Friday, August 28, 2015

Austin

Yacht Rock had a nice, random Wednesday night gig in Austin, Texas yesterday, performing at a summer concert series.  

After flying in and dropping our bags at the hotel, we caught a ride to Curra's Grill for some dynamite Mexican food, described by Greg as "gastric nirvana."



A bottle of juice and a bottle of jews?


I had shrimp and pineapple enchiladas.  Outstanding.


Load in was pretty miserably hot--too much of direct sunlight.  By the end of soundcheck, my horns were hot to the touch and my laptop was almost too hot to pick up.  That's not good!  I took pretty much all of the gear that I flew with (2 saxes, EWI, flute, piccolo, computer) into the green room.  The local crew taped my keyboards with a thermal blanket--the aluminum foil looking ones.

As usual on these fly dates, we rented keyboards, stands, pedals, and cables.  Our old sound guy Hans would be pleased with this cable wrapping job.  Greg Lee would not.


Dream big.


After the sun set, the evening turned out to be quite nice!  Not a big crowd, but they were very entertained.




Go time...


This was a pretty good gig.  Personally, I played much better on the saxophones (though my alto reed bit the dust--it pinched shut a couple of times during Baker Street).  The mix was a little bit different from what we've been hearing, but it wasn't a big deal.  We ended up with two or three hundred people in the crowd.

We flew home the following morning.  On to the next thing.