The Tressi Tour

Yacht Rock returned from another successful tour yesterday afternoon.  Miles were driven and notes were played.  I dealt with head cold for most of it.

Thursday:  Our first stop was Asbury Park, NJ's Wonder Bar.  Asbury Park has a mythical quality because of Bruce Springsteen--we were all pretty excited to be there.  What if he shows up?  He's been known to crash other people's gigs unannounced.

We pulled up to a foggy, desolate resort town in the wrong season.  Except for about fifty orthodox Jews, there didn't seem to anybody around. We loaded in and set up--tight stage!  The sound was pretty decent, all things considered, though when Greg would play a low G the whole place would vibrate.

After soundcheck, we wandered up and down the boardwalk.

It seemed, based on the fact that there were about a hundred people in the entire town that night, that we would be playing to nobody, but the promoters were able to find about fifty people to come see us.  A handful of those had either seen us before on a cruise ship or in New York.  Repeat customers!  One girl even showed me a picture of the two of us--"See?  You let me touch your mustache."  Weird.

Friday:  We made the short drive up from the Jersey shore to New York City for our gig at Brooklyn Bowl.  Coolness everywhere.  We'd walked in here on a previous trip, but this was our first show--we shared the bill with a heavy metal tribute to the Bee Gees called Tragedy.  

First off…we had some time to kill, so we commenced wandering around the Williamsburg neighborhood.  No one would allow us to use the restroom--Pete and I ended up doing a shot at a bar so we could go pee.

Cool stuff everywhere.  We ate at a Venezuelan restaurant.

Soundcheck was fine, though two sets of gear was a little cluttered.  

It is a fact that Brooklyn Bowl has the best fried chicken in the universe.  I ate seven pieces (four wings, three boobs).  

Opening the evening was Ali Spagnola, who sang sixty stupid one minute songs about drinking.  In between every song, everybody was supposed to do a shot of beer.  She even sells shot glasses (attached to a USB drive with her "album" on it).  "AwwwwwwwwwwSHOT!"  It was really bad, then so bad it was funny, then bad again.  Kind of shameful that this passes for entertainment, especially at a real music venue.

We then alternated sets with Tragedy.  You can find their stuff on YouTube, I bet.  Heavy metal Bee Gees is a joke that's amusing for about forty-five seconds, and then you have about forty-five minutes to endure until their set ends.  Half the guys on stage aren't doing anything--one of the guys sports a guitar that isn't plugged into anything and sings into a dead microphone.  Not my thing at all.

So, at the risk of bragging, I'll say we won.  My main evidence is the fact that after our second set (before Tragedy came back for their second set), the crowd requested an encore (we did not--that wouldn't be cool).  When we didn't come back to give them one more, three quarters of the audience left.

After the festivities had ended (and Tragedy had covered the stage in buckets of glitter that got all over everything), we loaded up and headed to our hotel in Jamaica, New York.  NOT GOOD!!!! At 3 or 4 in the morning, they only had rooms with one bed, so we had to spoon.  I slept with Dannells.  Our bed had crumbs in it.  I was still full from the fried chicken.

Saturday:  we headed up to Norwalk, Connecticut to play a wedding reception.  It was in a tent right on the beach.  Pete was able to back the trailer almost up to the tent, but we still had to carry gear across the sand to the stage.  Not the greatest load in.

This one was pretty uninspired, especially coming off the previous couple of nights.  It finished at 9:40, though, so yay.

We loaded back out and drove to Enfield, Connecticut (home of former Beth Freeman employer LEGO!) to spend the night.  Much better hotel.

Sunday:  we were up waaaaaaaay early to fly to Nashville for a talent buyers' showcase.  Strangely enough, we had a connecting flight in Atlanta!  Notice the emergency exit legroom that Greg Lee and I are enjoying.

The showcase was in the War Memorial Auditorium, an awesome looking venue…though not meant for a modern concert PA.  Looked cool, sounded bad.  We played five songs--7 PM to 7:20 PM!  Steel Magnolia followed us, and then Edwin McCain.  Following that were Bare Naked Ladies and the Spin Doctors.  Does this say more about the state of our career or the state of theirs?

After that, we went out to celebrate Mark Bencuya's birthday at Robert's Western World.  We got really drunk.  I was drunkest.  

Monday:  we rented cars and drove home.  Our van and our gear should be home by Tuesday morning.  It had better!  We've got rehearsal and gig that night.  

PS.  This is my 600th blog entry.  I dare you to read them all in one sitting.

davidfreemanmusic.net

Monday

Yacht Rock was up early (for us) on a Monday morning for an appearance on CBS Better Mornings (the local morning TV show).  The traffic was horrible because of the rain, but at least there was no loading in involved--we stood around in the shot while Nick and Pete did all the talking, promoting the Candler Park Fall Festival.  We'll be performing our Dazed and Confused stoner-rock set with special appearances by Rick Derringer and Derek St. Holmes.

There were a couple of awesome cars there--a Chevy Nova and a Plymouth Belvedere.

Monday night, I played a weird House Live gig at the World Congress Center.  The client was worried about the volume, I guess, so they wanted it to be acoustic.  That's not possible, however, when ONE THIRD OF THE TRIO IS A DJ!  Also, they wanted it to be futuristic, so they requested that I play EWI, which is once again NOT ACOUSTIC.  Duh…We ended up with a couple of monitors pointed back at us, but no microphones or effects.

More stupid stuff:  the client wanted me to play saxophone at the top of the escalator to "draw people down to the exhibit hall."  At 5:30, the guy told me to start.  After five seconds, the guy asked me to stop.  "They can hear you everywhere in the building!"  I thought that was the idea.  Eventually, this great idea was scrapped and I moved downstairs to the main gig.

Our set was uninspired.  People kept coming up to photograph us;  later on I realized they were taking pictures of the aerialists behind us.  Thank God this one didn't go three hours--I wouldn't have made it.

The entire exhibit hall was full of futuristic logistics solutions--mostly trucks and computers.  There was no one around at the end of the night to keep me from test driving some stuff.

davidfreemanmusic.net

Thousands!

Yacht Rock sold out the Georgia Theatre in Athens Saturday night!  We were awarded gold medals for the achievement.  The Theatre had a banner day--they set all kinds of records for people coming through the doors (the broadcast of the UGA football game earlier in the day obviously helped), and they ran out of beer, ice, and Red Bull.  We're #1 for the time being.

The show was great.  It's such a cool room, and now that we're getting more comfortable on that size stage, it's better and better.  We had a great set list going:

Very sax heavy in the first set.  Good stuff.

Things are pretty awesome!

Here's my solo from Reminiscing:

 Reminiscing sax solo Sept 29, 2012 by David B Freeman

What an amazing weekend!  We played for about a thousand people Friday night at the Park Tavern and then another thousand Saturday.  Every show from now on should have a thousand person minimum.

So…we started at 10 PM, finished at 1 AM.  We were on the road back to Atlanta shortly after 2 AM.  I got home and repacked for Sunday, took a shower, and crawled into bed at 5 AM.  My alarm went off at 7 AM.  I was at my church gig at 8 AM.

My AM church gig was different--one of those weeks when the church decided to drag out every ensemble and make a big production.  Maybe it's fortunate for me--I ended up playing tenor saxophone in the orchestra (which is strings + volunteer concert band).  My part in the show was reading middle school level saxophone parts and trying to stay awake.  The orchestra actually sounded really good from where I was sitting.

There was some confusion, of course.  I walked in to find out I was supposed to play alto today…except that nobody told me that, so I brought soprano, tenor, clarinet, and flute.  They swapped out some charts and I played tenor.  I can't see what difference it made either way--they already had one alto player and one tenor player.  For one song, I played a second trumpet part down an octave.  Another song had divisi parts for the tenors, so I alternated playing the top part in one measure and the bottom part in the next.  Fun.

In addition to the band, they had a combined choir--the group which usually sings with us, another adult group, and the children's choir.  All fifty kids had on t shirts which said on the back, "its the place to be."  Really?  It made me wonder if anybody in the church was praying for fifty missing apostrophes.  How can a typo that egregious make it through? How can none of the fifty children's parents not take a Sharpie to the shirt?  Don't any of the teachers from the school run by this church attend services here?

Ugh.  We played both the 9:30 and 11 AM services, which gave me two chances to get angry about the shirts, and hell, if you're going to pay me to play half notes, let's do it twice!

As you might imagine, I slept all afternoon.

The PM church gig was not bad.  Cell phone service inside the church seems to be improving, which kept me up to date on the football games.

Happy birthday to my lovely wife!

davidfreemanmusic.net