I did a House Live gig at the Georgia Aquarium last night. It's been a while…Wayne dubbed it our reunion tour!
As usual, it was a super easy gig. We played in the Atrium overlooking…the atrium. I don't know how else to say that. Party Nation was in the ballroom (great to see my old friends in there: Steve Cunningham, Maurice White, and Allen Cook).
The entire aquarium was open to the crowd. It seemed like there were only about four hundred people there altogether, so we probably only played for a hundred and fifty people. Very sparse. Check out these pictures, taken DURING the gig! Nobody out there!
They delayed our start by a half hour, so we wandered around for an hour an a half before doors opened.
When we left, the gate was up, so free parking to top it off! Yay for that!
I (along with Louis Heriveaux and Kevin Smith) played a trio gig last night in the CNN atrium. Some kind of corporate reception background music thing. No sweat. Actually, I did sweat quite a bit trying to get the PA and my stuff into the atrium. I couldn't find the phantom CNN loading dock entrance and had to do some evasive driving in 5:30 downtown traffic. No fun. Eventually, I just gave up and turned my truck in at the valet at the CNN/Omni. From there, eight steps led to lots of elevator rides to nowhere. Needless to say, by the time I finally got to the atrium, I was not happy (and I still had to set everything up).
The gig itself was a really tedious. The time between the three of us seemed (to me) to be all over the place. Listening back, it doesn't seem as bad as it felt. I was not happy--it felt like there was no groove and no energy. It got better mid-gig, but then evaporated again at the end. I was glad when the gig finally ended. It felt too much like work. I'm not sure if we were ever really playing together. It was more like we were playing next to each other.
Anyway…here's the audio if you want to give it a listen.
In other news, here are two clips from the Yacht Rock gig in Nashville last Friday.
Thursday, Yacht Rock played the 10 High. Nick was sick so Kevin Spencer filled in for him; Ganesh on drums. Not too bad of a night! We had a good crowd (we made good money). I played well. Reports from Pete (playing my keyboard on Silly Love Songs) were thus: "Your sax sounds like shit!" And thus, my time with the amazing TC Voicelive 2 has come to an end. It looked cool, it could do lots of stuff, it was well made…but it didn't work well for me on stage. The crappier Digitech pedal is not nearly as hip, but it works. I spent most of the second set not thinking about what was happening on stage--I was focused on why I couldn't get what I wanted out of the TC pedal. Boo. I can't play gigs worried about my equipment (well, not necesarily true--I already do that; I just want to keep it to a bare minimum). TC out. Purple pedal in.
the passion
pre-gig restaurant
Friday, Yacht Rock traveled up to the Mercy Lounge in Nashville. SOLD OUT!! Woo! How cool is that! It appears that we're finally getting over the hump up there and people are really locked into what we're doing. Very cool. 500+ attendees. Evidently, the owner was working the door and just kept selling tickets past what the fire codes would allow. Record numbers at the bar. We were heroes for the night!
with Walter Egan
Walter Egan (of Magnet and Steel fame) sat in with us for two songs: Only the Lucky and Magnet and Steel. He hung out with us backstage for about an hour before the show. Very laid back. Really cool. He insinuated that he had slept with Stevie Nicks. Evidently that's who Magnet and Steel is about. Interesting.
After the glory had subsided, we loaded up the trailer and drove about an hour out of Nashville to spend the night in Cookeville. A couple of hours later, we drove to Asheville, North Carolina to play a wedding.
legs
Claxton Farm, Asheville NC
Maybe the coolest wedding we've ever played. It was in an event space in a pasture. Neat people. Really tall women. Awesome '57 Chevy. I sent my Dad pictures (it was his dream car). He never responded.
pre-gig boredom
I think the highlight of the night was Cobb's decision to steer Escape (Pina Colada Song) into Wipeout. Perfect segue.
The groom and a friend played Mustang Sally--I think the first official Yacht Rock attempt at it in the history of the band (I'm not counting the time we backed up Nick's Dad at Nick's wedding). They were good!
For the second time in a week a stranger at a gig asked me for blow--this time, it was some guy who cornered me at a urinal and insisted that someone in the band must have some.
a rally of some sort
We packed up, raced to the hotel, and went to bed as quickly as possible.
The next morning, Nick took us to breakfast at some amazing restaurant, then we headed for home.
I took some pictures of Mark Dannells.
brunch
neighborhood garden
Bencuya dreaming about a well behaved Fantom
Sunday night I played my church gig. I'm definitely getting better at mixing--I had it sounding good! I played well, too, which was fun personally. My flute face was really happening.
I had a crazy trio gig yesterday…how crazy can it get when you're in a hotel ballroom playing music while people eat and ignore you?
First, I had to stop and pick up speakers and speaker stands right as a monsoon was passing through town.
As I was pulling away, I got voicemail from Tyrone saying he was in big trouble! A Clayton County sheriff had been shot and killed near his house, and the police had locked down his entire neighborhood while they searched for the suspect. Holy cow! He couldn't leave home.
Kevin and Cid (our handler) called everyone they could think of (I was off playing solo saxophone in the prefunction), and we finally got Tony Winston on the phone. He came screaming downtown--missed three songs and he was in. Nice! He totally saved the day. The clients were cool about it.
Friday: Another installment of Please Pleaserock Me at Smith's Olde Bar. For this one, we went up against the Main Street Exiles (Rolling Stones tribute). They were ok; we were good. I think we won! It was (as usual) an easy night for me. I probably spent as much time drinking beer and taking pictures as I did on stage. Still fun, though! Paul Poovey on trumpet with us. He played very well, as did Dannell's brand new awesome guitar (P90s are sweet).
If you're lonely you can talk to Wheat. Hell yeah.
Saturday: Yacht Rock played a birthday party in Athens at the Hotel Indigo. This one took a while to get going. It seemed like there were probably only fifty people in attendance…kind of a strange gig for us. Still, they were into it. The stage was really small but acoustically very dead, so the sound was good, though Dannells' P90s were a bit noisy. He's thinking about switching them out for some noiseless P90s.
Bencuya's Fantom is starting to do that same thing that mine does--loose knobs are making adjustments to the sound parameters on their own! Not cool. Roland needs to talk to us about it. Mine has actually been behaving a bit better recently. I would still like to have a technician go in there and make sure everything's cool, since my go-to repair is to press hard on the knobs.
I think I'm giving up on the synthetic reed idea. I tried a still harder tenor reed, and it still didn't feel good. I tried a harder alto reed, too, and though it didn't choke like the softer one, it felt weird, too. There's something about the resistance and feedback that doesn't feel quite right. I wonder if it's something I could get used to? Dunno. For now, I'm going to stick with cane.
We had some sort of wiring issue with the van--smoking wires in the left tail light. Hmm.
Sunday: We got back into town from Athens very early in the morning, unloaded the van, and went our separate ways. By the time I had unpacked my gear at home and packed my gear for my church gig, it was 5 AM. I was up at 7, and at my gig at 8. We played two services.
I was asleep again at 1 PM and up at 5 PM--out the door at 6 PM to play my church gig. It dawned on me that most of what I'd said to Jack in the past four days was "Goodbye. I'm going to work again."
I got home from church gig number two, ate, hung out for a little bit, and then learned a couple of songs for a Monday morning rehearsal.
Monday: Yacht Rock had a rehearsal this morning, checking out a couple of Walter Egan songs (he of Magnet and Steel fame). He's going to sit in with us this coming weekend. Pretty cool, huh? We also checked out a song we need for a wedding this coming weekend and a Fleetwood Mac song. No Bencuya on this rehearsal--cool for me because it gave me the opportunity to try and grab some of his parts. It was a good challenge. When we hit these on the gig I'll be back to one note string parts.
Yacht Rock played the 10 High last night. We billed it as "Happy Endings Night"--the usual songs, but probably with mangled endings. Once we got on stage, I don't think we were that interested in the endings; maybe we were ONLY focused on the endings. Whatever…Bencuya was recording, and I think we felt pressured to come up with something funny, but couldn't quite do it.
I had a pretty good night; I even made it halfway through the first song before I remembered that the recorder was there! The entire night I would forget about it, remember it, forget about, remember it…or play well, play well, play well, screw up, remember the recorder, beat myself up for the rest of the song, forget it, play well, play well, play well, brain fart! That kind of thing.
I got my pedal a little closer to sounding good. Here's a comparison of the sax thing in Reminiscing (the original and then us). I have the harmony programmed into it. This is the best it has sounded.
I screwed up the intro to My Life. Spaced out for a second.
We premiered Whatever Gets You Through the Night tonight. I should have recorded myself at soundcheck…I could been the stunt double for Lenny Pickett! On the gig, though, I sucked real bad. Too many weird notes. For instance, the end of the opening solo, I didn't land on the down beat on a G like I was supposed to, so I played an E and then a G, just…dumb stuff. The whole song went like that. I wanted to nail it, but I couldn't quite get my playing to line up.
On Heart of Rock and Roll, some of my harmony stuff worked and some did not. What I'm finding out with programming my effects pedal (I think) is that I have to chop the EQ to keep the harmonizer from trying to harmonize stage noise. Makes sense.
In the second set, we played Pina Colada super fast…like it was a samba. The crowd did not like it.
What else, what else…I think I was OK on everything else. I went back to a conventional reed tonight on alto instead of the synthetic, which was starting to feel too soft. The Fibracells are great, but you've definitely got to up an entire number (if you play 3's, order 4's!). The alto reed I've been playing is great, but it chokes when I really lean into it.
Beatles tonight at Smith's, then back to Yacht Rock on Saturday!
I was fortunate enough to hire three of my favorite musicians for a quartet gig last night. Tyrone Jackson, Kevin Smith, and Marlon Patton were awesome. Great gig!
Here's the audio. The sound file from the first set malfunctioned (the file was there and had a large size, but when I would open it there was nothing there), so I only have the stuff from the second and third sets. Good stuff. Check out Tyrone's solo on Back Where I Belong, or Marlon's crazy Chris Dave-delayed-backbeat thing behind the bass solo on the same tune (or all the stuff Tyrone was coming up with behind the bass solo!). How do they keep coming up with this stuff?
We were supposed to be background music, but a fair number of people congregated around the band to listen, sitting on the floor and applauding after each song. Yikes! Marlon suggested at one point that I should introduce the band.
I'm finally back near my computer long enough to update my blog…
Thursday: 10 High. It was an ok night all the way around. The crowd was thin and ambivalent; not the inspiring throng we seem to need these days to really put on a killer show. Things were fine, but nothing important springs to mind.
Friday: Park Tavern. Sold out show--Christmas in July/80s night! This was a good show. It was obviously packed, and that made it fun. It's kind of crazy how excited people get about seeing us perform at this point. You'd think that the majority of people who come to our shows have seen us and like us and they enjoy it, but these people get kind of weird about how MUCH they dig it. People standing at the front of the stage appeared to be on the verge of insanity.
It Christmas, so we did a few Christmas tunes. That was fine. I failed (for the however many time in a row) to pick up my saxophone before we started Dick in a Box, which left me desperately looking for a chance through most of the song. Stoooopid.
I've been trying out Fibracell Premier reeds on alto and tenor--I'm looking for a good synthetic reed for playing this gig, since I'm only playing saxophone a couple of times in each set. It's never fun to try and play on a reed that looks like a Ruffles potato chip! The alto reed I've got is pretty good; I'm going to try and go up one strength to see if I can keep it from choking when I overblow (I could just NOT overblow, too, but that's easier said that done). The tenor reed I tried didn't work well--it was a little too soft, and all the altissimo went all over the place on it. I was fighting it by the end of the first set. I'm also going up on that one. I usually use Javas, and I think the comparative Fibracells are probably a whole number softer (so my #3 Java needs a #4 Fibracell). We'll see. Part of my suckitude on Biggest Part of Me was the aforementioned crappy tenor reed. The rest was me.
What else, what else…my effects pedal is still in need of tweaking. We played Heart of Rock and Roll, and the harmony parts got weird on me. I think the harmony voices were routed through the slap delay (well, I know they were…I think that might be why it sounded weird). Gotta fix that. The thing sounds great by itself so I feel like it's going to work, but the added wrinkle of the stage volume changes things up.
Saturday: wedding in Davidson, North Carolina. This was a real snoozer! Ever play a wedding where it was half old people and half people the age of the bride and groom, and neither is happy with the other's music choices? It was that kind of thing. Eventually the old people left and the party got rolling, but it was a tough sell.
I had some suckiness on Steal Away…my new version of the piano part bit me in the butt repeatedly. My solo on Biggest Part of Me was not good either (and I couldn't blame the reed). The piano playing was better, though!
Sunday: we drove home from Davidson. I drove; the band slept; Nick iPadded.
Sunday night, I had a flute and guitar duo with Dan Baraszu. Dan and I played a duo gig at Ventanas. It was sold as "classical flute and guitar." I brought my flute and my duet music. Dan determined that sight reading a bunch of classical stuff would not do it for him, so we kind of "classicalized" jazz tunes. Nobody could tell the difference. It was fun! I've been playing stuff with Dan for about fifteen years. He still kicks my butt. I should be ready for it by now.
Some audio:
Monday: rehearsal for this coming weekend. Yacht Rock has a Beatles show this Friday night at Smith's Olde Bar, so we went over a few new tunes. My personal favorite is Whatever Gets You Through the Night. Not a great song, but it does have that great 70s NYC vibe to it--sounds like old Saturday Night Live stuff to me (the video helps reinforce this).
Something makes me think this could be a big one for us. It just feels so good, and it felt really good when we played it at rehearsal. I bet if the crowd gets us going, this one could explode. Mark Cobb can really make it go. I love this song right now.
We're also working on writing some originals. I've never done any kind of collective writing thing. It's very weird. I take it this is how bands generally write material. For my stuff, I can hear the song in my head, so I go and find it, write it down, and then turn it over to the band to interpret/fix it. Having a room full of guys just kind of chew on an idea seems foreign. Trying stuff and screwing around start to feel like the same thing. I guess things are progressing, though little is written down or recorded, so I wonder how much we are starting over from week to week. Everybody else seems pretty satisfied, so I guess I'm doing ok at it.
