We loaded in really early (2 PM), but finished early (4 PM), so that Butch Walker could set up and play a show in front of our show. Sounds like Atlanta music royalty. His show was slammed, though. I got back to Smith's a little after 9 PM, and I could hear the crowd from the bottom of the aforementioned stairs. The whole room was a hot and stinky mess. It took about three hours for it to finally cool back down.
Our show finally got rolling around 10:30 PM. The first set went pretty well. We added in two new ones--Happiness is a Warm Gun and Rain. We also played our original, Can't Wait for Summer. It felt really weird, and then it dawned on me that this was only the second time I've ever played the song in the context of a horn section (the other being with Jordan Shalhoup on the last night of the 10 High).
The second set got a little wild. We began with our third new one, Live and Let Die. That was pretty good--it got me wondering how often somebody plays piccolo at Smith's Olde Bar. After that, we played Strawberry Fields Forever. Halfway through the song, the onstage power went out, which reset all the keyboards and killed the bass for a second. Dannells' amp wouldn't come back on--the particular quad box into which he was plugged was on a bad breaker, evidently. So as the song was supposed to be boiling up to a climax, it instead broke down to just drums. Uhhhh…
Strangeness. Next up was Penny Lane. Paul Poovey aced it. More piccolo for me.
We followed that with Whatever Gets You Through the Night. Yay for me! Around this time, I realized the crowd just wasn't that into us. A pretty lukewarm reaction. It felt like it was too hot to leave, so they just stood there.
The rest of the night was easy. Nothing else to report. We forced an encore on the audience even though they weren't screaming for it.
Down the stairs we go…
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