David Freeman Music

The 2017 Yacht Rock Revival was Saturday. EPIC! This year's show was at the Tabernacle, a far superior location for us--better stage, better dressing rooms, adequate restrooms and bars for the audience, air conditioning, and an exceptionally good staff and crew. Maybe the attendance numbers weren't as huge, but the experience more than made up for it. We're still in the midst of shooting (or being shot, I should say) a documentary, so this show had the extra pressure of cameras filming everything. I, for one, had a stationary camera staring me down all night. It's probably two hours of nerves and mouth breathing. Some pictures from soundcheck. We also played five songs so that the cameras could do close ups. Before the show, we took a ride around the block so that the film crew would have footage of us rolling out of a limousine and into the back door of the Tabernacle. The first try at this almost ended in disaster when the driver couldn't g...

This past weekend's adventures: Friday: Yacht Rock played a private show at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta. A little strange--we've played more than a dozen times in this room, but this was the first private/corporate party. Interesting. For us, it was a dress rehearsal for next week's big public show at The Tabernacle--this year's Yacht Rock Revival, so in addition to the band, we also had Keisha and Courtney on background vocals, and the mighty horn section of Rob Opitz, Gary Paulo, and Richard Sherrington. Pretty good gig, all things considered. The horn section (directly over my left shoulder) mostly sounded fantastic, and I felt like I played pretty well doing my usual thing. My EWI rig continues to scare me, though--this gig's hiccup was in Peg , where it randomly decided to play a half step lower than my fingering for a couple of notes. Having updated the MainStage app and the OS, I've hopefully ruled out the possibility that my laptop is ready to ...

I have never seen this video until now. Cold war reminiscing! Saturday night, we played a gig in Athens for a company that makes balloons. Check out the decorations! Amazing. How long did it take to make all of these? The gig itself was no big deal--we had two and a half subs (Greg out front for Nick, Rob Henson on bass for Greg, and Dustin Cottrell for The Great Bencuya), and the set list accommodated the stuff with which they were most comfortable. Easy. Done at 10 PM, home by 2:30 AM.

A week ago, Yacht Rock returned to Indianapolis (again!) for a Revival show with Robbie Dupree, Matthew Wilder, Elliot Lurie, and Peter Beckett at the Indiana State Fair. The travel and the soundcheck were fairly painless and the weather was great. Something about the show, though...I just felt really uncomfortable the entire time. Maybe it's the quicker pacing, the need to keep the energy up, and the less-well-known second and third songs by each of the artists, but I just couldn't get in the groove. All of this discomfort culminated in my failure to change the EWI to the correct sound for the Rosanna solo, the first half of which sounded like a middle school band falling down a flight of stairs. I went through the setlist a few days ago, thinking that there would be bomb craters next to every song, and other than the Rosanna  crash, a three measure faceplant in Arthur's Theme a flesh wound in Break My Stride , my injuries were all in the much less known follow up hit...

Ahh! We're rolling now! Four Yacht Rock Revue gigs last weekend, beginning in Virginia and finishing in New York. It's great to get a little momentum in our schedule. Thursday: We flew out to a gig in Virginia Beach. Stacked up in Atlanta. I'm kind of impressed that I wasn't already asleep by this point in the flight. This one was strange, to say the least. We played a Thursday nighter in a country bar (complete with a Cowboy Troy style emcee)--a free show for god-only-knows who's going to show up. The skies over Virginia Beach/Norfolk are thick with Navy jets, and the largest Navy base in the world is right here. Would it be a Top Gun  situation? Uh, no. More like a Wild Wing Cafe situation. I did watch a bit of the NFL preseason game (Dallas and Arizona), and endless repeats of some bro country jackass's music video/commercial on the ten TVs ringing the room. Other things...fruit for dinner, courtesy of the Walmart across t...