Summer Tour, Part 2

Back on the road!

Wednesday:  the Yacht Rock Revue got up waaaaaaay early (for me) and flew to Baltimore to pick up our gear, all right where we left it.  From there, it was onward to Washington DC for our next gig.

The show in Washington was at Kastles Stadium, which is a tennis stadium right on the Potomac River.    It was broiling--really uncomfortably hot.  We shared the (thankfully covered) stage with an opening band, and neither they nor the audio company knew quite how to get their stuff together, so even though we were a little late getting there, we stood around and sweated for a while before things finally got moving.  Thinking about it now, I'm kind of surprised that one of us (in YRR) didn't get annoyed enough to start telling everybody else what they needed to be doing.

We waited in an air conditioned portable office.  Short on seating, but it beat standing in the heat.

The show was pretty lukewarm.  I don't think we played poorly--in fact, the playing part was a lot of fun--but the crowd was there for the all you can drink and the fireworks, and really didn't care that much about what we were doing.  The heat also crushed some of our enthusiasm.  We played for about an hour and a half and then the fireworks began (we had a fine view of the show in between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial).

On the way to our hotel, we listened to board tapes (CDs) from our show at the Canal Room in NYC last week and made some sound adjustments (and also had some good laughs at our mistakes).  I really liked hearing that--not just because it sounded good, but I could hear how different things were coming through the mix.  My organ playing is reaching the point of obnoxiousness.

Thursday:  up early again!  We drove all day to get from DC to Asheville, NC for our gig at The Orange Peel.  Cool!

This might have been the best room we played on this tour.  The Orange Peel is pretty legendary--when you tell people you're playing Asheville, they ask if you're playing at The Orange Peel.  We pulled up, and they had a crew of guys to haul our gear to the stage.  Hell yeah!  While they were bringing up gear, we had the opportunity to check out the Moog exhibit in the lobby.

After soundcheck, Andy Elliott from Elliott Guitars asked our guitar hero Mark Dannells to try one of his custom guitars.  A very cool experience, even though I was just a bystander.

The show was a lot of fun.  It's a big room with good sound.  We played some good shit in there, though I spaced out for a while mid-set.  I was watching some hippie girl watch me, and it dawned on me that I was supposed to be playing saxophone.

The audience was WAAAAY into the music.  Small in numbers (200 people?), but mighty in their enthusiasm.  We had crazy hippies, people dressed in YR clothing (one guy who I thought at first glance was Jim Ramsdell!), friends and family, and some guy who'd discovered us on YouTube and had been waiting a year to see us.  Neat!

In the middle of our set, our friend (and trumpet player for Please PleaseRock Me) Paul Poovey walked in with John Bryant (another IU guy)  and a couple of other guys!  A crew of wild brass players in town for JB's wedding.  Great to see familiar faces!

After the gig, the crew loaded our gear back out…rock star treatment!

P.S.  It was 77 degrees that evening when we went to eat supper.

Here are several YouTube clips from the show.

Friday:  an easy day, by comparison.  We got up and walked to brunch (where we once again ran into Poovey, JB, etc).  On the way back, we had several people in town ID us as Yacht Rock and congratulate us on last night's show!  Cool!  We'll be back!

brunch art by Mark Dannells

We headed to Nashville for a show at the Cannery Ballroom, sharing the bill with My So Called Band (90s tribute).

First stop was a quick tour of Zac Brown's new Southern Ground Studio.  Nice place.

We loaded in, soundchecked, and ate…usual stuff.

The Cannery was sold out.  Lots of people were jammed into that room.  We played pretty well.  Here's my solo from Good Thing:

 Good Thing Sax Solo by David B Freeman

You can buy the real thing here on iTunes.

Walter Eagan was gracious in joining us for a couple of songs.  He said it was like he was back in the seventies, but with hotter women.

We played his songs, beginning with Only the Lucky.  Before Magnet and Steel, he announced "Here's a song I wrote about Stevie Nicks."  We followed it with Go Your Own Way, also written about Stevie Nicks!

We loaded our own gear out.  Boo.

Saturday:  we boogied on back to Atlanta for a show at Riverside Park in Roswell.  I heard the estimate on the crowd was 3,000-3,500.  Nice!  It's good to be home.  People in the suburbs like us, too!

There was rain passing through about a half hour before the start, which probably kept some people away, but on the whole it was wildly successful.  We had another good show (though the sax mic had some feedback that the front of house guy never could solve).

Yay!  Another successful tour.  We're doing some recording in Athens, but otherwise it's a pretty slow week ahead.

davidfreemanmusic.net

Summer Tour, Part 1

Yacht Rock is in the middle of a pretty big (for us) east coast tour.  Here's what's happened so far:

Wednesday:  we left Atlanta and drove all damn day to Washington DC.  Lots of driving, napping, and talking.  We made a lunch stop somewhere in the Carolinas, which turned out to be great. Most of us hit a Whole Foods.  I bought twenty bucks worth of fruit and two slices of pizza.

We stopped in Richmond for supper at a place called Millie's Diner--super good food and cool people.  They had those at-the-table-jukebox-selector things.  Thelonious Monk was on there!  I played both--Monk's Dream and Trinkle Tinkle.

The band spent the night in the same crappy hotel that we had stayed in on a previous trip.  Our room smelled like they'd bombed it with five gallons of carpet cleaner.  Bad stuff.

Thursday:  one nice thing about staying at the same hotel is that we knew where to go for coffee.

More driving…eventually, we made it to the Lincoln Tunnel, where we encountered a ton of traffic.  For a minute, it seemed like the air conditioner in the van had had enough--no more cold air!  It came back to life once we started moving again.

First gig of the tour!  Canal Room in NYC.  We've played here before--good sound, bad electricity.

Our special guest for the first set was Robbie Dupree.  Yes!  We played Steal Away and Hot Rod Hearts with him.  Before the show, we all went next door for pizza.  How cool is that?  We hung out with Robbie Dupree.  It's kind of mind blowing that this sort of thing happens to me now.

He sounded exactly like Robbie Dupree, by the way, and he said we sounded exactly like the original recordings.  Very cool.

At soundcheck, I had one of those crazy moments where everything coming out of my horn was perfect--the sound was right on, it felt good, and every note was the right thing to play.  This happens maybe a couple of times a year, and it's sort of scary because it feels like I can do no wrong.  Magical stuff.  By the time we got through into the gig, it had started to fade a good bit, but at soundcheck I was the best sax player in NYC (which is saying something).  It was a freaky feeling.

We had a good crowd--I think a hundred and fifty people?--in the Canal Room.  Not bad!  I'd love to keep this as one of the places we play.

Towards the end of the night, the most amazing thing happened.  Some crazy drunk girl in yellow pajama pants jumped up on the stage in front of Dannells, and STAGE DOVE over his monitor!!! Holy shit!!!  At a Yacht Rock show? Fortunately, some guys caught her--she didn't hit the floor.

After the gig, I tried to congratulate her.  She asked if we were all wearing wigs.  Yes.  We're all bald.

Friday:  we got up and found some coffee.  Due to problems at the Canal Room Southampton (where we were supposed to play Friday night) our gig was cancelled, so we ended up with the day off in NYC.  Coolness.

I had previously ordered a couple of alto mouthpieces from a mouthpiece maker in Queens named Sakshama, and the day off afforded me the opportunity to pay him a visit and try some of his stuff.  How cool is that?

The trek from Chinatown to Jamaica Queens took about an hour and fifteen minutes.  Quite a haul!  I found the little house where he has a room.  He has a bed, a desk with a computer, and some bookshelves, and that's about it!

I tried his Dukoff copies first.  Both were very good.  Neither is made of the silverite--Sakshama makes his out of bronze.  I was really digging those.  The other mouthpiece I'd requested was a copy of a Guardala studio alto mouthpiece.  That model was not ready, but he let me play his real Guardala that he uses as his model.  Wow!  Two of these, please!  Awesome mouthpiece.

Once we'd dealt with the alto, I tried his copy of my tenor mouthpiece (a Guardala MBII).  His played at least as well as mine.  I took that one off my horn pretty quickly so I didn't fall in love!

Since the alto pieces weren't ready, I asked if he might be able to reface the mouthpiece I'm currently using (a Cheong Guardala copy).  He agreed to work while I waited.

Here's something dumb (maybe):  since I had a few hours to kill, I left both my alto and tenor at this guy's house and just walked away.  Stupid?  Maybe!  I couldn't believe I was doing it, but I did it.  I walked around Jamaica, talked to my mom on the phone, and ate Indian food.  Three hours later, he called, saying it was finished.  I tried it.  It's way better than it was.  Success!  He flattened the table (one of the main problems with it) and opened the tip.  It actually isn't very far off from his Guardala.

I made it back to the hotel a little after 10 PM.  Quite a day!  After a quick shower and change of clothes, I jumped in a cab and rocketed up to 44th and 8th Ave to see the Yellowjackets play at Birdland.  Super cool.

I think the Yellowjackets are really cool.  What they might lack in almost-out-of-control, firey playing (I guess I'm mostly talking about Mintzer), they make up with pretty amazing compositional skill.  The slick quality of their sound hides just how heavy their stuff is.  If you've ever seen a lead sheet for one of their tunes, you know right away how good the players really are.  Good stuff.

I lucked into a great seat at the end of the bar, which afforded me a great view of the stage, and also put me on the route from the stage to the dressing room.  Bob Mintzer shook hands with me after their set.  I'm golden!

Saturday:  Peter and I hit the coffee shop again before the van headed south.

We rolled into Baltimore pretty early.  Parts of the city were without power.  I walked around the little mall where we were playing (Rams Head Live) and came across a couple of street musicians.  This is (and you're going to have to trust me here) two guys playing You Are So Beautiful by Joe Cocker.   Good luck.

Rams Head Live is super cool!  It holds 2000+ people.  We had maybe 200, so that was kind of sad, but the stage was huge, the room was huge, and the sound was good (and the redhead was there).  I hope we can come back with a better crowd.  I bet the heat and the lack of power really squashed us.

We met lots of cool people who really enjoyed our show.  The end of the night featured a wild fistfight which ended with one guy in a puddle of his own blood and a massive cut over his eye.  The lesson?  Don't take photographs of another guy's wife.

Sunday:  we got up late, packed all our gear in a storage unit in Baltimore, and flew home.  Right around the time we hit baggage claim in Atlanta, I realized I'd left my keys in my gear in Baltimore.  Ugh.  Thankfully, my wife was able to help me out.  I went straight to my church gig, which went pretty well.  Good to see them again.  I played some really horrible stuff on the last song, but my mix of the sound was pretty good.

A couple of days to do laundry, and then we fly out again!  This is lots of fun!

davidfreemanmusic.net

Trio

I had a rough trio gig last night.  Tyrone Jackson, Nadav Spiegelman, and myself were booked as a trio for background music at a corporate dinner.  Great, right?  I've probably played five hundred of these--we do our thing, they eat, everybody's happy.

We began with my tune Under a Tree:



You might notice while the piano and bass are soloing, I am in conference with two ladies (agent/hand holder people).  The lady who hired them (who in turn hired me) is freaked out.  Basically, she doesn't like what we're playing and wants to know what else we can do…like…I don't know…blues was thrown out as a different genre, to which I countered that it's going to sound like a jazz trio playing a blues.  Then it went to pop music, whatever that means.  This one stumped me.  Obviously the instrumentation severely limits what we're capable of doing, and who knows what pop tunes we might know between us and be able to pull off.

The best we could do was to play the very common jazz songs that freak out lady would recognize.  Next up was Georgia on my Mind.



From there, I played it like it was wedding band first set, so we hit Route 66, Just the Two of Us, Girl from Ipanema, and What a Wonderful World.  That pretty much sucked all the energy and enthusiasm out of the band.  We continued on for a set and a half like this, bored out of our minds.  In the middle of the second set, we started easing back into stuff we wanted to play, and by the third set we were into the Joe Henderson tunes (Shade of Jade, Inner Urge, and Punjab closed out the evening).  That was really fun.

Better luck next time!

davidfreemanmusic.net

Athfest 2012

Yacht Rock headlined Athfest 2012 in Athens, GA last night.  Great crowd, good weather, nice size stage, easy load in;  bad sound, bad sound, bad sound.  We set up in a hurry (in front of everybody), plugged everything in, and the sound guys couldn't get it together.  It was one of the most awkward line checks ever.  The entire audience got to watch as the crew tried to figure out what microphone they'd just plugged in to what channel.  Not good!

Once we got off and running, the sound guys let a couple of microphones feedback just slightly through the entire set.  One was my vocal microphone, which I unplugged after three songs.  The other…we'll never know.  Obviously, they didn't.

In other news, I couldn't play the horn lick on Rosanna to save my life.  I was 0-4.

Mark Dannells had an atomic flip out after he messed up his solo on Can't Wait for Summer.  Briefly, I wondered if he'd be able to play the remainder of the gig.  After he'd kicked every piece of equipment, he was ok.

I figured out where the microphone is on my phone, so I pointed it away from the drums and towards me.  Less crash cymbal and more saxophone.  You might also be able to hear me cussing when I screw up my piano part.  The solo was not necessarily any better than Friday night.

 Takin' it to the Streets (Athens) by David B Freeman

Home by midnight.  Not too shabby.

davidfreemanmusic.net

Park Tavern Fun

Yacht Rock played our monthly gig at the Park Tavern last night to 1,600 fans.  The show sold out early in the afternoon, but they sold a bunch of walk up tickets at the door.  I'm not sure exactly how that works, but it was PACKED.

Great crowd, great gig!  We did a chronological set, beginning in 1972 and ending in 1984.

Takin' it to the Streets showed up on the set list for the first time in months.  The set list maker does not care for this song.  Naturally, I like it.  We rarely play it.  It seems really silly to me that a couple of obvious yacht rock songs (Baker Street being another) are rarely performed because someone in the band doesn't care for it.  How is any song on our setlist better or worse than any other?

 Takin' it to the Streets by David B Freeman

We slipped our originals in there.  They seem to be getting better, though I sucked on the horn section part.  Thinking in two keys will do that to you, I guess.

 Can't Wait for Summer by David B Freeman

We have a bunch of shows between now and the next Park Tavern gig (July 27).  See y'all out there!

davidfreemanmusic.net

Bon Voyage!

The Yacht Rock Revue closed out our four year residency at the 10 High in Atlanta last night.  Has it already been four years?  We're moving on because our schedule is so packed, we can't make it most of the time.  Rather than show up every five or six weeks for our house gig (to ever dwindling crowds), we decided that it was time to let it go.

Naturally, the send off party was super packed.  I went upstairs on the break, and there was STILL a line of people out the door of the Dark Horse waiting to get in.  That's pretty neat.  I can only think of one other "line out the door" night.

The crowd inside was, of course, jammed in there.  I wish they'd given out breath mints at the door.  Lots of very appreciative people--they all made it seem like we were never playing again.  Maybe they misinterpreted Jim's Last Waltz poster?  I even said to somebody, "Why come down in this dirty basement when you could see tomorrow at the Park Tavern?"

While I was standing around waiting for the show to begin, some girl asked me if I straighten my hair (I had my wig on).

"No.  It's naturally straight."

"Do you put gel or anything in it?"

"No, just shampoo and conditioner."

Uhh…the show on stage was a lot of fun.  The special guests were all prepared, and everybody played well.  Jordan Shalhoup got up and played a few section things with me, and I thought those were really cool.  I didn't get a chance to ask Nick (since he was closest to my amp), but I bet Silly Love Songs sounded really neat with multiple saxophones.  Jordan and I were pleased with ourselves.

And then it was over, and we packed up just like every other time in the past four years, dragged stuff out to the parking lot, and drove away.  So long 10 High!

davidfreemanmusic.net

The Bird

I played only my AM church gig yesterday (I took the PM gig off).

This gig was not good.  The tunes were a weird mix mash of oom-pah songs with a generic latin tune in the middle.  I don't think they hung together well.  Things we did in rehearsal (introductions and endings) did not make it upstairs to the service.  Plus, the charts weren't very good--one was in the wrong key (untransposed) and another needed editing (some rhythmic things that didn't fit).

Worst of all, though, was our sub sound guy, who had all kinds of trouble.  He couldn't unmute some of the stage microphones, and he got yelled at my the senior minister because he couldn't turn on the lights.  The biggest problem was that he couldn't make the headphone amplifier work, so the electronic drums and electric bass were inaudible for everybody on stage (including the drummer and bassist).  They were also muted in the horn monitor.  Unfortunately, they were coming through the main PA, so had to play in time with the piano, but ignore the slap of the drums in the house.  Not fun.  It was a wreck.  The latin tune, in particular, was an unnecessary challenge.

I heard that the husband of one of the vocalists was so angry with the sound that he went down to the tech guys after the service and flipped them the bird.  Wow!

Obviously, nobody was happy.  I bet there'll be hell to pay this week in the staff meeting.  Maybe it will finally be enough to get things running more professionally.

davidbfreemanmusic.net