We got home Monday afternoon, and Thursday, January 20, we were back in the van, this time headed to Columbia, South Carolina. Remember the gig we played here a month ago? (it's in here) This is the followup to that gig. Here's the show poster.
This place we played didn't seem like much from the outside, and it held the generic name of "township auditorium," but wow! What a room!
Our gear was still making its way home from the Pacific Northwest, so we used backline (rented) gear for this one (and I brought my spare saxophones, flutes, etc).
When I first tried to install my settings on the Fantom (top keyboard), the drive didn't work, so I tried to do it using a USB cable from my laptop. Still no luck, and then it looked like ALL the sounds on the keyboard were gone. HOLY SHIT! MASSIVE PANIC! I was freaking out. The backline guy was like, "I can make it happen!"...whatever. I tried the USB cable upload one more time, and the keyboard burped and came to life! Disaster averted! I guess that it had been sitting in storage for a few years and it needed to reset before it was ready for action.
Anyway, it took me ten minutes or so to calm down. Jeez.
This place had lots of places downstairs to hide, so I got in a good warmup, and the show was a piece of cake. As you might imagine, we did not fill the place up, but the floor had a good amount of people and the vibes were excellent, and the gear was just fine (and my "fly date" wireless microphone stuff was, as usual, flawless!).
We drove home the next day. Twenty-four hours later, we were at the airport, headed to Ft. Lauderdale for a pair of gigs--it was some kind of a wine festival (rosé) combined with a breast cancer benefit. At least, that's what it seemed like. Lots of pink.
We arrived right around lunch, so after checking into our hotel, I headed off in search of food, eventually landing at a Mexican place. It was awful (loud Pitbull-ish music, annoying South Florida people), but the food was ok. It's surprising to me that with so many superficial people in the neighborhood, there are very few vegetarian/vegan options. The veggie fajitas option was not on the menu--I had to ask as a special order.
On the other hand, our hotel was really cool, and only two blocks from the gig, so it was a quick walk back and forth. I'm guessing that at some point, these were Art Deco studio apartments, and now it's a boutique hotel? I dig it.
This gear was also backlined, this time from SIR in Miami. Everything worked fine--no crazy Fantom shit. Small stage, though, which was a drag, and I've probably got a good amount of the beach in my computer and saxophone mechanisms.
Pre gig dinner was catered. Gnocchi!
The first show was underwhelming, to say the least. My in ear monitors kept dropping out, we didn't have much of an audience, and it felt like we were just something else in this little circus that they'd built on the edge of the beach. We also don't have much notoriety in the area, so we were just "some band playing 70s music."
As is often the case in Florida, we finished about fifteen minutes before a rainstorm was going to clobber the stage, so I had to sprint to get everything of mine packed up and headed back to the hotel, and the SIR guys were panicked to get their tarps on everything.
At 3 PM, we finished, and by 4 PM, we were in the shuttle to the airport--home in time to see the end of the day's football games.
No Yacht Rock gigs for the following week, but I did sub for a friend on a local high school production of the musical All Shook Up, which uses a lot of Elvis songs, but doesn't directly have anything to do with Elvis. It borrows a few elements from the Elvis movie Roustabout, though (the outsider, the motorcycle, the conflicts with the locals, the forbidden love interest). It's pretty bad.
Anyway, as I'm learning, the orchestra was all local pro musicians, so it was a pretty good hang.
