One Night Stands

Last week...another week of airplanes, van rides, gear issues, and special shows...and work! We are still gigging hard, but it looks to be slowing down slightly to a more manageable pace. Last week, however, was kind of nuts.

Tuesday: I was making great time on the way to pick up Nick and Bencuya, as we normally carpool to the airport. Suddenly, traffic came to an abrupt halt just south of Moores Mill. Why?

Not good. All lanes blocked. I was definitely not going to make the carpool--maybe I wouldn't even make my flight! The last three miles to Nick's house were projected to take fifty-one minutes. Terror radiated from my body.

After a half hour of sitting/freaking out, the "police activity" cleared, and the traffic sped a way like the start of the Daytona 500.

Average speed on the Connector through town:

Whew! Made the flight.

The camera crew was along for this trip. More documentary footage!

Our first gig of the week was a corporate party in a restaurant in Miami Beach. I had a lot of trouble paying attention on this one.

Before the gig, Matt (who drove our gear to Miami and back), Kip, and I went for a quick walk. The weather was immaculate.

Here's our crazy dressing room.

Anyway...the gig was...kind of mindless. Music after dinner for maybe a hundred people on a Tuesday night, with the band jammed up against a wall. A good snapshot of the night would be the penny whistle (piccolo) solo on Call Me Al, where I tried (out of boredom) to add little flourishes and curlycues and suddenly messed myself up so badly that I couldn't finish the solo.

Post gig, we sat shoulder to shoulder for a quick group interview with the film crew, which made the night that much longer.

Wednesday: This evening's gig was in Florence, Indiana. From Miami, we flew back to Atlanta (because everything connects through Atlanta when you fly Delta), and then out to Cincinnati (where the airport is actually across the river in Kentucky). So...Miami to Atlanta to Kentucky to Indiana (via Cincy). Got it.

the Atlanta layover

 This gig was a corporate party kind of thing (I'm familiar) at a casino in Indiana.

The view from my cigarette stained room. Unimpressive! That's Ohio over there in the trees, by the way.

Giant adirondack chair. Impressive!

 The golf course was at least scenic (and didn't reek of cigarettes). Nice weather.

So...the gig...significantly better for me than Miami, in spite of the horrible Nord Electro 2 that showed up for me. Boo. I missed my keyboard.

This one at least ended pretty early, giving me plenty of down time in my stinky hotel room. For the life of me, I can't understand why I didn't just go and ask for a different room. I bet you can't either.

Thursday: Back to Cincy/Kentucky for the flight back to Atlanta so that we could bang out another gig. Not on this plane, however.

Thursday's gig was a corporate party/reception kind of thing at Venkman's. Nice to be back on our home turf, with our gear. Pretty painless--two sets, and then we could pack the gear back up and go home.

Friday: Purple Rain in Piedmont Park time. We've finally played this album enough that it's not a huge burden to bring it back to the front of our brains. Due to the moderately insane schedule of these two weeks, our only chance to rehearse was...last week. This should be interesting.

One exciting thing: I've been playing synthetic reeds on this gig for several years. Both of my saxophones might possibly sit for an entire set, and then be called upon to work perfectly, and regular cane reeds don't do that well.

I've been using reeds by a Japanese company named Forestone, and they've served me pretty well. My main complaint is that they are wildly inconsistent in terms of relative strength and longevity, and at $20 a reed, that ain't too cool.

The major player in the synthetic reed arena is Legere. They're more expensive (almost $30 a reed!), which makes it much more difficult to trial-and-error several different reed strengths to find the one that fits me. But my relationship with the damn Forestone reeds was in dire straits, so I blew around a $100 on three reeds.

First one...right out of the box...is a player! 2 and 3/4 was a little hard, but totally playable. 2 and a half feels great. I think I'm sold.

On to the gig...all set up in the big tent in Piedmont Park. We took the stage just after 8 PM. Bencuya's top keyboard died (really just the screen, we think, but because he couldn't see any information on the screen, he couldn't locate any sounds). Disaster! Where's ol' Roland Tech Support when you need her?

Fortunately, one of our crew guys, Kip, sprang into action, calling the local backline company to immediately replace the busted synth, and then had another friend deliver it to the park. All the while, we did our best to avoid songs in the first set that needed the dead instrument. Miraculously, we faked a whole set. Bencuya's head almost exploded.

We took a long intermission, and once the replacement arrived and booted up, we were on our way through Purple Rain. Most of the people in attendance had no idea what had happened. Good thing we had a film crew standing by to capture the terror.

Saturday: One more gig. We drove to Savannah for another corporate dinner party. Pretty relaxed after the previous night's tension convention.

Things ended at 9:30 PM. Nice! Party time in Savannah? Hell no. We had individual hotel rooms (with SUPER SHITTY wifi--what is this, 2006?). I was in the bed before midnight. Dig it.

This week...relative calm. A corporate shindig Thursday night in Atlanta, and then a private party in Connecticut. See y'all at the airport.

More Travel Tales

Another week of traveling and gigging! Here we go.

Wednesday: I travelled to Charlotte, North Carolina with our second band, the Yacht Rock Schooner, for a gig at the National Whitewater Center. There's a huge rock climbing wall and long zip lines, but the main attraction is the giant manmade river where kayakers, rafters, and olympic hopefuls come to train. Pretty cool.

Greg Lee and I were filling in for the usual guys on the gig, who are led by Greg's brother Ganesh. I only played sax and flute, so I tried to keep busy singing any background vocals I could handle. It feels strange to not play my keyboard parts that fit around the sax and flute parts.

The gig was for web designers (their job was to take news stories and format them for news websites). There looked to be a couple of hundred of them. Unfortunately, the bar was approximately one hundred fifty yards to the right of the stage (down river!), so other than a painful few moments when they were all forced to come and stand in front of the stage for some remarks, we had less than a dozen in the audience. Ouch! Maybe they were all listening from afar...

 Thursday: Greg and I took the shuttle to the Charlotte airport, where we caught a flight to Atlanta. At the Atlanta airport, we met up with the rest of the Yacht Rock Revue, and boarded the plane to Chicago.

Our first show of this run was at Joe's on Weed Street, a place we know well, having played here numerous times.

Before the doors had even opened, I was in trouble--I guess I'd bent a key on my alto (the low D) when I was packing my gear for this trip. In trying to diagnose the problem, I accidentally knocked a cork out from under an adjustment screw on another key. After a quick phone call to my repairman, I bent the key back to its correct position and screwed in the adjustment screw to compensate for the cork that was lost. Greeeeaaaaat.

How would this one go? We hadn't played a Yacht Rock gig in twenty-six days. The answer? NOT WELL! I, for one, spent the first third of the gig desperately trying to catch up--I remembered my parts, but everything needed a extra ninety seconds to line up in my brain. I was miserable. I wanted to quit and fly home that night.

It took almost until intermission for me to find my groove again.

That being said, over 500 people on a Thursday night is not too shabby! We'll take it. Next time we come through Chicago, we'll be at the House of Blues, and I am already pumped about that.

photo cred: Andrew Costello via Twitter

Friday: I slept with Greg again. In the same room, I mean.

Northern Indiana--lots of nothing, which is its own kind of beautiful.

 

Our show at The Vogue in Indianapolis sold out the week before, I believe. It feels like we are hometown heroes.

Indy was a kick ass show! Completely different from our rusty Chicago gig. Just that quickly, we were back to our usual standards.

The video from our Facebook Live broadcast is nothing great to watch--the camera is having trouble locking in, but the audio is spot on. Another great mix by our crew of Kip and Zach!

Saturday: After the show, the van and trailer headed south. We slept for a few hours in a hotel in Indy and then caught a REEEEAAAAAALLLY early flight to Chattanooga (once again with a layover in Atlanta!). The van and trailer caught up to us after lunch (and another nap).

This day's gig was in the historic Engel Stadium. I think this one may have been part of a summer concert series or something. 

Unfortunately, rain was in the forecast. The opening band was to play around 7 PM, and we were to begin at 8 PM.

We barely got any kind of soundcheck in before the rain interrupted us.

Future radar on the Weather Channel app said we were going to get nailed around 7:15.

So...the opening band (Jason D. Williams) started up, and they were fantastic. Kind of a Jerry Lee Lewis thing, but the piano player was CRUSHING IT.

A few songs into their set (let's say 7:15!), however, the sky opened up. That was the end of that. They tarped everything. Once it was clear that this was no passing shower, the local crew helped the openers pack up and split.

We waited and waited and it poured, and then the lightning started, and the sky continued to unload on the diamond. It seemed really obvious to all of us that the gig was not going to happen, but we hung around until it became official.

Since we weren't able to play anything from the stage, we ended up doing a forty-five minute set in the stands, where I attempted to add saxophone parts and solos to several songs that required neither. Not my best playing.

photo cred: Mark A. Herndon

 After that, we waded back out to the stage and packed our gear.

I think more rain came through after we'd escaped--we drove through a good bit more on our way back to Atlanta. Home by 12:30 AM. We survived!

A Weekend of Odds and Ends

When did we last play a Yacht Rock gig?...as I write this, twenty-three days ago in Boston. Since then, it's been Zep/Who, a week off, and last Friday's project, the Talking Heads Stop Making Sense. Around that, two other little gigs. Here it is.

Thursday: I played a gig in a band centered around local celebrity chef Ford Fry. Mark Cobb has played multiple shows in Ford's band, and he pulled me in to be the utility guy, playing a little bit of saxophone, a little bit of keyboard, and a little bit of miscellaneous percussion. A dozen songs were picked (four Beatles, four Zeppelin, and four Stones).

The event was some sort of private party for car people, and Ford was doing the catering. We were set up on stage at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. Sweet! I've never been on stage at the Fox.

For me, this gig was all about playing keyboard with a great band (other than Ford and the lead singer, everybody else in the group was a professional musician--Mike Lemond, Benjy Shanks, Mark Cobb, and Kevin Spencer) something I would not normally be privileged to do, and if I had to play Brown Sugar to get there, so be it. Maracas on Jumpin' Jack Flash? Done. They let me play the keyboard solos on Get Back and Revolution, and I must say I got pretty close on both of them! I even played the banging piano part in Rock and Roll, and I was so thrilled that it sounded so good until my arm started getting tired and my eighth notes died a slow death. But...whatever! I was almost The Great Bencuya for a few minutes!

Friday: The Talking Heads Stop Making Sense at Venkman's. The songs are long and repetitive, but it was a fun deviation from Yacht Rock nonetheless. Also, we killed it (especially on our first show). I think it appeals to the bands' collectively off center approach to music. This one will be back. Super fun.

You'll want to jump around seventeen minutes in for the beginning of the show.



Saturday: The Greg Lee Band hopped on I-20 East, headed to Covington to some upstairs listening room on the square. We opened for a singer/songwriter and her band from Nashville. We played ok, had a good time, and (most of us) ran out the door as soon as our set was over. Home before midnight. Passed out on the couch.

The next two weeks are NUTS!: Tuesday rehearsal for Purple Rain, Wednesday with the Schooner in Charlotte, Thursday with the Revue in Chicago, Friday in Indianapolis, Saturday in Chattanooga, Sunday church gig back in Atlanta. Then, Tuesday in Miami, Wednesday back in Indy, Thursday in Atlanta, Friday is our Purple Rain show in Atlanta, and Saturday is Savannah, and Sunday I'm back on the church gig in Atlanta. As Skip Caray once said, "We'll either bond or never speak again."

Zep/Who

Yacht Rock (plus special guest Peter Stroud) played a show of all Led Zeppelin and The Who last night at the Variety Playhouse. As you might imagine, not much for me to do--of the twenty-six songs, I played on nine (2 background vocals, 2 tambourine part, 2 keyboard parts, 2 horn parts, and 1 cowbell part). Lotta hanging around...

I watched a few songs from the floor...

Watched a few from the balcony...

Hung out in the green room...

Here's my chart for the beginning of Stairway to Heaven. I've seen a few others on the internet, and I don't agree with them.

All of the moving stuff (particularly the entire second line) was difficult to play smoothly with the sustain pedal (but not overlap anything). Also, I made the mistake of not hearing my part against the acoustic guitar at soundcheck--at the gig, I had to back my volume way down so I could hear (and stay in time) with Monkeyboy.

Quick load out from this one. I was home by 12:15 AM.