Wayne Viar and I were back at Ventanas for a House Live gig this past Monday. It's been a while! This one was a four hour party, which meant that for sure there'd be at least an two hours of total bullshitting by us.
The gig wasn't too bad. Jeremy did a nice job of setting up little sections in which Wayne and I could play, and then when we would finish he would go into the track. I really we'd be in agony (four hours of this?!), but everything turned out fine.
This has nothing to do with the music, but they had these cool balloons that had controls, and you could steer them around the room. Many times, I was nearly attacked from above by a large, inflatable shark. Death from above!
I had two pretty good church gigs yesterday. The AM gig is coming together well--we've figured which voices in the horn charts we need to make the section sound good, and the leader is picking songs that work for us as a band. More importantly, we've added Phil Smith on drums! Super solid drummer. I've known Phil since the late nineties, when he was in love with Kenny Washington. Over the years, he's expanded his focus, and his pop/rock playing has strengthened immensely.
The PM gig was small but mighty, with just two vocalists. No problems, though. If Lopes ever gets around to repairing my soprano (which I gave him two weeks ago to fix), I might play it again on this gig.
In between, I did some less exciting stuff like finding guys for upcoming gigs. I checked in with a local guy I'd used before via text, and he hadn't bothered to save my number and had no idea who was asking. That kind of crushed my ego--I thought I'd played pretty well, but to him it was forgettable. It also reinforces my feeling that I'm completely off the local jazz scene. Bummer. It makes me think that the guys who do play with me are there for the check and not the music.
I also had a random guy ask me about sending him my transcription for Us and Them (Pink Floyd). Occasionally somebody asks after seeing me on YouTube…anyway, I told the guy that yes, I would send it to him. This week, he asked again, so I got out my handwritten chart and put it all into Finale so it would be nice and neat. The dude never sent me an email, so I ended up making a pdf of it, then saving the pdfs as jpegs, then emailing them to myself so I could save the jpegs on my phone, then texting the three pages to him. All that, and I heard nothing in reply. Thanks would have been nice…
The hell with that guy. Here's the chart. Send me an email and I'll send you pdfs if you'd prefer.
Yacht Rock had quite a long day Saturday. Nick and Dannells flew in from Indianapolis; the rest of us began our third day of gigging in a row. We played the Dunwoody Beer Festival for the fourth time. I think this is the first time the weather's been clear--usually we are huddled under a leaking tent.
Why anyone would want to stand in the parking lot of Perimeter Mall and drink beer in the middle of the day is beyond me. People turn out, though, and we gave them three sets of music (our first set was our Dazed and Confused stuff, so I only played on half the set). No problems. Still no crazy bass feedback, which makes me think The Hamilton owes me some kind of monetary apology. Get it together!
Anyway, we finished and it was still light out. Yay! I went home and unloaded all me gear, and then I started to get really tired. It was tough to turn around and head out to Smith's to play 500 Songs for Kids. We were given Strawberry Fields Forever. No sweat, right? We do a slammin' Beatles tribute! I think I got about eighty-five percent of my part (the trumpets thing, which I played on keyboard) correct, which sadly is one of my better attempts at 500 Songs. Usually, I suck real bad..remember November Rain? This time I only sucked on the first full chorus with brass (the third one if you're counting from the beginning…CHORUS, verse with flutes, CHORUS, verse with brass, CHORUS THAT SUCKED, verse with brass, CHORUS, tag, outro). Right notes, wrong spot. Booooooo!!!!! We backed up a friend on Imagine right after that (me on strings, which I miraculously did not screw up).
Following (my) tradition, I ran out the back door and went straight home, tired and brain dead. Why do these gigs take so much out of me these days? Gettin' old?
The Yacht Rock Revue played a snoozer of a gig last night. The audience was a bunch of lawyers. We were largely ignored (except for the half dozen wives who tried in vain to get the party going).
My big entertainment was trying to fit "the lick" into all of my solos.
The Yacht Rock Revue (with a couple of subs) was back at the 10 High after a few weeks away. It's still a dirty hole of a room. Load in through the back hallway, past the stagnant puddles of something(why there are puddles indoors is a mystery), past the dead roaches, over the rubber bar mats that are thrown in the way, and you're in, but then avoid the dead roach on the dance floor and the leaking pipe from the bathroom upstairs while you're setting up.
The crowd was thin. I'm guessing the crowd has moved on as we've moved on to bigger and better things. The head count was somewhere around sixty people on the night. Not very inspiring! We made the best of it, though, and generally played well. Oh well…at least there were fewer people to dodge while loading out.
Wednesday: The Yacht Rock Revue began our little northeast tour with a local gig at the Weather Channel, celebrating their thirtieth anniversary with a party. An unusual start, if for no other reason than I drove down to the office, loaded my gear in the trailer, and then drove most of the way back to my house for a gig. This one was 80s themed, since they began in 1982.
The gig was pretty easy. We backed the trailer up to the stage, unloaded, and set up. Good weather (predictably) made it all go well. We were on one end of a giant tent; food trucks were on the other; Jim Cantore in the middle. Cantore looks like a cop, by the way--a bit shorter than me, stockier, shirt sleeves rolled up--Detective Cantore. The food truck (Yumbii) was awesome, by the way, and I had two desserts from the King of Pops.
Detective Cantore in the lower left hand corner
After the gig, we packed up and drove up to Charlotte, NC, where we spent the night.
Thursday: We were up pretty early for the drive to Baltimore for our next gig. This one was a public/private event for Groove Commerce at a bar called Little Havana. Pretty cool setting--right on the inner harbor in a pretty good sized room. They loved us and we loved them. B is for Baltimore and B is for beautiful boobies. I saw many of them; exquisite scenery. Evidently, internet marketing is big with the babes.
The sound was good, the energy was great, and the views were mighty fine. Another good performance by us.
Here's a video:
Friday: We were able to sleep in because we only had to go to Washington DC for our next gig, so we left around 11 AM. The traffic in the city was incredibly bad, even mid day--it took us probably forty-five minutes to get parked once we got within sight of the venue.
We played a public gig at a super swank room called The Hamilton. It looked to me like a really upscale jazz club; their calendar lists everybody from Roy Hargrove to Toad the Wet Sprocket.
They had an underground loading dock where we could stash the van and go wander for a few hours.
Dannells led a few of us to a pretty good African restaurant called Peri Peri. Lots of dead chicken. I ate four bowls of frozen yogurt (it was all you can eat).
We still had an hour before load in, so we then went to the Spy Museum. Pretty groovy, with lots and lots of Cold War stuff. It had hidden listening devices, guns disguised as other things, things you can stick up your butt in the name of national security, and an air duct for Dannells and me to climb in.
The Hamilton was cool, the stage was nice, the backstage was super groovy. I had an hour to actually warm up for this gig, so I found a back hallway where I could zone out and play saxophone. Ahh…
The gig itself was OK. I figured out really quickly (as did everybody in the room) that there was some kind of low end thing happening to the right of Dannells, and whenever I would step forward to take a sax solo, it would feed back--a gig-destroying low frequency, high volume roar that the sound guys never could fix. If I stayed at my station, things were OK, but it kind of neutered my performance (on a night where we played Baker Street, Maneater, and Careless Whisper). I was really disappointed. Everyone seemed to have a theory, but nobody had a solution. Could it be that I when I walked out, I was right on top of the sub under the stage? The sound guy didn't think so. Whatever it was, they couldn't get it right.
Awesome light show, light guy.
Here's a video of us crushing Rosanna. The mix sounds really good! Early in the night, I turned my amp off for a while--I was so cranked in the house, I didn't need it!
Saturday: This was the toughest day of all. We spent the night at a crummy hotel in Maryland, then got up on four hours of sleep and drove to New York City for a pair of gigs.
Gig number one was a three set extravaganza on a pier in NYC (pier 83, I believe). We were on one end of what was really just the Circle Line's parking lot); Wrestlers were on the other end--a Nacho Libre situation. In the middle was the most pathetic excuse for a taco stand ever, manned by the Disgruntled Asshole Taco Servers Union. We changed on a boat with about thirty of the wrestlers, in a haze of body odor that nearly asphyxiated me. All of us has an El Guapo to face.
The whole thing felt really cheap. The stage was small, the taco thing sucked real bad, the wrestling thing was weird (congratulations to DJ Phat Pat for winning his match). If I didn't know any better, I would have sworn that he was one of Cobb's biggest fans (by weight), Terry.
We had a really good all female mariachi band open for us. Nice pants, ladies.
In spite of the surrounding BS, we played well. The sound was pretty good, though my sax mic picked up some interference and started cutting out (nobody told me until the gig was over, though).
When the Cinco del Cheapo was over, we packed up and let a crew of guys move our gear two piers over (pier 81?) to a boat for a booze cruise (ride around New York harbor, drink yourself stupid). The one we did last time seemed like a decent set up for music on a boat. This one, in contrast, looked like Yacht Rock hijacked a Circle Line Cruise. We jammed ourselves in a corner and set up.
This gig was pretty insane, like we were playing a basement frat party. No stage (and no room), so the crowd was right on top of us. I had some crazy girl who kept banging on the top notes of my keyboard. She also jumped in and screamed into Dannells' microphone a couple of times. The security guy was worthless, but I also think the crowd was so thick, he couldn't see what she was doing. The sound man couldn't see us either. Afterwards, he told me "When I was learning how to use this mixer last night, I was hoping to get a band like you guys." Yikes.
Hey Gina!
This gig went well. They loved us, and even with the strange set up, we hit another home run.
We loaded out and headed to our hotel. Greg almost got in a fight with a guy picking up laundry. The place had problems with the rooms, so we had to share beds. I flooded our entire bathroom by taking a shower. What a messy day!
Sunday: We left Nick and Dannells behind in the city and pointed the van towards home. The five of us took turns snoring.
Our return got as far as Gastonia, NC, where we spent the evening. Applebees. Yay.
Monday: The last few hours went by pretty quickly. Home again!
I managed to survive another crazy weekend, and there are only a few days at home before I'm gone again.
Friday:Yacht Rock returned to Nashville. We've been selling out the Mercy Lounge the past couple of times, so we moved downstairs to the larger part of the venue: the Cannery Ballroom (the Mercy is about the size of Smith's Olde Bar, and the Cannery is about the size of the Variety Playhouse). Cool. We loaded in, set up, soundchecked…usual stuff. Definitely a bigger, better stage. The room is L shaped.
Before the gig, we ate at a Thai food truck around the corner. I had the red curry with pork. Very good. I could have eaten two.
The gig went pretty well. We played I Keep Forgetting, one of my faves, and we went through a string of fun sax features (Whatever Gets You Through the Night, Your Mama Don't Dance, Careless Whisper, and Baker Street). The crowd was pretty into it. Coming back from the intermission, the vibe changed--I don't think the we ever got to the same shared energy with the audience.
Some turd got on stage at the end of the night, but the monitor guy was quick to launch him back into the audience. Also, Greg Lee yelled at some jackass in a panama hat at the front of the stage, who responded by throwing twenty dollar bills at us. Alcohol...
My tenor reed died, and thus my altissimo. It made the F#s at the top of the Who Can it Be Now? lick almost impossible. My batting average for that note in the song was low enough to get me sent to the minors.
Load out was slow. The final numbers were around five hundred, which would have been good in the Mercy, but in a thousand person venue like the Cannery, was just ok. The thing that killed us, though, was the production costs--upstairs, it's around $150, but downstairs it's almost $2,000. Ouch. That killed any profit off this gig! Back upstairs we go!
Saturday: We spent the night in Smyrna--no hotel rooms were available in Nashville. We got on the road a little bit late.
Bencuya drove away from a gas pump with the hose still in the side of the van, but we suffered no damage (the gas hose took the brunt of it). Oops.
Chattanooga has a nice place to stop for lunch--the 212 Market. Good stuff. I had ravioli.
We rolled into Atlanta and went straight to our next gig--a spring party at the Atlanta Athletic Club. They had a tented stage set up in their tennis stadium. Not a bad place for a gig! The only drag was that the sun was blazing on my corner of the stage--it cooked me and my equipment.
This gig was ok. I was tired, I guess, but I just couldn't really get into it, and the stage sound kind of crushed any enthusiasm I had. The front line monitors had a lot of stuff in them, and each wedge was cranked to the point of feeding back.
Some drunk bitch (it's always going to be a female, isn't it?) decided that we needed a chick in the band, so she invited herself on stage. At first I thought she wanted to play cowbell or tambourine, but nobody would give in to her, so she just stood in the corner. I got a quick picture during Footloose. I wish we'd had the monitor guy from Nashville come and throw her off the stage.
She spent about a half hour after the gig going among the band, trying to convince us to add her on, though we were never able to determine what exactly she could do. Loading out gear was definitely not on her list of talents. Drinking our rider, perhaps?
Also at the end of the night was a pushy lady who demanded to hear Brick House (which we don't play). I hope at some point we no longer have to deal with stuff like this. It really kills gigs when you have a handful of people who want to tell you what you should be doing.
I got home, unpacked my gear and clothes, packed my stuff my my church gig, took a shower and got in bed at 4 AM.
Sunday: Two hours later, I was up and trying to get out the door to go to Cumming, GA for a church gig. Bryan Lopes and I played the same song we'd played at Gwinnett Church a few weeks ago. This one was at Browns Bridge.
Easy stuff (one song in each of the services), and we got to hang out. Wayne Viar was playing drums, so the three of us traded stories. The song went fine, but spending time with two of my favorite people was extra cool.
Home, then straight to bed. I got up and made my second church gig. Kind of a light band--three vocalists. It was a little rough sounding, compared to the previous week. I didn't anything worth talking about.
