May update!
Wednesday, April 30, 2025: Woodstock, GA. Got on the bus at 11:30 PM.
Thursday, May 1, 2025: Louisville, KY. Got off the bus. Time for coffee!
Today’s show was at the Iroquois Theatre - a WPA project that has been gently updated through the years and is still fantastic, and it’s situated next to a very nice park.
The production (video/lightning/sound stuff) started going in around 10 AM - mostly the lighting and video stuff, because it all takes a ton of time to set up and turn on. I went ahead and got my stuff set up on my riser, and then went ahead and ate lunch.
After lunch, I spent some time playing flute in one of the dressing rooms.
The park next door to the theater was (I’m guessing) several square miles, but the best part for me was that it had a three mile loop road that was mostly closed to traffic. A few rolling hills, but overall, very pleasant!
After the run, there was still time for some more flute, some clarinet, and eventually, soundcheck.
Dinner: pasta (always good) and some kind of lentil soup. Both were good! My caloric and nutritional needs were met! After that, I played some saxophone to complete the unnecessarily long warming up trifecta.
On to the gig! As you might imagine, I was a little worn out at this gig - too much warming up, and maybe a little too much running, and maybe not enough quality sleep? Who knows…
Mike Mills from R.E.M. came to the show and sang Pina Colada with us. How cool is that? I was a big R.E.M. fan in high school.
What else…the Wheel of Chorus songs were Baby Come Back and Easy, and I still haven’t quite gotten comfortable on the latter. Fewer mistakes, but I should have it by now.
The crew had a very long day. After I packed up all my gear, I showered, ate some things, put my bags back on the bus, went for a walk, came back, and they were just putting the last few cases into the trailer. Ouch!
Friday, May 2, 2025: Memphis, TN. A day off in a hotel parking lot.
I woke up really, late, like 11:15 AM, and I had to race over to a Starbucks for coffee before a passing thunderstorm came through.
For lunch, Bencuya, Nackers, and I had Indian food. It was good! Hit the spot.
…and it was bug free!
Cool fact! I sent this picture of these two buildings across the parking lot from the buses to my dad, and he wrote me back that his office was on the seventh floor of the building on the right when we were living here in the early 1970s.
The weather improved in the afternoon, and I was able to get my flute practice done in the parking lot.
I went for a run late in the afternoon, and when I returned, everyone else had left to go eat, so I played some clarinet in the back until they returned. I opted for a peanut butter sandwich, two apples, and two bananas for dinner.
Since everybody had returned, I went ahead and moved up to the day room in the hotel for a shower and and some quiet saxophone practice. When I got back to the bus, everyone was already asleep.
Saturday, May 3, 2025: Memphis, TN. Show day - we got a slot at the Riverbeat Festival. The buses left the hotel parking lot around 9 AM and mad the short trip to Tom Lee Park to get inside the fence before the gates opened. Once we parked, I left in search of coffee.
I found a coffee shop behind the Orpheum Theatre on Beale Street and went for a walk. Beale was almost completely empty.
When I got back, it was time to set up our gear and check everything before the gates opened. Our check happened to be at the same time that Public Enemy was doing their check. Their stage was facing ours. They were really loud. Also, they basically ran their entire show at soundcheck.
Lunch was kind of wild. They had a massive tent set up, and all the bands and crew were filtering through.
 |
| Yes, please |
I went for a run after lunch, which also afforded me a little bit of sightseeing.
 |
| The MLK memorial at the Lorraine Motel |
The last time I went to check out Stax, there was no building—it was just this sign in an empty parking lot. Pretty cool that they’ve recreated the original studio.
I had to run through some rough parts of town to get here, and I thought that maybe a straight shot back to the festival was a good idea, so I ran straight down McLemore Ave, figuring I’d eventually hit the river and then I could make my was back to the bus. It turned out to be equally sketchy, and when I got as far west as I could go, I had to get around scrap yards and tank farms to finally find my way back to Tom Lee Park and the festival.
I stopped off at the bus to get my bag and then headed to our dayroom at a nearby hotel for a quick shower, and came back through just in time to hear The Wailers sing I Shot the Sherrif.
Peanut butter for dinner, and then it was time to change clothes and go set up our stuff again.
 |
| The sun setting on Arkansas |
This show went surprisingly well. I didn’t know if we’d have any crowd, but it was well attended and the people were very receptive.
It was really breezy, though—once the sun went down, it was kind of chilly, and I was glad I’d brought a suit jacket.
Once our show was over, we packed up while The Killers were playing their set on the big stage, and then we went back to the bus to change clothes and eat pizza.
The bus pulled out around midnight, and we were back in Atlanta at 8:45 AM.
Wednesday, May 6, 2025: Orlando, FL. We had an easy corporate gig booked in Central Florida at the Orlando House of Blues. It was a very tame event, and it started and ended early enough that I was able to go for a run once we got to the hotel (actually, it was 11:30 PM when I went for a run, but let’s say that’s early).
Unfortunately, our dog Maggie was acting weird when Beth was leaving for work, and a trip to the vet brought news that Maggie was bleeding internally because of a mass attached to her spleen, so we went for it, but it was very stressful. She made it through surgery, and I got on an early flight home to be with her at the emergency clinic where she spent the night in recovery.
 |
| She’ll eat baby food! We can go home. |
 |
| Ouch |
All things considered, she’s doing great, but the masses discovered during the surgery were malignant, so…yeah. Hopefully she’ll continue to beat the odds.
Friday, May 9, 2025: Duluth, GA. Two days after the stress of Wednesday, I subbed on clarinet, tenor sax, and bari sax with Blair Crimmins and the Hookers at the Red Clay Theater.
I’d received a Dropbox link with music in it earlier in the month, but Blair didn’t send out a song list until Tuesday afternoon, so I had to squeeze in a lot of last minute practicing (thirty songs). Once we finished soundchecking, Blair made a setlist, so a few things got cut from the list.
This was a tricky gig! I would say that the charts were only around 65% accurate, and the corrections have been passed down to each new horn player by the other guys in the section. In my case, Ryan Greer (trumpet) and Mike DeSousa (trombone) were very kind to steer me through the show. There were some spots where I was on fire, but also some spots where I died. So it goes…
Also, I had to play a lot of clarinet, and I am not an especially strong clarinetist! I made it through ok, though.
Blair is a cool guy. You should catch one of his shows.
Sunday, May 11, 2025: Crabapple, GA. Mother’s Day brunch gig, 10:30 AM - 2:30 PM at a country club forty-five minutes from my house.
The band kind of drove me nuts on this one. Without naming names, I’ve played gigs with the pianist for thirty years, and in the last few years, I’ve played probably ten gigs with the bassist. The vocalist and I had never met. This was a leaderless quartet booked by an out of town contractor—nobody to steer the ship.
Right off the bat, the gig was at 10:30 AM. I showed up at 10, and the pianist was about halfway setup. At 10:15, we got a text from the contractor asking if everybody was there, so we stalled for a minute, and the bassist said he was in the parking lot. The vocalist answered a few minutes later that she had arrived.
In reality, she rolled in at 10:22 with her personal PA in a wagon. She got it set up quickly, but it was not a good look. The guy who had hired us was trying not to lose his cool, but he was just about to freak out.
We started on time, though, so I guess it was ok. After the first set, the vocalist helped herself to the buffet, and the banquet manager came to me, about to lose his mind. I said I would speak to her, but he grabbed her on his own and asked her to not eat. She was mad because somebody else had told her it was ok. Again, a very bad look regardless.
Four hour of mindless music in the corner of a golf club ballroom. A singer reading lyrics off her phone. Boring solos. I’m glad we got paid. It was soul sucking, though. I never even met the vocalist—to this day, I couldn’t tell you her name. Some of that is on me, but I just say that to demonstrate the level of this whole thing.
I made it back to my house in time to eat and leave again for my church gig. There were naps during the homily.
Wednesday, May 14, 2025: Charlotte, NC. This gig was another one-off, and we traveled overnight by bus and woke up next to the venue.
After the usual coffee and bananas breakfast, I went for a run. It was a little lumpy, but no big hills, and the weather was nice—sunny, but not too hot, and low humidity.
From there, I went and set up my stuff, and then had a Publix sub and an apple on the bus for lunch.
After soundcheck, we all ventured over to the house that was being used as our green room (you could walk there—around a half mile—or ride in the shuttle van). The vegetarian dinner option was a yucky looking eggplant-with-cheese-on-top kinda of greasy monster, so I had some other things on the menu to make do.
 |
| The sneaky backstage passageway to the other side of the stage |
Good gig! There were around 3,000 people on the hill. Cool venue, too (though it could use a real green room next to the stage).
I played ok. I swapped out my alto reeds, and the new ones are really soft, so I kept pinching them shut with my embouchure.
The Wheel of Chorus songs were bass solo (Greg played Higher Ground, which was perfect) and Easy. Easy again! I’ve decided to drop the brass part that follows the background vocals and just focus on the string part until I can get that to be automatic. I used to have it together, so I want to think that the correct circuitry still exists somewhere inside my brain.
Post show, I packed up my stuff and then walked back to the house, and along the way I encountered a few dudes with inflatable saxophones. I’m not sure if they recognized me or not. “Nice horn,” but they didn’t respond.
I took a shower, and the shuttle drove us back to the bus. We woke up back in Woodstock, GA and I called a car to take me home.
Saturday, May 17, 2025: Atlanta, GA. A few months prior, I accepted another gig with an Atlanta wedding band, even though I was really mad about it the last time I played a wedding with them. I am not a good fit with this group! It’s just too loose and disorganized for me, too casual.
For starters, I went through and wrote charts for everything on the couple’s “special requests” worksheet, which ended up being over thirty songs, including lots of songs that didn’t have horn parts at all—I wrote out prominent string or synth parts that I thought we might end up playing since we’d otherwise just be standing there like stupid horn players.
The info for the gig said “full band load in at 4 PM,” so at 4 PM I was there, and nobody else was. The bandleader showed up five minutes later, and then the drummer, then the bass player. I guess what I should’ve done is worked backwards from the 5 PM soundcheck and planned accordingly. By comparison, the trombone player showed up at 5:30 and completely missed soundcheck, and nobody seemed to care.
At soundcheck, we went over the first dance—which had a horn part—but the trumpet player hadn’t even listened to the song, so he had no idea and read it off my chart. The trombone player also had never heard the first dance—but he missed soundcheck, so he didn’t know that he didn’t know it until the actual first dance happened, so he just fumbled some bullshit to try and match what the trumpet and I were doing. Apparently this was no big deal.
This entire band—for every gig, a band is assembled from the available players in town, so it’s never the same combination—everybody’s just kind of doing their own thing with each song, so most of it works ok, but the bass player or the keyboard player might play a bunch of unnecessary bullshit and it ok because nobody cares that much.
The horn parts have also devolved over the ten years of the band. I would like to believe that when they started, the horn players were playing the parts like the recordings, but over time (and boredom), guys added and subtracted things, and those “modifications” got passed down through the pool of different horn players as the way each song is played, so when I show up with the original parts from the records, they don’t agree with what the other guys are playing.
The vocalist had her phone clamped on to her mic stand shoulder high and read the lyrics off of it for every song. When she was not singing lead, sometimes she was looking at incoming texts and other things. One time she was reading the lyrics off the internet and an ad popped up and blocked the words, and she couldn’t find the X in the corner of the ad to close it…and sang no lyrics. But again, nobody seemed to care too much. I had to laugh at the pop up ad, though.
It was a long gig (I also played in the cocktail hour trio with the bassist and keyboardist). So why did I take the gig? I’m trying to meet some different people and keep a foothold in the Atlanta music scene. For the guys in the band that I already know, it’s important to remind them that I’m around and to play well in front of them. I accomplished all of that.
Friday, May 23, 2025: Marietta, GA. Maggie’s doing great!
Wednesday, May 27, 2025: Tucson, AZ. The Yacht Rock Revue had a “revival” style show (backing up several of the original yacht rock artists) for a corporate gig in Arizona, so we flew out the day before. Lots of songs to review! The artists were Walter Egan (Magnet and Steel, and for this he sang Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams), Elliot Lurie (Brandy, and he always sings Dancing in the Moonlight as a second song), Peter Beckett (Baby Come Back and How Long as a second song), Wally Palmar of The Romatics (Talking in Your Sleep, Rock You Up, You Really Got Me, and What I Like About You), and Mickey Thomas (Fooled Around and Fell in Love, Jane, Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us, and We Built This City). We’ve played with all these guys previously, so it was a matter of going over everything to get comfortable again.
Sort of like the wedding gig I just described, the preparation is tricky. In this case, all of these guys are still performing and the sounds and arrangements have evolved, so (speaking for The Great Bencuya and myself) we needed to find the sweet spot where we had the original parts from the studio recordings together, but also the current versions which may only have one keyboardist playing the main part.
We ended up somewhere in the middle, and then each guy’s soundcheck/rehearsal changed things a little more, and we had to roll with it.
Anyway, off to Tucson with a Qdoba airport burrito and an apple.
We got to Arizona early in the afternoon and some of the guys wanted to go eat, so I tagged along, and then later on I followed our record collector to a nearby shop to check their stock. He bought a CD of something I’d never heard.
It was almost a hundred degrees outside, so I spent a lot of the afternoon in my hotel room looking at the internet, but I did eventually go run on the treadmill, and then I found a really good Indian restaurant within walking distance.
Fun side note: I was told that “the bus will meet us in Tucson,” so I packed my toothbrush and contact lens stuff on the bus, and it was not here on Wednesday and I had to buy some stuff because I am a doofus. Oops!
Thursday, May 29, 2025: Tucson, AZ. Reunited with our gear and the bus!
I have no feeling for how this show went. We had a big rehearsal from 3 PM to maybe 6:30 PM, and each of the guys came through and we ran their stuff with them, and there were plenty of little things to try and remember on top of all the other things that I’d practiced in the previous weeks.
Yacht Rock played ten songs at the beginning of the show, and it was all stuff we’ve been doing, so that was no big deal.
Bencuya’s top keyboard was making some weird distorted sounds, and he couldn’t solve it. Maybe it was a bad saved file? He’d done his homework on his keyboard at home and brought the saved stuff on a memory stick—maybe that had a glitch in it, or maybe the road keyboard didn’t upload it properly. All the parts were there, but they were harsh sounding.
On with the show..
Walter came out and did Dreams, and it was down a minor third. I’d spent some time on that at home, but it still took a second for my ears to adjust, and his phrasing is so loose that it didn’t always feel like we were still playing the same song. Magnet and Steel went ok. I play that toy piano part on the choruses, and a few times I got sloppy with what I was doing.
Elliot’s two songs were fine, consistent with the way we’ve done them for as long as I can remember.
Peter Beckett came out and did How Long, but he decided he wanted the second solo to be a sax solo instead of organ. No problem there, but at the gig, I had to work around a key that kept sticking shut. It made for a weird solo as I tried to avoid the note, and then later, tried to get the key unstuck whenever I would take a breath.
Baby Come Back was a little bit of a mess—Beckett’s pedalboard developed a bad connection somewhere in the middle, and Hans came out and knelt at his feet while holding the cables together so that Peter could play his guitar solo.
Wally’s stuff had no sax and no keyboard, so I didn’t really spend any time preparing for it. I knew we’d be playing the version of Talking in Your Sleep that he played in the Ringo Starr band (with Edgar Winter on saxophone), and I was ready for that—the instrumental verse and pre chorus were divided between sax and guitar. That was easy enough. Wally suggested that I double the bass part with synth bass where I could, so I did that, but it felt like I was too loud and too sloppy.
For the other three songs (Rock You Up, You Really Got Me, and What I Like About You), I didn’t have a plan, and Wally (and Bencuya) thought some simple organ stuff made the most sense, so I did that, trying to stay out of the way as much as possible. None of it felt right for the song, so I tried to keep it low and tucked into what everybody else was doing.
On the other hand, The Great Bencuya really shined with some killer piano playing.
Mickey Thomas’ stuff was ok. He’s been doing this for so long, he can probably just sing over any kind of musical soup going on behind him. I’m pretty sure I got just about all of my parts right, though I had a trouble spot in the chorus of We Built This City where I was trying to jump up and grab a four note voicing, and I think I missed it more times than I got it.
Guess who our MVP of this gig was? Monkeyboy! He really nailed all of the parts and solos. He was on fire.
Friday, May 30, 2025: Santa Fe, NM. We drove overnight and stopped here for the day to let our driver sleep, arriving around 11 AM at a Hampton Inn with bus parking. Hooray for lobby coffee!
There was a Schlotzsky’s Deli across the street, so I had lunch there, and it was really lame. Not recommended.
When I got back, the bus was empty, so I used the back as a space to practice flute (everyone else was either hiking, or over at this weird art exhibit place called Meow Wolf.
When I got tired of flute, I went to the crew bus because they had peanut butter and bread, and watched a little bit of a movie with Van, our monitor guy.
I went back to our bus and played clarinet for a while, and when the guys came back from Meow Wolf, I packed up and went for a run.
The altitude kind of clobbered me, maybe. It was for sure not comfortable, but maybe I was tired and Schlotzsky’s failed me, and peanut butter wasn’t enough. Who knows. I got back to the bus.
Most of the band had convened at a shitty Mexican place down the street, but I was late and not in the mood for that, so I went to Chili’s and had a salad and a black bean burger and didn’t talk to anybody and that was just fine.
After dinner, I had my turn in the hotel dayroom, showering and playing a little bit of saxophone at a whisper.
Saturday, May 31, 2025: Denver, CO. Today we woke up on the street outside Fiddler’s Green in Denver.
After some coffee and a phone call to check on everything at home, I went for a run. Denver’s weather was really great—70 degrees and low humidity—and even though there were lots of hills, I didn’t die.
This was a big show, with big lighting and big video, so the band gear didn’t get set up for a while, so I took a shower and went to catering for lunch before setting up my instruments.
We used the rolling risers available to us at the venue, so my stuff and the drums were built backstage and pushed into position later. Very easy.
There are lots of dressing rooms here, and I found an unoccupied one and played flute for about an hour.
Soundcheck was fine. This place sounds good. On to dinner!
Pasta and veggies and potatoes. Yes please. And one of those tart things for dessert.
I played saxophone on the loading dock for about forty-five minutes as a warm up, and then it was time to get dressed and go.
Right from the start, I was in trouble—in the introduction of All Right (the second song of the show), Ganesh did something different on drums and it threw me off, and I panicked because I thought I’d missed the beginning of the song, and then he counted it off and I crashed and burned for a few measures, like I was playing with my knuckles.
Once I got past that, my playing got my comfortable. Business as usual!
We had a great crowd, including a pack of Mrs. Ropers (like from Three’s Company). I think there were ten guys in red haired wigs and muumuus!
Wheel of Chorus tonight: Rich Girl and Easy. Collectively, we couldn’t remember how we were going to just play the chorus of Rich Girl, so we ended up playing the intro, a verse, a couple of choruses and then we kind of crash landed. On Easy, it started before I was ready but I jumped in ok, and then played the modulation chords wrong, and then half the band tried to end too early and it slowly ground to the last note.
After the gig, I put everything back on the bus except for my bag with the dirty laundry I’d accumulated so far, and we took cars to the hotel where we’d be spending the night (Monkeyboy and Bencuya were hanging out with friends after the show, so we left them at the venue). We’re flying back to Atlanta for a couple of days, while the buses and crew would continue on to Salt Lake City, Boise, Idaho, and finally Portland, Oregon.
P.S. Any weird typographical errors are the fault of this crappy little Bluetooth keyboard that I’m using to type on my iPad while we’re on the road. Sorry!
