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| photo courtesy of Julia Wallace |
As I write this, I can still feel the boat moving, even though I'm at home. Here's everything I can remember…
Thursday: we got on the boat later than we usually do. I think, in fact, that most people were already on there--we went straight through registration and hopped aboard. A late morning flight and a stop for lunch got us there just in time for the lifeboat drill.
The rooms were bigger than usual. We even had room for a couch!
The bathroom had a countertop, which I like a lot better than the usual glass shelf above the sink.
We played pretty early on in the cruise--something like 8 PM--on the stage in the Criterion Lounge. Much bigger stage than the Candlelight, and they gave us an hour to set up and and hour to soundcheck. I like that. Sometimes it's a real "throw and go" thing, and there's no time to hear what things sound like until you're into the gig.
The first set went pretty well. Things sounded fine (lots of low end out towards the front line--possibly a hollow stage?). I had my own monitor, so I could hear my stuff.
We're used to the way these boats work, so it was no surprise that there weren't many people in there with us, but the ones who came saw and believed.
We're used to the way these boats work, so it was no surprise that there weren't many people in there with us, but the ones who came saw and believed.
We finished around 9:30. Some guys went to bed. I wandered the ship with a large cup of whiskey. It was a REALLY slow night--not a lot people out, and not much partying going on. What do you expect with a boatload of hipsters?
I saw the first half of the first song by song by Dinosaur Jr. Too loud and not my thing (i.e. I didn't like it). Check out the guitar set up (left side of the pic) and the bass set up (right side). A bit much.
Back to the Criterion Lounge to see who had followed us. There was some band--a guy with a DJ set up who also played guitar, a bass player, and a drummer. The DJ guy would get a groove rolling, and then the trio would play along with it--like chords and the bass line. I was sitting next to the front of house guy and I said "Wow! A song with no hook! How about a melody?" At that moment, the song ended and I exploded with drunken cackling laughter and several people turned around and looked at me, so I removed myself. Oops.
I went up on the Lido deck, sat in a lounge chair, and listened to some indie rock band. Nothing memorable, so I gave up and went to bed.
Friday: we got up and started preparing for our big show on the Lido deck. Unfortunately, it was uncovered! NOOOOOOOOO! Neither my electronics nor my acoustic instruments like direct sunlight. That sucked. The gig was good, though, and we had (as usual) a significantly larger audience. Reports from out front said that Baker Street sounded huge. The Caribbean has been alerted to my presence!
The rest of the day was easy. More sleeping and more eating of copious amounts of fruit, but I took a day off from drinking. I hung out a little at the end of the night at the mid-ship bar waiting to see if a party materialized, but no avail. Instead I had the experience of listening to Nick tell people I was the biggest asshole in the band, and then later on some girl got in my face because I wouldn't dance with her (I was leaning against a pole watching the band). That's how Friday's fun ended.
Saturday: Cozumel! We got off the boat around 10 AM. The original plan was that we would rent scooters and not wreck, but the cheaper option turned out to be hiring Jose to drive us around. $80 for the day for four of us (Mark Dannells, Greg Lee, Ganesh Giri Jaya, and me).
The first place we went was the Mayan ruins. Not much to look at--a stone pyramid and an old Catholic church. They did have some dogs.
We met up with some fans in a stretch Lincoln Navigator--totally homemade! There was a weird air conditioner unit built on the top, and the windows were smeared with silicon caulk. We started drinking with them, passing around a bottle of tequila.
From there, the four of us moved on to the tequila tour, where our tour guide, Gabriel, got us drunk on more tequila shots. He was loud and sweaty. Dannells bought an $80 bottle of tequila.
Jose! get us out of here!
Jose! get us out of here!
From there we moved on to another restaurant.
They also had a dog.
I had a margarita and some kind of cheezy chicken and peppers thing. The Navigator crew showed up shortly thereafter.
Once everybody was finished eating, we ditched Jose and got in the Navigator with the crew. Our next stop was some tourist trap place called Carlos and Charlie's on the main drag. More alcohol. I danced; I was part of the conga line. Other highlights included doing the dance along with Y.M.C.A., except the DJ would kill the music and say "Why are you gay" in the chorus. The servers also opened a tank of compressed air and shot it at the dance floor while pouring tequila into the stream. That looked cool. I got sticky.
We got back on the boat, sat in the hot tub and listened to Dinosaur Jr (from behind the stage, which was still WAAAAAAAAAAAAYY too loud, but tequila and beer got me through it). I ate and got back to my cabin.
The next thing I knew, it was 4:30 AM and I was still in my swimsuit, still in my room. I changed and went back to bed.
Sunday: thanks to a TV in my cabin, I saw a lot of football stuff. That ate up a good amount of time. All the bands on the boat took a photo, and we met a couple of significant people: Brian Ray, who plays guitar with Paul McCartney and also worked with Etta James, and Josh Freese, who plays drums with everybody. I never know what to say to those people, other than thanks for checking us out. They're not any different than any other high caliber musicians I know, they just happen to be on bigger gigs.
So…football football football. Dannells told his fitness joke at the Weezer Q and A.
We played our final show of the cruise at 10 PM back in the Criterion Lounge. This show was the best attended, but sounded the worst--speaking specifically of the sound (not the playing). The production was all digital so all the settings were saved from our previous show, but it seemed like the bass was all over the place, and Dannells was EXTREMELY UNHAPPY with the amp he borrowed. In spite of that (and this one happened to be a "throw and go" with a thirty minute change over from the previous band), I think we performed really well and the crowd was extremely enthusiastic. Ganesh played his ass off.
Josh Freese (with a fake mustache) sat in with us on Peg. No big deal for us…just another performance of a song we've played hundreds of times. He had fun--how often do you get to play a Steely Dan song with a band who can really nail it?
It reinforces my feeling that the difference between that guys with whom I play locally and a guy like that is more about the opportunity than some giant leap in talent. I think we can hang just fine.
Some more drinking…I was doing my best to plow through the remainder of the whiskey we'd smuggled on the boat. I gave up pretty early (2 AM, maybe?).
Monday: we didn't have to get off the boat until 9 AM (usually it's an hour earlier). Nice. Not so nice was that our flight wasn't until 7 PM, so we tried to kill off the day in Miami. The cruise organizers helped us leave our gear at their hotel, so we caught a shuttle to the airport and then city bus to South Beach. Hours later, we arrived! Pretty cool--I'd never been there before. We ate at an awesome restaurant (I had 4 steak tacos and a side order of rice--for my homies!) We took a stroll on the beach.
Finally we ended up drinking mojitos at some lounge (called "The Mojito Lounge"). A real stick of sugarcane jammed in there. Nice.
At the end of the day we cabbed it back to the hotel (our cab driver's name was "Louis XVI"!), shuttled it to the airport, and flew home! The end!
