Maui

Amazing fly date! Yacht Rock had a gig in Maui last weekend, and as usual, we had a great time, played only a little bit, slept a lot, flew a lot, and I took a bunch of pictures. Ready, set, go!

Friday: We boarded the plane from Atlanta to L.A. Friday afternoon, which actually wasn't too bad--I much prefer early afternoon to early morning. 

not too happy

Kip was squeezed into his seat. That's a 6'8" dude in a regular size seat.

Our layover in Los Angeles was supposed to be around two hours, but our next airplane was late, so we stood at the gate for an extra hour.

The Great Bencuya, poised to board another flight (and finished being my sax mule)

We got on the plane, settled in, buckled up...and sat there. In a rush to turn the airplane around, the baggage handlers had begun packing the cargo hold without scanning the bag tags, so all the suitcases had to be taken out, scanned, and repacked.

Our flight landed approximately two hours late. Ouch! 10:30 PM in Hawaii is 4:30 AM according to our body clocks.

To make matters worse, they hotel shuttle was looking for this strange David Bencuya person.

Zach, modeling his color coordinated lei in the hotel lobby

We got to our rooms around midnight. Almost time to get up again!

Saturday: 2 AM lobby call for our official band excursion to the top of the top of Haleakala Crater to see the sunrise. Also included in the package was a bike ride down the side of the (dormant) volcano. The ride up in the van took two hours. I slept through the whole thing.

The edge of the crater is almost 10,000 feet above sea level, so we are standing in the clouds; thus the rain gear. It doesn't help perk you up in the middle of the night, but it did stop some of the wind. 32 degrees up at the top!

Behold the sunrise.

Our guide claimed that this plant only grows at the top of this volcano. It looks like a Dr. Seuss flower.

On to the bikes! We gather back in the van and made our way approximately halfway back down, where we met up with the bike trailer. Mountain bikes on a downhill road...hmm...the wrong tool for the job! Anyway, it was pretty much twenty miles of coasting with a little bit of pedaling.

We were in and out of the rain the whole way down.

The best part of the morning--breakfast! It felt like 4:30 in the afternoon, but it was mid morning in Hawaii. Time for the Toast of France! Side note: beautiful waitresses.

We all went back to our hotel rooms and crashed. I woke up several hours later, and it was only 3:30 in the afternoon. Here's my room. Best hotel room ever?

my balcony

the view from my room

I was awake enough at the end of the day to go down and jump in the ocean.

Much like other tropical hotels, the lobby is open! At dusk, these trees would be screaming with birds coming in for the night.

Sunday: Work day! Our musical commitment for this trip consisted of an evening concert, and a talk show style performance (playing musical beds under awards announcements, playing as people came to the stage) for a corporate meeting. This day began with a line check for the latter.

Remarkably, when I powered up the Roland Fantom that had been backlined, it still had my sounds from our performance in Hawaii the summer of 2015!

All set. The Nord for this show was a little 61 key Electro 4 with weighted keys, so it felt a little strange. Someone had also programmed the sustain pedal to work backwards (it would only sustain when you took your foot off the pedal), which took me a few minutes to correct.

Cell phones are marvelous technology.

Our evening performance was a painless ninety minutes while the guests were eating dinner. At the conclusion, they were ushered off to another show. Same top keyboard, but a different bottom keyboard. This setup had a bad instrument cable that I swapped out.

Monday: Rehearsal for the corporate thing. Today's gear issue was an unhappy expression pedal. I replaced it with a giant Yamaha expression pedal that did not work, so I went without one.

Rehearsal finished pretty early in the afternoon, so after lunch, I killed off the afternoon with a run.

The hair dryer! I moved this off the sink when I first got into my room, but the person who cleaned my room put it back, mocking me.

Zach, Bencuya, and I went into town for Thai food, which was amazing after a couple of days of lame hotel food.

Tuesday: Gig number 2! We had a 6:30 AM lobby call (which at this point really did feel like 6:30 AM) for the corporate talk show/awards show gig.

I powered on the Fantom keyboard and got this error message!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! Immediately, I had the backline guy (who probably hated me by this point) go to work on it while I set up my saxophones and EWI. He pulled the card out, put it back in, and got the same message. This happened a couple of times. Since that wasn't working, I pulled the DIMM card out of the back of the keyboard and turned it on.

MAGIC! Everything loaded correctly. I don't know what the DIMM card does, but its absence did not affect my performance. What a relief.

Replacement DIMM memory is $12.99 on Amazon.

This gig was as easy as anything we've done this year--little 20 to 30 seconds snippets of songs for the most part. The most difficult thing was remembering that the count offs were short ("3-4" instead of "1-2-3-4") and that most of the time we were just repeating one section over and over.

We finished around 10 AM, leaving us with the rest of the day to kill before our flight. I went for another run.

A dip in the pool.

We finally had to check out of our rooms at 2 PM, but our ride to the airport wasn't until 5:45 PM. The resort allowed us to leave luggage at the lobby.

Here's something cool...the entertainment for the night was STING! Unfortunately, we were flying home during his concert, but they allowed us to attend sound check. Wow!

That's Sting (with the backpack) and Dominic Miller (guitarist)

Pete and I had lunch at the Thai place again. I'm a sucker for white rice.

And we're off. It was a long, cold flight from Maui to Los Angeles, landing at 5 AM local time. We had a two hour layover. I ate a massive burrito at 5:30 AM, thinking to myself that this would be my last chance to eat until I was all the way home.

In all the gear issues, I failed to mention that I broke the drag handle on my fly-date box before we even set foot inside the Atlanta airport. It's not too heavy (30 pounds), but carrying it around Hawaii left a nice bruise across my left thigh. Calling SKB ASAP!

Georgia Theatre + 1

The Yacht Rock Revue made a long awaited trip to Athens to play at the Georgia Theatre Friday night. 

Good news! After my rough night at the Variety Playhouse last weekend, I was back to my more normal self. Things felt great, and I had a good night playing. In particular, I had a fun solo at the end of Africa. We had a full house (850-875 people) of attentive adults. The whole night restored my faith in what I'm doing.

Saturday night was a private event in Atlanta. They were very particular about us possibly saying anything negative (going so far as to threaten withholding payment), so I'll just say that the Georgia Theatre show was a lot more fun.

Restaurant Gig!

I played a random restaurant gig last night with a female blues/pop vocalist and a pianist in a Mexican restaurant in a suburban strip shopping center north of Atlanta. Make sense?

It was cool, though, because:

1. The pianist was Dustin Cottrell--it was great to catch up with him again
2. The gig was all improvisational for me, and I am sorely out of shape in that regard
3. I got to practice clarinet beyond the scales and stuff I do at home
4. It was an easy gig for a Tuesday night--free food and we were paid in cash!

Not So

Yacht Rock was back at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta for the first time since the beginning of the year, bringing our annual show of Michael Jackson's Thriller to the stage.

The newly renovated Variety Playhouse looks great! It is now very reminiscent of the Georgia Theatre in Athens (another beautiful room).

On to the bad stuff...

My playing was very disappointing. For whatever reason, I began second guessing myself at soundcheck, and I never could break free of it. I'd played through all of the new songs every day the week of the show, and by Wednesday night I felt really good. I was kind of cocky about it, like when you know the answer on the test before the question has even been asked.

All of that evaporated at the gig. By the middle of the second set, I was pretty miserable--the accumulation of a bunch of small mistakes ate away at me.

A few videos from the show:

One More Trip

After the big Yacht Rock trip, I finally made it home Wednesday afternoon. Friday, I was gone again, this time headed to Alabama for a weird gig. It might have been some sort of debutante ball, or a gathering of young Trump supporters.

Greg, Mark Dannells, and I were recruited to help fill out the band for a Yacht Rock Schooner gig that none of them could do. In addition to the three of us, we had Ian and Tony from Bumpin' the Mango and Cole from The Shadowboxers. Tom Young was the only actual member of the Schooner on the gig! Ian and I soon started calling this version of the band Spare Parts.

In spite of our situation, the gig was fine. Things were surprisingly cohesive, and the crowd didn't know us well enough to see that we were almost all subs. Plus...they were super drunk. Look no further than they guy in the tuxedo who massaged one of the front line monitors for most of the second set, or the girl whom Greg walked in on while she was peeing on the floor of the storage closet.

The load in/out was pretty tedious (through the kitchen, up the only elevator), but it was certainly worse for the guy who had to leave in an ambulance after drinking too much. Ouch.

After what amounted to a long nap, we headed back to Atlanta early Saturday morning.  First up was a noon gig with the Greg Lee Band on Mark Cobb's front porch.

No Bencuya on this one. I played mostly saxophone, and probably should've thought out my approach to some of the music a little more--tambourine maybe would've been been more appropriate!

Lunch in Virginia Highland.  Tried tofu.  Didn't like it.

Next up, we played two shows at Venkman's, celebrating their one year anniversary. The 7 PM show was "unplugged" (maybe labeling it "acoustic" would be more accurate), and the 10 PM show was closer to a normal Yacht Rock gig. I took a nap in between shows.

I woke up the next day on the couch, still in my clothes.