David Freeman Music

Off we go...the Yacht Rock Revue was in Nashville, Birmingham, and Atlanta last weekend for three more sellout gigs. No plane rides, though...how am I supposed to accumulate Skymiles in the van?

Friday: This was our first time playing a Top Golf, which is basically a two story driving range attached to a music venue. How these go together, I don't know, but the room sounded pretty good and the load in was not too bad.

This week, we added the Doobie Brothers' Minute by Minute, so we spent a fair amount of soundcheck trying it out. Here's my chart. It took a long time to sort out those voicings! Bill Payne (of Little Feat fame) played the synth stuff on this as well as What a Fool Believes. I think he has six fingers on each hand.



After a few swings at this one, we sound checked Magnet and Steel with our old friend Walter Egan, who sat in with us at the end of the show. Before we changed, though, we ate, and before we ate, we took a few swings. I am really bad at golf--like m…

Only one Yacht Rock gig this week, but we had to go a long way to get there: Park City, Utah. We performed at the Sundance TV party for the Sundance Film Festival.
Salt Lake City/Park City got a foot of snow the night before our arrival.




I had no interest in the festival (the hipsters are thriving in independent film), so I walked a couple of blocks up the hill to escape the crowds.







I stayed outside for as long as I could, and then headed back to the HQ. At that point, they were about begin another event, so I ended up sitting in the hallway outside the restrooms until it ended. Also in the hallway: a display with bags of "bark THINS." I ate three bags. Major tummy ache.


So...finally! Set up time on this tiny stage. Most of the gear worked (guitars and drum pad did not). Also, the in ear monitor system that we ordered did not make it on the truck, which meant that somebody probably had to drive a hundred miles an hour to Park City to get it to us in time.




We played from 9:3…

I had the opportunity to play with the Atlanta Latin Jazz Orchestra this past Thursday night at Venkman's. It's a cool band comprised of some of the most excellent horn players in Atlanta, and the rhythm sections are always stellar as well.

Unfortunately, the charts are very difficult, and I wasn't able to be comfortably prepared, so parts of this gig were painfully bad for me. I needed a few more days to really digest the parts, so...I don't know. I sucked in some parts, and I was embarrassed that I was screwing up surrounded by twenty of my contemporaries.

Here's video of the first set:

I began playing professionally in the mid 1990s just as the Dave Matthews Band was becoming popular, and yet, in those twenty plus years, I have never been called upon to play a Dave Matthews song (not entirely true--years ago, I got called to play a random gig with a Dave Matthews Tribute Band, but I was unavailable) until 2018. I would've thought people would be calling me constantly, since the gig is all four saxophones plus flute and I own all four saxophones and a flute, and then I thought, maybe I haven't gotten called because nobody's playing these songs because maybe nobody wants to hear them?
Anyway, my friend Dustin Cottrell has a group called The Laymen (with another church musician friend of his), and they opted to use a full band for this DMB show. We played at the Red Light Cafe on a snowy night that maybe affected our attendance--there were maybe ten people there, but difficult to say because most of the people watching the first band were involved in the D…

Last weekend, the Yacht Rock Revue headed back out on the road for a weekend in the northeast. Sold out crowds and weird weather abound.

Thursday: Our first show of this run was at The Queen in Wilmington, Delaware, a beautiful venue that was recently renovated and reopened in 2011. We flew into Philadelphia, drove to Wilmington, and grabbed a quick lunch before setting up our stuff. Mark Bencuya, Monkeyboy, and I found a local deli to our liking.




I had enough time to squeeze in a run before the show.



This was a really good first gig of the weekend. The room sounded great, the crowd was surprisingly good (350 people was comfortably full on the floor), and we played well. Little Lies by Fleetwood Mac was added to the setlist this week, a song that half of us hated to hear, but it's fun to play, so I think we're keeping it. All in all, a pleasant surprise in Delaware.

After the gig, we drove an hour and a half into New Jersey.

Friday: On to Boston!

We played the Royale in Boston--…