Here comes a long post! The back half of the Yacht Rock tour was relentless, and there was never any time to stop and figure out what just happened. We had days off and days at home, but it was really only enough time to grab some clean underwear and print more setlists.
Thursday, July 28: Lexington, KY. We've played here maybe twice before, and I don't know how anyone here knows about us, but we sold this show out, and they gave us several bottles of bourbon.
Small stage, small backstage. Sounds fine, though.
Our hotel rooms had big, weird jacuzzi tubs. Here's mine with a size 11 shoe in the middle for scale. Also, it was pretty deep, so getting in and out was not the easiest! Who needs this in a basic hotel like the one we were in?
Friday, July 29: Chattanooga, TN. Five or six hours in the van. I ate a can of chili beans, cold, out of a can at a rest stop in order to win $5 from Zach.
This place has a much more comfortable backstage/green room situation.
Big stage, big room, big crowd. Chattanooga is a good gig. However, Monkeyboy was apoplectic about the security guard posted at the corner of the stage, who he claims was blowing incredibly stinky farts at him all night. Not me, I swear! The can of beans had no effect.
Saturday, July 30: Atlanta, GA. We drove home, ate lunch and set up for a birthday party for a friend of the band.
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| a guitar shaped birthday cake!!! |
Easy gig, and something different. Plus...we got to go home at the end!
At the end of the night, a massive thunderstorm passed over the venue, and we had to sit around for about thirty minutes before we could push the gear out to the trailer. Kind of a bummer, but...we got to go home at the end of the night!!!
Wednesday, August 3: Denver, CO. We flew to Denver to begin one of our long stretches of shows. Denver is far enough (and enough time zones away) that we flew out the afternoon before to get a little better acclimated.
It was an easy afternoon. I went for a run, went to dinner, hung out with an old college friend all night.
Thursday, August 4: Aspen, CO. We drove to the Belly Up in Aspen, a place we were sure we'd never play again, and yet, here we are.
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| backstage |
The stage is small and very cold at soundcheck, but once they pack it out, it's pretty good (temperature-wise).
I guess people really live here year round--I would've thought a place like Aspen only had a population when the ski slopes were open.
The next morning, I hiked up the mountain at Snowmass for a little trail running before we left.
Friday, August 5: Denver, CO. Back to Denver we went. Colorado sure is picturesque.
We played Fiddler's Green in Denver today. Big venue! Pretty cool.
Denver is always a good gig. In case you were wondering, the altitude in Denver is not a big deal for me. I can feel it in Aspen, but I didn't have any trouble with the oxygen here.
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| (photo by Mikey Mo) |
After loading out, we drove around an hour to Colorado Springs to get a jump on the next day's travel.
Saturday, August 6: Albuquerque, NM. This damn hotel has no free coffee in the lobby, so I had to make my own in the hotel room. Annoying.
My hotel room air conditioner doesn't like summer, and even though I had it as low as it would go, the night was kind of warm and humid. Good effort, though!
Hans drove us all day. We stopped in a little town in the middle of nowhere for pizza at Sexy Pizza in Trinidad, Colorado. Check out what they've made of the old train station!
More driving. The rain in the distance was beautiful.
So...Albuquerque was a weird one! It was a summer concert thing with multiple bands on one stage throughout the evening. We got there late and a salsa band had set up and was sound checking, and then we set up some stuff around them, but then their gig started and we had to split to the hotel. While we were gone, a rockabilly band played, and then a massive wedding band kind of thing with a big horn section (with questionable choices by the lead trumpet player) played run-of-the-mill stuff like "Get Down Tonight," "Brick House," and "September." They finally cleared out, we shifted our gear into place, and then it was time to go.
I had wireless microphone problems in this place. Very annoying. Zach thought it was because we were in the plaza where all the city government buildings were, and maybe they had a lot of radio frequencies in play. That was a bummer.
Also, this massive beetle monster (this sucker was an inch wide and two inches long) showed up on my gear early in the show, and I spent the next couple of ours trying to make sure he stayed away. In between songs, I would flick him off my cables or kick him away, and he would slowly plod back to me. Go away! I really thought I was going to pick up a saxophone and we'd be nose to nose.
Sunday, August 7: Phoenix, AZ. We got up and headed to the airport. The vans headed to Phoenix. Our flight would've been short if we'd been able to fly direct, but unfortunately, we had to connect in Salt Lake City! Thank you, Delta Air Lines. Anyway, Skymiles, right?
We got to the Van Buren in Phoenix with several hours to kill before the gear arrived, so I played flute in the lobby for a couple of hours.
I also did a load of laundry.
A little warming up in the alley in the hundred degree heat.
Maaan, this place is pretty great. Good room, great crowd. Dig it.
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| Post show: the load out |
After the show, it was too hot and dangerous to run, so I ran inside on a very cranky hotel treadmill.
Just before falling asleep, it sounded like there were multiple gunshots outside. I was not the only band member to hear it. Yikes.
It was still hot the next morning in Arizona.
Monday, August 7: travel day.
Two flights later, we landed in San Jose, California, where the temperatures we much nicer!
We had a family dinner at the teppanyaki place a couple of blocks from our hotel. Good fun!
Tuesday, August 9: day off. I planned to live primarily off bananas for the next few days, but I accidentally froze my supply in the hotel refrigerator and had to throw them all away.
I went for a run through town. It's nice, but it's also kind of deserted.
Also, I ran accidentally ran into a tree with my head.
In the evening, several of us went to eat at a Chinese restaurant inside a casino.
We then headed to another part of town to explore a tiki bar. Drinks were had!
Wednesday, August 10: Saratoga, CA. Back to work! We played at the Paul Masson Winery. Such a cool venue!
Thursday, August 11: travel day. We flew from San Jose to San Diego.
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| the view from my hotel room |
Our hotel was right on the edge of San Diego's Little Italy, so after a run around the bay, I found a seat at a restaurant where I could replenish my carbohydrates.
We tried to go to a nearby tiki bar, but the line was too long, so we settled on some hotel balcony drinking instead, talking shit and watching the planes land. Someone has a video of Monkeyboy and me stuffed into the shelves of an armoire.
Friday, August 12: San Diego, CA. More of the same; went for run, ate some awesome Italian food.
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| marinara sauce recipe! |
Our gig was at Humphrey's, a legendary venue. Could there be a more perfect setting for us?
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| we mustered for a quick photo shoot |
Saturday, August 13: Los Angeles, CA. Onward we travel. A trip that, on paper, should only take two and a half hours always manages to be more like four and a half.
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| Zach and I had Thai food in San Clemente |
We played the Wiltern in LA. It's huge! Probably a little too big for us, but it's fun to hang out in a place like that.
Sunday, August 14: Las Vegas, NV. Another day of riding in the van, watching the scenery go by.
Vegas is a weird one--it feels like nobody who lives here would ever want to go see a show, as they probably work in the service or entertainment industries. We've had some weird ones here in the past, so I don't think anybody was particularly optimistic about it.
This time, we were at the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay. The crowd was probably random people from the strip, free ticket giveaways, and stuff like that. It was a decently full, room, regardless!
This was a really good show, and it felt like we were ending this trip on a high note. I would definitely play here again in the future!
Post show, I did a short run around the strip to remind myself of what a drag it is to try and run on the stip.
Side benefit of playing the House of Blues in Vegas: we spent the night in Mandalay Bay.
Monday, August 15: travel day. Ouch! We were at the airport reeeeeaaaaaaaally early to fly home.
Thursday, August 18: Ft. Wayne, IN.
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| This cool truck in the Ft. Wayne airport is just that. |
The is a musical instrument company in Ft. Wayne called Sweetwater, and they have a massive venue in the corner of their parking lot. It's kind of a random place to play, I guess, but it sounds ok. One of those places where people show up for whoever is playing, and not necessarily because they are fans of a particular group.
Friday, August 19: Indianapolis, IN. Ahh yeah, back in the motherland. Indy loves us.
The Amphitheater at White River is a pretty amazing venue, and I love just about everything about it (I do not love the local crew/loaders, who were major doofuses, however).
There were about a million people at the show. It was incredible. Couldn't have been better.
Saturday, August 20: Cincinnati, OH. Back at Bogart's. Another good show, and a packed room in spite of the rain that came through just as the door opened.
Sunday, August 21: Detroit, MI. This one was going to be outside, and thankfully, there was enough rain to push it indoors. This was a pretty cool, old theater that sounded good, but the crowd was small and seated, and so there wasn't much vibe to it.
I also remember that the local crew was once again pretty worthless (they brought the gear from the trailer to just inside the stage door, but didn't move it the rest of the way to the stage because they "didn't know where things were supposed to go"), and I was hot and kind of dehydrated and didn't want to be there.
My banana collection at this point.
Friday, August 26: Atlanta, GA. Night one at Chastain was
Purple Rain and some other stuff. It was good to be home, but having to pull a set list worth of extra stuff back into my brain was pretty stressful, particularly the Guns N Roses song
November Rain, which we played once maybe ten years ago. There were two rehearsals between Detroit and this show, too, so...man, I was a little fried.
To top it off, Mark Bencuya's synth went haywire about an hour before the show, and there was a mad dash to find a spare one we could rent, and also to try and figure out what was wrong with it. He thinks that maybe there was a bad sample saved, and it had corrupted the sounds for all the Purple Rain stuff? The keyboard was blank for a while, and then they were finally able to get it to reboot correctly. Scary stuff. He wanted to barf.
Anyway, we made it! Pretty epic night.
Saturday, August 27: Atlanta, GA. Night two at Chastain--the usual setlist that we'd been playing all summer, so this one was much more relaxed. Also, it was sold out--holy moly, we sold out Chastain!
Thursday, September 1: Chicago, IL. It was pretty hard to get going again after the triumph of Chastain. No sleep, early flight, ugh. Plus, we were at the venue from lunch on, so by the time we got to the gig, I was kind of over it.
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| lotsa pickles |
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| lots of garlic |
I mean, Ravinia is really cool and legendary, but I'd gone for a run and played a bunch before we got on stage, and I just wasn't really in the mood anymore. Plus, all the people were just sitting there looking at us--it was kind of a boring night.
Friday, September 2: Nashville, TN. Our next gig was in a galaxy far, far away, so the gear drove and we flew to Tennessee, with a stop in Detroit.
We got in to town early enough to go and eat lunch before the gear arrived.
This show was much better. Nashville was a fun gig.
Saturday, September 3: Columbus, IN. We were driving from Nashville to southern Indiana today for our show when we got the call that it was cancelled because the weather was not going to cooperate. Fortunately, we were just passing the Louisville airport, the whole band was able to change flights and flight home a few hours later. Yay! It was kind of a bummer that we wouldn't get to play, but everybody was really excited about the drastic change in plans. Let's go home right now!
Monday, September 5: Atlanta, GA. Back in Atlanta for Labor Day, and I picked up a big band gig put on by the local musicians' union. I hadn't been a member of the union in twenty-five years, but you had to be in the union to do the gig. It paid $450 and it cost me $165 to rejoin the union, so...laborers unite!
Such a strange gig. I guess the union has some kind of trust fund that can pay for this kind of thing, so we played this event in an arts space in Avondale Estates, and it ended up feeling like somebody's grad recital where the audience was ninety-five percent people who were performing. It was full when we started, but people would get up, play the song on two that they were involved in, and then leave, so by the time the big band played at the end, there were only about five or six people watching, and it dwindled from there!
On top of that, the whole thing was live-streamed on the internet, but they couldn't get the livestream to work at first, so they called the union office...and it was closed because it's Labor Day! Eventually, the thing got up and running, but of the ten people in the audience, there always seemed to be somebody who wanted to sit directly in front of the camera for a song or two, so I can't imagine there was anybody on the other end watching us.
Wednesday, September 7: Marietta, GA. I did some at home recording. I'm so glad I'm able to do stuff like this at home instead of having to commute to some hole-in-the-wall studio. It's much easier to just send stuff and let them edit it.
Thursday, September 8: Dallas, TX. Here we go for the end of the tour!
Our first show was in The Colony, which is a suburb north of the city of Dallas, at a place called Lava Cantina. It's hard to know what to make of this place--I guess it's as good (or bad!) as any other place we've played in Dallas. It's kind of far from the center of town, and it's more of a "restaurant with an outdoor stage" instead of a music venue, and the stage is about six feet high so you look down on the tops of peoples' heads, the load in involves dragging the gear about a city block to a little rinky-dink elevator to lift it up to the stage--I don't know. At least the weather was decent--we've played here when it was scorching hot, and we've played here when it was cold and sleeting outside.
Also, I don't think this is very safe. Might be time for some repairs to the venue's power? Is this safe? The whole twenty foot cable looked like this, which makes me wonder how much worse it has to get before 1. Someone gets zapped; 2. Someone's gear gets fried; 3. Someone's show gets ruined when the power goes out.
All that being said...good show! The weather was good, the sound was good, we played well, all that stuff. It was fun! And nothing got electrocuted!
Friday, September 9, Houston, TX. Another strange venue; this time on the second floor of an office building, maybe? The first van was just barely able to push the trailer up a ramp to a place where it could be unloaded. The second van was not, and after several spin outs, we had to open it at the bottom and drag all the gear up.
The room was not acoustically friendly, let's just say.
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| I'm not sure what he's doing |
Houston's a pretty good crowd--we just haven't found a better venue than the House of Blues.
They drank a lot, though...
The room was so loud after the show that I thought about putting in ear plugs while packing up my gear--just deafening (and blasting things like
Piano Man and
Who's Crying Now). The loaders decided not to take the gear down the ramp, so load out took an eternity as they brought everything back to the street via a passenger elevator in the middle of the building.
Saturday, September 10: Austin, TX. Last show of the tour! We stopped for pizza in LaGrange. Not much was happening.
It was nice to finally play a normal room!
Annnnnnnnnnd we're done! It's over! But not really. There are some private and public shows in the southeast this fall, a few days in Florida, and a couple of trips to the northeast. Plus, some non-Yacht Rock stuff in town. Stay tuned!
