The Yacht Rock Revue played our usual Thursday night extravaganza at the 10 High. This week featured the regular band! No subs.
On some of our gigs, having the regular band there can be a hindrance--we're comfortable enough with each other that the silly jokes come early and often. The 10 High is the worst place for this--there's not enough of an incentive to behave. We were really good last night. Not to say we weren't messing around, but the funny stuff didn't overshadow the music making.
Going into the gig, I was really tired. Beth and I went to see Wilco Wednesday night; when I got home, I took my Nord apart in an attempt to fix what I thought was a problem with the mono output jack--I got the whole thing in pieces, couldn't find anything, put it back together, and then only the bottom third of the keyboard worked, so I had to take it apart again and find the ribbon cable that had come unplugged. Put it back together but it still wasn't fixed. Once I'd sort of given up on that (I used the headphone jack for sound as temporary fix), I moved on to finishing learning Lady (You Bring Me Up) by the Commodores. My responsibility was strings and horns. It turned out to be really really really complicated. Damn you Lionel Richie!
I got in bed at 5 AM. My alarm went off at 8:30 AM. I was at the rehearsal space by 9:45 AM. We played through our Lady, our two completed originals, Take Me with You and Baby Be Mine (for the upcoming Purple Rain/Thriller gig). I was hanging on to Lady by my fingertips. The mono jack on the Nord was still not working.
When I got home, I ate lunch and got Jack off the bus. Then I set up my stuff and practiced Lady for a couple of hours--slowly, just trying to get the flow of the parts. I also discovered that the Nord problem was a bad cable--because I was using a TRS to XLR cable, I was able to hear sound sometimes because of the ring (the R in TRS), and that's why I could use the stereo output of the headphone jack successfully. Duh!
So yeah, Lady for like three hours straight. I finally got the hang of it. Still on three hours sleep.
I got the gig and couldn't wait to go home and go to bed. Once we got started, though, I was having fun and was wide awake. In fact, most of the first set was about the best I've ever played! After each of the first few songs, I thought "Wow, I haven't messed up yet!"
Without any notice, we played our two originals on the gig, and they both went over really well. What a coup! The second song, Good Thing, got a particularly good response. Pretty cool!
Lady went well, but I was again holding on for dear life. I need about eight or ten more gigs with it before it will be comfortable.
At the end of the gig, it dawned on me that I'd set up my tenor but never played it. I only played alto on three songs, and flute on one. I don't mind though, because we did some different songs than we've been playing with the subs.
Great gig!
Tonight we're playing the Georgia Theatre in Athens. How cool is that?!
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