Please Pleaserock Me at Smith's

Please Pleaserock Me played a show at Smith's Oldest Bar last night to a packed house.  The wrinkle in this one was that Mark Bencuya was out of town, so Nick successfully picked up a bunch of his keyboard parts.

For the horns, I took a solo on Don't Let Me Down (instead of the Billy Preston wurly solo), and I arranged the strings on I Am the Walrus for the horns.  Tricky stuff.

Greg Lee brought his new 12 string guitar to the gig.  Very very cool.

Smith's feels like it's on the verge of closing…in addition to the usual smells and the non functioning restroom, they were out of good beer (they gave us the choice of Bud Light or Yuengling), some menu selections, vodka for Monkey…hope we're not loading out when the back stairs finally give way.

That said, it sounded great on stage and out front, and everybody played really well because of it.  Good gig!

We finished at 11 PM.  Another band was slotted to play at midnight, so we loaded out quickly (with help from the staff, which was very very cool).  See you in December!

Hey Monday!

Hey…it's Monday again!  Another weekend has blown past.

Thursday:  Yacht Rock played at the Georgia Theatre for Halloween, performing all of Michael Jackson's Thriller and then a set of 70s/80s stuff.

We wore the Ghostbusters outfits for Thriller.

Oops!  As we walked on stage, I noticed that my stack of charts had been blown onto the floor by the air conditioner.  Aaaaagh!  I think I could probably make it through the album without them, but I like the short term memory bump.  Thankfully, there were enough 10 second spaces in the first few songs that I gradually got them back in order.

I actually played a really good sax solo on Lady in My Life for the first time in years.

The Yacht Rock set was our usual stuff.  We've been playing Kiss You All Over and Love Will Keep Us Together, both of which I enjoy playing (though I bombed the solo for the latter).

Nice crowd!   440 people through the door.  I heard that UGA was on fall break, so maybe not everybody was in town.  Athens seemed really dead.

The Georgia Theatre is a fantastic room--looks cool, sounds good, and the crew helps load the gear.

One bad thing:  by the end of the gig, my elbows, forearms, and hands were hurting--the sore, tender, tendonitis/ulnar nerve kind of problem.  Not good.  I couldn't fall asleep until I took some Advil.

Friday:  We spent the night in Athens and then headed to Charleston to play the Music Farm.  Half the trip was through middle-nowhere-Georgia until we finally jumped on the interstate.

The Music Farm is a really cool venue!  We played a great show (including TWO encores!) for over 300 people.  Not bad for our first time in Charleston.  The crew also helped load gear in and out.

I ate at Basil Thai Restaurant, just down the street.  Totally awesome, but then again I'm genetically predisposed to like anything served with white rice.

I sat at the bar (which obviously faces the kitchen).  What a cool set up!  The two woks stay on the fire the whole time.  A water spigot is right above each one, so after each dish, they wash the wok and their tools right there, dump it in the moat around the fire, and move on to the next thing.  Very cool to watch.

We added the Blue Swede version of Hooked on a Feeling (ooga chuckas and all), which we had learned last weekend for the wedding.  It went over well.



More forearm and elbow problems (though the back of my hands didn't hurt like the previous evening).    Advil in the morning, Advil in the evening.  Once again, my arms were so uncomfortable that I had to take medicine to dull them enough that I could sleep.

Saturday:  the final gig on this trip was a birthday party in Anderson, South Carolina.  We had Kip and Zach running sound for us on this one.

The stage was really small and I had no monitor, so Kip ran me a line into the open channel on my mixer--voila!  My amp is also my monitor!  Kip is super awesome.

As quickly as possible, we loaded out and headed back to Atlanta.  I slept most of the way.

Sunday:  my AM church gig was pretty good.  I was able to get a spot in with the rest of the band, which makes a big difference for me--I'm not playing into the back of the preacher's head (or the bandleader's), and I can hear everybody so much better.  A win!

My PM church gig had a problem with the main speakers.  The far side/left side isn't working.  I would suspect somebody's been tinkering with the main set up and has accidentally panned everything to the right side, and now can't get it back to the center position.  You'd think that the biggest Catholic church in the diocese would have a dedicated audio pro to make sure that everything always sounded perfect, but instead...we have volunteers.

My flute face is either really bad, or my flute is really out of whack.

A guy and his girlfriend were really amused by my performance (both of them gesturing towards me and talking and laughing, and mimicking playing flute).  Do you get paid to go to church?  I do.

I also had the chance to drop the line "Throw me the idol, I throw you the whip!"  You've got to use it when you get the chance.



Monday:  I woke up today (Monday) without pain in my arms.  Maybe I'm allergic to the keyboard.

We're at Smith's Olde Bar this Friday, performing a set of Beatles stuff (with some new ones--it's time to write some more horn charts!).

Trio Gig

It's kind of rare that I pull up to a hotel in Atlanta and say, "Hmm, I've never played here before."  And yet there I was last night at the Sheraton Gateway (which is immediately south of the airport, kind of tucked in between the park and ride and the 5th runway) for a trio gig with Kevin Smith (bass) and Kenny Banks Jr (keyboard).

This one was supposed to go 5:30-9, but nothing happened at 5:30, so we waited and eventually things started getting cranked up at 6.  We did an hour and a half in the pre function area (nice natural reverb), then took about a half hour for speeches, toasts, and us to move our gear into the ballroom, and then we played another hour.  No sweat.

Here's the audio.  We tried a new tune of mine, titled Angel with a Tail.  When Reggie died in June, the  emergency vet sent us a condolences card.  In it was one of Reggie's paw prints with that inscription.  Long live the Reggie Dog!  We approached the tune like it was an Impulse era Coltrane ballad.



We were (thankfully) ignored for the entire gig, except for the jackass who came up right before the last tune and said, "You don't expect us to dance, do you?"  In the words of Goldfinger...

This Past Weekend's Adventures

Yacht Rock is staying really busy…this past weekend being no exception.

Friday:  we played at Paris on Ponce for a Cystic Fibrosis benefit.  I think I've finally figured out how to get from the front door to the stage without getting lost.  Things were so much better when you could drive up to the doors next to the stage!

This room has its charms;  stage lighting is not one of them!  It's really dark, even more so when you're wearing sunglasses.  Honorable mention:  the phone booth of a dressing room, which also serves as a passage for servers between the kitchen and the room.  It also houses a toilet and sink, and we had to fight off people who were presumably too lazy to walk to the real restrooms.

Mark Cobb debuted his new/vintage Tequila Sunrise Vistalite drums.  You can read about them here.  Very cool looking.  We picked them up in NYC on our last trip--the seller delivered them from Montreal.

Other fun:  two ladies entered our dressing room with the great idea that what we do is so amazing that we should franchise it and cash in.  We tried to explain that there was more to it than just finding another band to play the same set list, but she wasn't hearing it.  Have you heard about the Yacht Rock Schooner?  I tried really hard to fart while all nine of us were stuffed into the dressing room…of all the times to come up empty!

We loaded out in the freezing cold around the stream of pee from the drunk guy.  Thanks for that.

Saturday:  where is Bluffton, GA?  We left mid morning to get down there (halfway between Columbus, GA, and Tallahassee, FL), to play a wedding for a 10 High alumni.

The reception was held in a giant tent on a quail hunting farm.  Agh!  Open tent!  Bugs during the day, freezing cold at night.  It was beautiful, though.  Our green room was in the tack room for the horses.

They also had two HUGE mules that were at least six feet at the shoulder.

This gig was a bit unusual because we played a jazz trio set for the cocktail hour, which we've never done before.  A nice warm up for me before the main gig, though as the sun went down, my hands got more and more stiff.

Other than that, it was a pretty standard gig.  No Pete on this one, but we covered his vocals as best we could.

My hands got really cold and my horns got really flat.  Other than that, my gear worked fine.

Both gigs had Kip running sound, and he was gracious enough to drive us home from this one (I slept).  We got back to Atlanta around 4 AM.  We divided the gear and went home.  I went to bed around 5:30 AM.

Sunday:  up at 7 AM!  I slept in the van, but I still felt really bad.  My AM church gig was pretty normal--nothing really to report.  I went home and crashed for a few hours.

My PM church gig was ok;  it went a little long because of some special ceremonial stuff.  This was the Sunday where they were introducing the candidates for church membership.  Somebody (I guess) thought it would be really dramatic to have there be a knocking at the church door, and then the altar boys would open the doors and the new people would file in.  Instead, the four big bangs on the church doors scared the shit out of just about everybody in the congregation.