West Coast

Yacht Rock just returned from a great trip to Los Angeles--2 House of Blues gigs and a wedding, plus some cool sightseeing.  I had hoped for a celebrity sighting and an earthquake, but neither materialized.

This was our first time flying keyboards--my sax case has made a couple of flights now, but our four keyboards had never taken to the air.  Evidently, the cost to rent two Fantoms and two Nords is insanely high, so in order to make the trip more cost effective, we had to do it.

I think Bencuya was more concerned than I.  Our cases are ATA rated, but you'll never really know until you actually hand them over to the baggage guys.  It looked bad slamming on to the baggage carousel, but all of the gear worked perfectly--no damage whatsoever.  Take a bow, SKB!

Thursday:  we flew out in the morning, landing (due to the time zones) at LAX around lunch time.

we hadn't even checked in to our hotel, and there was already a police chase on the local news

After dumping our gear at the hotel in West Hollywood, we strolled down Santa Monica Blvd to a Mexican restaurant for a late lunch and margaritas.

There was a liquor store pit stop and some record store browsing before we eventually wandered back to the hotel.  Pete made a phone call and got us into the House of Blues on Sunset Strip to see Shuggie Otis.

Another drink (warm tequila), and soon I was hanging out in a restroom stall.

At some point, Nick dragged me out into the parking lot, I projectile vomited three times, and the House of Blues asked us to leave.  Oops.

Friday:  Water, water, water, water, but still quite a hangover.

We swung by SIR and picked up some rental gear.  Fortunately, the House of Blues has some gear available (drums and amps), so we only had to pick up things like keyboard stands and an acoustic guitar.  From there, we headed to Anaheim, a distance of approximately thirty miles down I-5.  It took us three and a half hours!  LA traffic is incredible.  I mean that in the worst way.

The House of Blues in Anaheim is in their Downtown Disney complex, an outdoor mall of gift shops, restaurants, and a movie theatre, all sandwiched between the gates to Disneyland and a Disney hotel.

The gig was pretty good.  The house drum set was in pretty bad condition, and the available guitar amps were not ideal for Monkey, but all in all, it was fine.  There looked to be two or three hundred people in attendance, and they dug it.

We packed up and headed back to Hollywood.  Circumstances dictated that we take all the gear out of the van and bring it up to our hotel rooms.  Definitely no fun at the end of a long day.

Saturday:  we reloaded the van in the afternoon and headed downtown to checkout the Grammy exhibit across the street from the Staples Center.  So awesome!  Lots of cool memorabilia, including an entire floor of Ringo Starr stuff.  Incredible!

Thelonious Monk's hat

Herbie's Grammy speech

sheet music from Miles' Porgy and Bess

Herbie's keytar

photo from Born to Run

Let it Be/Abbey Road kit

Our Saturday night gig was at the scene of the crime--the House of Blues on Sunset Strip.  A much cooler experience than the Anaheim show--better gear, better crew (Jim Croce on monitors!), better location.  On top of that, we had Elliot Lurie, and Peter Beckett, and Ron Moss sit in with us (on Brandy and Baby Come Back).  All of these factors brought forth a really kick ass performance for maybe five hundred people!  Sooooo coooool.  We're definitely playing here again!

with the Led Zepp Riot House across the street!

the scene of the crime

Here are a couple of video clips:





Sunday:  we returned our gear to SIR, ate brunch at a great place called Grub, and headed south to play a wedding reception for some cruise ship friends in the Carlsbad/Vista area.

Sunday afternoon, but still there was traffic.  What the hell?

We loaded in the gear we'd flown (saxes, keyboards, guitars), and the rest was back lined by a nice crew of sound guys (friends of Kip).  No problems.  Other than my EWI freaking out again on a humid night (I guessed correctly on which was to turn the adjustment screw and made it through Africa), it was a relaxed gig--definitely nice to see some of our friends out in California.

The gig was over at 11 PM.  We were on the road around forty-five minutes later for the hundred miles back to Los Angeles.

Monday:  I turned off the TV at 2 AM.  We were in the lobby at 7 to catch the plane home.  Ouch.

Wham-it!

The 80s live!

I played saxophone on an song that sounded like a Wham rhythm track today.  Much fun was had, and the hang was great, too.  I'll take one of these any day of the week.

Highlands Wedding

Unfortunately, I ended up with no Saturday night gig.

Sunday, I was up for my AM church gig.  There were no big surprises this week;  we did play some crazy seventeen page song with a million chords and three or four modulations.  Sightread that!

So long to our buddy Matt Sheren, who has been running sound for us ever since I began playing here. He's off to bigger and better things.  I hope the next guy is as funny and talented as Matt!

When the gig ended, I had enough time to race home, change clothes, and run out the door again to meet up with the Yacht Rock guys for an out of town gig.  Under our more catch-all wedding band moniker "Constantly Awesome," we played a wedding reception in Highlands, NC.

It was a really nice gig in a beautiful room.  We left the doors immediately behind the stage open and enjoyed the really pleasant weather up in the mountains.  Everything sounded good (using our very basic PA).

The first set focused on Beatles stuff.  On the break, we changed over into more Yacht Rock stuff.  Other than the first dance (All You Need is Love) and Hava Nagila (which was SUPER GROOVY AS HELL!! thanks to Mark Cobb), everything else was really familiar.

We came back to Atlanta Monday morning.  The new van's maiden voyage was a success.

Here's a nice sounding clip from last Friday's Park Tavern show.



We'll be in California this coming weekend--the House of Blues in Anaheim on Friday and the House of Blues on Sunset Strip in Hollywood Saturday.  Come see us if you're out there!

Park Tavern

Yacht Rock was back at the Park Tavern last night for our monthly show there.  Not much to report…a good sized audience, though not overly crowded.

We added a couple of new tunes:  Band on the Run (which technically we added last week, but I just started playing the keyboard part this weekend) and Running on Empty (which technically has nothing for me to play).  The former is much more interesting for me to play now that I have a greater role in the music.  To the latter, I added some organ to kind of fill it out--the live recordings I looked at had one keyboardist but two guitars.  We have one guitar and two keyboardists (well, one and a half, let's say) so I'm providing an anonymous layer of harmony and volume.

The gig began with Band on the Run, and the rest was kind of downhill.  I'd practiced that song a bunch, so I was confident and played well.  Everything else (other than Running on Empty, which I'd also played a lot during the week) was pretty sloppy.  My solos on Biggest Part of Me, Takin' it to the Streets, and Lowdown were bland.

Anyway…the Park Tavern PA only has six vocal microphones?  Maybe five?  Ganesh got a 57 and I ended up with a massive wireless microphone.  When I tried to adjust the boom stand, the microphone clip broke--the threads came out of the plastic.  Great…I turned off the mic, set it out of the way and got on with the gig.  One of the sound guys came by later and got it back together with a wad of electrical tape.  That held until the end of the gig.  I felt lucky that the thing didn't come apart and fall in my lap.  Falling on the keyboards would probably have broken some keys.

Ganesh on drums:  sweet red Vistalites

I wonder if we're getting pickier about the way things sound for us?  Even with good sound guys, we still had some feedback problems, and generally a really loud, muddy sound on stage.  Is it the shape of the tent, the placement of the PA stacks, the relatively short distance to the opposite wall, or are we just not getting things the way they need to be at soundcheck?  I'm not sure.  I know that I went back and forth with my volume all night (too loud, not loud enough), and was pulling my ear plugs in and out from song to song trying to hear the stage sound.  Every time I see audience videos, the sound out front is fine, though, so I'm not sure what the solution is.  They did upgrade the monitors (which I think has made a significant improvement).  I wonder what it would sound like if the stage was in a different part of the tent?

Oh well…still, it's great to play for a crowd that was really into it, and I sure do appreciate the gig.  We have yet to wear out our welcome in Atlanta!  The next Park Tavern show will be September 27.

Once again (I think it's happened after every one of these shows this summer), I encountered rain on the way home.  I had to stop under an overpass and reconfigure my gear to keep the electronics from getting wet.  Boooooooo.  Any Yacht Rock fans sell Bakflip bed covers?

The Long Sunday

Sunday was a long day, with a Yacht Rock gig sandwiched by two church gigs.

AM church gig:  not too bad.  When we'd gone over one of the two big songs for the day, the main vocalist hadn't been in the room, so I played the melody as a place keeper.  During the actual service, it dawned on me (right around the time nobody was singing and the bandleader whipped his head around to see why I wasn't playing) that there would also be no vocalist!  Yikes.  So, I was in.  No problem.  Four bars into the verse, I tried to turn the page, but six or seven pages turned instead.  Uh oh.  I tried again, but no luck.  I ended up playing the entire thing from memory, which definitely got the adrenaline going.

I checked with the rest of the band afterwards, and nobody knew it was going to be an instrumental, which means I didn't miss anything at rehearsal.  Sometimes I don't pay attention...

After my gig, I had around forty minutes to get home, change, and load my truck up with Yacht Rock gear.  We played a benefit for Live Thrive, which is an organization dedicated to cleaning up and preserving the local community through recycling.  What other band better represents recycling?

We played two sets for a friendly, good looking crowd, opening with Band on the Run (sounds like that one's going to be a keeper!).  It was a very relaxed show.

We finished around 5:30.  I was packed and out the door just after 6, headed up to my PM church gig.  There was a guy riding a horse bare back on Howell Mill at I-75.  Wait…what the hell?

 My family met me at the church, where we swapped cars.  My gear went home, and I stayed to play.

The evening church gig was decent.  I felt better after the nap I took during the homily.

Upcoming Yacht Rock gigs for August:

August 23, Park Tavern (Atlanta, GA)
August 30, House of Blues (Anaheim, CA)
August 31, House of Blues (Hollywood, CA)

It's sad to hear the Cedar Walton is dead.  I've been on a big late-70s Bob Berg kick, right around the time the two were playing together.  Here's one of my favorites, from Berg's New Birth (1979), with Cedar Walton on rhodes.

Beatles at Smith's Olde Bar

Please Pleaserock Me (Yacht Rock plays the Beatles) had a two night stand at Smith's Olde Bar.  Great gigs!  Also considering how much gear we have on stage for this show, it was nice to leave it all set up overnight (I did not leave my horns there, however).  The Friday crowd was decent;  Saturday's crowd was pretty full.

Friday:

Canadian Tuxedo night (head to toe denim).

When I'm 64 went well, and I appreciated the reaction from the crowd, especially the guy who yelled "Goddamnit Dave!"  In spite of barely playing any clarinet these days, my sound and pitch felt good.

Lady Madonna is, I think, the only Beatles song with a sax solo (played by London's own Ronnie Scott).  It's funny to me that the main groove is the Fats Domino boogie, and the sax solo is phrased in half time swing.

Everything else was fine.  My solo on Jealous Guy held promise, but I couldn't deliver.  My solo on Will it Go Round in Circles (written and performed by the fifth Beatle, Billy Preston) was also pretty bland.  Two songs with piccolo--Penny Lane and Live and Let Die!  My picc felt great.

We ended just before midnight, and I was home before 12:30 AM.  Love that!

Saturday:

Mark Cobb's birthday!

I think I have the songs we added in on the fly correct;  there may be something I forgot.  Anyway, another enjoyable night of music with friends.  We took another shot at Lady Madonna--a better solo, I believe, tonight.  We played Happy Birthday for Cobb, and then he did an excellent job singing and playing It Don't Come Easy.  Following that, we had our first public attempt at Band on the Run, which sounded great.  The horns only play in the transition between the second and third sections, but I did my best to help on the vocals, too.  The second set had plenty of horn stuff for us (the handclaps in Eight Days a Week on down).  My solo on Whatever Gets You Through the Night was pretty good.

Mostly, it felt like I was hanging out while my friends played a gig, taking annoying pictures and stuff.  Still fun, though, and once again I slipped out the back door and got home long before the rest of them had begun packing up.  Ahh, to be just a horn player again!

Don't forget to come see us Friday, August 23 at Park Tavern!

Georgia Theatre!

Yacht Rock was at the Georgia Theatre in Athens Thursday night.  The seven regular guys haven't played together since July 27 in Hilton Head.  Reunited!  I could definitely feel the vibe of the seven of us back together again.  Coupled with the Theatre and a good crowd, we were in for a good night!

Wednesday afternoon, I developed (out of the blue) severe vertigo, so bad that I could barely get home.  I still had it Thursday morning, which made loading my gear down a flight of stairs and into my truck pretty treacherous, but Advil helped me get through it.  I made it to Athens and got loaded in and set up without issue.

Our soundcheck was more of a rehearsal for our Beatles show at Smith's, so I didn't do much more than nearly freeze to death under the Theatre's air conditioner.  When we finished, I took a walk around Athens to try and possibly locate a drug store with a clinic, but no luck.  I did almost fall down, though, in the middle of the sidewalk on College Ave.  Time for more Advil!

The show went really well.  I was careful about doing anything that might upset my inner ear--no major backbends during solos, no sudden movements.  I felt fine!  We had a great time playing together, and I actually played really well, with some different solo ideas than normal.  I think my preoccupation with not falling down kept me from overblowing and having saxophone diarrhea.

We got loaded out and made it home without any issues.  I wish whatever is wrong with me would leave me alone.