Houston

Yacht Rock was hired for a particularly cool gig last weekend in Houston, performing revival-style for a corporate concert at Minute Maid Park in Houston (home of the Astros).  They built a stage over the third base dugout and we played facing the stands.  We backed Elliot Lurie (Looking Glass), Peter Beckett and Ronn Moss (Player), Matthew Wilder, and Eddie Money, and Ambrosia played their own short set as the opener.

I've never been to Houston before, but I've heard that the summers are pretty miserable.  The weather on this day couldn't have been more perfect.

The grounds crew spent much of our set up taking care of the field, which equated to water everywhere, including these puddles perilously close to the power supply.

Ambrosia's soundcheck.  Every time they came to a spot that was originally a sax solo, I wanted to throw stuff.  Greg subbed on bass for them and NAILED IT!

So...a run down of the show:  Nights on Broadway, You Make My Dreams, no problem;  Dancing in the Moonlight and Brandy with Elliott, just fine;  Still the One and Africa, all good;  Kid's American and Break My Stride with Matthew, easy;  This Time I'm in it for Love, at a frantic tempo, but that's how they want it;  How Long in a different key and plenty of "I can't tell which guitar is supposed to be soloing right now";  Baby Come Back with more dramatic fermatas than ever;  Taking it to the Streets--the batteries died on my tenor microphone right when we started this tune, so I had to sit out the first verse to swap them with the alto batteries (which probably means it'll die again in another gig or two);  then the Eddie Money stuff.

Eddie changed endings and his song order at soundcheck, grilling us at the rehearsal.  At the gig, however, all the endings kind of went out the window.  He also sang more at soundcheck than he did at the gig (during the show, we played an entire chorus of Shakin' with only the background "woahs").  I tried to sing along to myself to keep my place in the song, because without the lead vocal, it would be easy to lose your place.

I'm not sure what the final order was, but I think it might have been Two Tickets to Paradise, Baby Hold on to Me, Shakin', and then Take Me Home Tonight ("Does anybody have room in their car for me?" was his joke).

We came off stage after that so they could shoot off fireworks, but the audience demanded an encore...but we don't know any more Eddie Money songs!  Eddie suggested we do a truncated version of Two Tickets, and we decided to go into Footloose to close out the evening.

Word never got to Monkey about the change, and he ended up playing the beginning of Footloose on the wrong guitar (tuned a half step down).  Then he flipped out and started cursing.  Once we got off stage, Nick dragged him into the dressing room and laid into him for screaming obscenities into a microphone.  Yikes!  Fortunately, Kip had muted Monkey's vocal as soon as he realized that he was probably going to go berserk.

Anyway, the fireworks went on for at least ten to fifteen minutes, giving us plenty of time for a long gig post mortem.

We brought a lot of gear to this one (quite a bit of Kip and Zach's PA).  Pete made sure the pack was correct.

The next day, we flew home.  I bought the only banana in Houston (Bush) Airport for $1.41.

Train Cruise 2016

Cruise time!  It's been a year since our last cruise--the 2015 Sail Across the Sun/Train Cruise.  Time to do it again.

Thursday:  up too early to fly to Ft. Lauderdale, and then we took a shuttle to the port of Miami to meet the boat.  I'm pretty sure we do this to save money.

A few changes for this one:

1.  Nick is still on paternity leave, so Ganesh Giri Jaya (of the Yacht Rock Schooner) filled in for him.

2.  Kip and Zach were along as crew, and they brought the in ear monitors.  Leading up to this trip, there was some doubt about whether or not we'd be able to use them because of the different sound systems on the boat and the short turn around time between bands.  They agreed to give it a shot.

As usual, the host company, Sixthman, made it very easy for us to hop on board.  A quick check of our rooms--we have balconies this year.  Monkey on one side...

and Kip and Zach on the other.

The cruise ship terminal at the port.

After lunch and a little bit of a nap, it was time to turn the boat around and leave.

A stable of yachts--check out how the one in the middle of the picture has a HELICOPTER on the back.

Once we'd left the harbor, I squeezed in a couple of hours of practicing.

Gig number one!  We had the atrium stage, which situates us directly across from the front desk of this floating hotel.  After the frantic set up (and some quick checking of the in ear monitors), we settled in for our seventy-five minute set.  The show was fun, but getting on stage, throwing our gear together, plugging into the PA, and sound checking in about forty minutes is really stressful.  I was glad that there were no equipment failures.

Friday:  Sea day.  Breakfast of...

Maybe the best part of the entire cruise was the balcony door.  I slept the first two nights with the door open, which was great with Miami's 70 degree, low humidity winter.  Then again, one time I woke up and Zach was looking at me from around his balcony.

Gig number two!  This one was supposed to be outside on the top deck around lunch time, but the wind and the potential for wet weather caused us to be moved into the atrium for a second straight night.  No problem, though.  All the rough moments from the previous night's in ear mixes were completely solved.  This was one of the best atrium shows we've ever had on this boat.

Saturday:  I woke up off the coast of Jamaica.

Zach.

Breakfast.

It looks great, but we'd heard from people who went ashore early that this port was pretty crappy--very few options for food, too many options for cabs (to take us where, exactly?) and shitty weed (and who wants to get busted and possibly left behind in Jamaica?).

Monkeyboy and I walked down the sidewalk (propositioned eleven times in ten minutes for cab rides).  As we began to loop back around to the ship, we ran into The Great Bencuya and his girlfriend.

Our original idea was to eat at Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville (in indication of how bad the options were), but the wait was damn near eternal, so we left.  On the way back to the boat, we happened across a bistro, across from the guy with the coconuts and the rum.

It took around two hours to get our meals (I had a nine dollar chicken wrap, so it wasn't anything out of the ordinary.  We would have eaten better if we'd stayed on the boat.  Catching the zika virus would have given us something to do.  A waste of time and money, but at least I can now say I've gotten off the ship in Jamaica, and I never have to do it again.

Gig number three was also to be on the pool deck, but the winds and the rain moved us into the smallest stage on the boat, the Spinnaker Lounge.  The stage is small and dark, and the low ceiling means that the lights are almost at eye level.

The two atrium shows used a compatible monitor mixer, so our in ear mixes were mostly the way we always have them set (small problems on the first night, but things were really good on the second).  The Spinnaker used a completely different system, so Zach had to create new monitor mixes for all of us from scratch, and he nailed it.

Sunday:  I was very happy to have this last day at sea free of gigs.  Not much happening in the ocean today, except for a race with a container ship.

I saw some of Train's last set.  Very good.

So...Greg, Monkey, and I were drunk enough to get involved in the singles mixer (even though we aren't single).  When we arrived, it became speed dating, so we were volunteered as target practice.

Monkeyboy made name tags for the three of us.

One of my dates was particularly disinterested in the process.  It appears that we were doing shots.

I should point out that the theme for the day was The Great Gatsby, hence the flapper dresses.

Uhhh...we had wine.

We left (Greg crawled out on his hands and knees to get away) the speed dating thing to go to the tequila tasting (already in progress).  Sixthman had volunteered us to sort of cohost the event with Train's bass player.  We were totally obnoxious.  I'm pretty sure he hates us.

So...I had no tequila.  Greg had no tequila.  Monkeyboy had lots of tequila, and had to go to his room for the rest of the cruise.

After a cooling off/sobering up period, the surviving members of the band attended our traditional meal at the teppanyaki restaurant.

Greg and Ganesh celebrated their birthday.  The restaurant staff tried to divide this cake nine ways (a lethal dose, 6"x6"x4").  I tried, but after eating two helpings of fried rice, there was simply not enough room left in my human container.

We split up and everybody went to pack.  We raced a couple of cruise ships.

Monday:  get off the boat!  Where is our shuttle back to Ft. Lauderdale!

Waiting to go through security.  Pete pulled this hat from the bushes behind us.

I slept the whole way home.  It's the only way to fly.

See y'all next year!

Dave and Dave

I was up much too soon Sunday morning after a late Saturday night, this time to head down to a brunch gig at Venkman's with David Ellington as the Dave and Dave Duo.  The first set went pretty well, but I totally fell apart in the second set, and my coordination and concentration went all to hell.  By the time I began driving home I was desperate for a nap.  

Anyway, I tried to call some tunes, for better or for worse, that we haven't played recently on either a Dave and Dave gig or Ellington's last two quartet gigs.  Check it out:

As usual, I stumbled back to life in time to make my church gig, which was poorly attended.  I wonder when the church will finally give in to reality and just cancel mass?  Is there some tipping point where it would make more sense to say "find another time to get here"?  

The Long One

Saturday was a gig for some kind of big money fundraiser at the Ritz in Buckhead.  Strangely enough, we were not in the actual ballroom (where the dinner and the auction and the bulk of the evening's affairs were), but across the prefunction area in the smaller rooms, where the stage was almost too wide for the room.  I remember seeing Blue Lou Marini playing a wedding reception gig in this same room a few years ago.

Many, many gigs have I played at the Ritz--my guess would be at least 200 in the twenty years that I have played around Atlanta.  A few stand out to me--a Christmas Day brunch gig (that I played with Rob Henson and a horrible pianist), where we played for five hours and I think I was paid something like $150;  the other being a wedding where a woman had a heart attack and collapsed on the dance floor (while the band played She Works Hard for the Money)--the room was cleared of guests, but for some reason the musicians had to stay put on the stage and watch the paramedics attempt (unsuccessfully) to resuscitate her.

The loading dock at the Ritz, in addition to having the reputation notoriety of being one of the most foul smelling locations in wedding band history, is also one of the biggest pains in the ass in town.  You can only enter from one direction, up a hill, and then once you push past the odor, you have to go all the way down a hall and take an elevator up to the ballrooms.  It's a major drag when you have multiple loads of gear, and once you get it all in the room, then you have to leave the loading dock and find a place up in the lot (which means that at the end of the night when you reverse the process, you'll have to do a lap around Buckhead to get back to the dock on the one way road).  So...I was pleasantly surprised to find out that we could load in from the parking deck!  Waaaaaaaaay better.

The gig itself was, I think, the after party for the event.  We began at 10:30 PM and played til 1 AM, much later than any of our gigs in recent history.  It was pretty much a run of the mill event for us.  Along with the captain's hats at the door, there were around a hundred beach balls, most of which were targeted at the front line for a hour or so.  Eventually the focus shifted to shooting them into the chandeliers, thankfully.

Also, there was a lady who ran a microphone cable through her teeth;  I think it was meant to be seductive.  Gross.  She did it more than once.

I played like crap--mostly crappy saxophone.  The band food was pretty decent, and the load out was no problem at all.

I got home at 2:30 AM, twelve hours after I'd left.