens very early in the morning, unloaded the van, and went our separate ways. By the time I had unpacked my gear at home and packed my gear for my church gig, it was 5 AM. I was up at 7, and at my gig at 8. We played two services.
I was asleep again at 1 PM and up at 5 PM--out the door at 6 PM to play my church gig. It dawned on me that most of what I'd said to Jack in the past four days was "Goodbye. I'm going to work again."
I got home from church gig number two, ate, hung out for a little bit, and then learned a couple of songs for a Monday morning rehearsal.
Monday: Yacht Rock had a rehearsal this morning, checking out a couple of Walter Egan songs (he of Magnet and Steel fame). He's going to sit in with us this coming weekend. Pretty cool, huh? We also checked out a song we need for a wedding this coming weekend and a Fleetwood Mac song. No Bencuya on this rehearsal--cool for me because it gave me the opportunity to try and grab some of his parts. It was a good challenge. When we hit these on the gig I'll be back to one note string parts.
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