Sunday

Gigs on Sunday are generally great.  It's a bonus gig.  Yacht Rock played some kind of corporate party at Stats downtown, up on their rooftop patio.  It was pretty hot, but I'm glad I remembered to bring a tarp to keep my gear out of the sun.

This one was a pretty sleepy gig.  Once the sun went down, we couldn't see or hear much of the crowd (because of sunglasses and in ears).  It felt like we were playing a gig in a dark, empty room.

In the second set, the crowd got a little closer and paid us a little more attention.  I'd guess there were two hundred people there, and maybe seventy-five were engaged with the band.

The real highlight of the evening happened after the gig when we went to get our cars from the parking deck across the street.  We'd been given vouchers so we wouldn't have to pay, but evidently we needed our original parking tickets as well.  The moron who worked the parking garage couldn't solve this one - they have the voucher but no ticket!  What do I do?  I'll call my manager.  Parking lot attendants are not independent thinkers.

In the mean time, Peter ran back across the street, retrieved the original parking tickets, and got us out of there.  Those idiots are probably still trying to figure it out.

We're on the road this week, playing the Riverbend Festival in Chattanooga on Thursday night, the Mercury Lounge in Louisville on Friday night, and Joe's Bar in Chicago Saturday night.  See our website www.yachtrockrevue.com for details and ticket links.

Saturday

Hamilton, GA is between Callaway Gardens and Columbus.  Saturday night, Yacht Rock played a wedding reception out in a tent in the woods.  This one was more or less the same set of music we'd played the night before, and the crowd was just as good looking (though younger).  Nothing more to report.  Twas a pretty easy night.

Lots of tuning before we got started.

No Zach on this one, but Kip did another excellent job running sound (Zach's roommate Liz worked as Kip assistant).

This one had one of the more unusual first dance songs.  I like it, though.



Once the sun went down, all the bugs in the county descended upon us.  This happens when you put a bunch of lights in a tent in the woods next to a pond.  Bugs everywhere.  The curtain behind the band was full of insects, and I spent most of the second set picking these guys off my keyboards and microphone.  At one point, one even went down my shirt.

The two hour drive home was spent pondering what might be in my truck with me, crawling up my legs.  I hate that.

Friday

Yacht Rock has played for a golf tournament at North Druid Hills Country Club for the past four or so years.  At one time we used to set up on the pool deck (in the sun), but for the past few years it has been in a tent around the corner (good because we had rain the previous two years).  This annual event is really easy, and the talent level (of the audience) is high.  Even the load in/load out isn't too difficult.

We brought back Arthur's Theme and added You're So Vain for this one.  Arthur's Theme is really complicated for me because of a pretty involved, two handed string part, and giving way at the end of the chorus to strings and a synth part.  There's also a famous sax solo, and it's a quick one beat change to jump from one to the other.  Later in the song it gets even more complicated--I play a chord, play a sax fill, reach up and play the next chord, play another sax fill, and then jump back to playing two handed strings.  It's going to take a few more attempts before I really have my coordination down.

You're So Vain is easy.  I don't even start until after the guitar solo halfway through the song.

One other thing I liked about this gig is that we had a nice sized stage with two levels, with my station and the drums up about a foot higher than the front line.  Plenty of room for everyone, I wasn't hiding behind the guitar amp, and I could see what was happening out front.  I could go for more set ups like that.

Honky Chateau

I'm glad I don't play many gigs at Chateau Elan because it's soooooo damn far away.  The best way for me to get there is to go across the top of I-285 and then up I-85, both of which are always a big mess...and then the place feels like it's right outside of South Carolina.  Too far.

This gig was a wedding, and our first good test of the in ear monitor system.  Major success!  Everybody's pretty happy, and it sounds like we're already all pretty close to dialed in.  I'm loving the sound.  Zach and Kip have done an awesome job of bringing this to fruition.  I hope they're as excited about it as we are.

Also (and I think this is purely psychological), I'm excited that I have to bring less equipment.  It's only my amp (in a pelican case), but something makes it seem like I shaved a significant chunk out of my load in/out.  I guess I can work it out to be one fewer trip between my truck and the stage.

Other than that, nothing to report.  My part of the first dance looked like this:

Good pre-gig food.  No margaritas, though.

Friday in the Woods

The same group of us (plus Ben Holst) who played last Saturday night in somebody's backyard in Alpharetta/Crabapple played our second gig Friday night at a backyard in Cumming.  Frankly, I'm not sure how we got the gig--maybe Greg knew the guy?  Anyway, there was an open space in the stand of trees between his house and his neighbor's that he seeded with grass.  Pretty sweet.

The hauling of gear from the street to the stage (there was an actual stage with power and a small PA) was grueling, but the gig itself was pretty cool.  Nice stage (the host owned a roofing company, so it was really solidly built).  Good sound, all things considered.  This time, knowing what to expect of the gig, I was better prepared and more comfortable.  I even had a couple of decent organ solos!  Playing keyboard on a gig like this is definitely more fun than playing saxophone.

They had a frozen margarita machine (I had two), and barbecue.  I would probably die from the food if we had regular gigs like this.  I considered drinking myself into oblivion just for the hell of it, but no one else in the band was going for it, so I gave up before I began to get giggly.

We finished after 10 PM, and I was home by midnight.  Not too bad!

On the Hill

Yacht Rock had a ticketed event on Memorial Day, a fundraiser at a Buckhead church.  We played this gig last year, too.  It's a too small tent over a too small stage in the church parking lot.  Last year it rained pretty hard, but we ended up getting through it.

This year we also had the same too small tent/too small stage combination, the same two hundred yards of extension cord to the nearest electrical outlet, and the same weather conditions.  We played five songs before the front left quadrant of the stage had standing water and the sky began to flash with lightning.  No good.  I'm glad I'd brought my tarp to put over my gear.  After consulting the radar (and singing Rain by The Beatles, Who'll Stop the Rain by CCR, and almost It's Raining Men), the gig officially ended.

It's unfortunate not only because we were unable to continue the performance, but also because this was the gig where the entire band moved over to in ear monitors.  We had a really long soundcheck and got each person's mix roughly dialed in, but having an entire gig to fine tune everything and get comfortable with the sound of everything would have been a huge bonus.  My mix was probably 85 percent solved at this point, and already way better than it was at the Purple Rain show--I'm digging it.  I think we're really going to love these things!

Oh well...any outdoor gig in Atlanta during the summer is a crapshoot.  With no rain contingency, what can we do?  At least the early release from the gig left those of us who needed it more time to dry our equipment out once we were home.  Fun.

In other news, here's a video of me playing with Greg Lee at Eddie's Attic last week.

Dave the Dipshit

I don't write about my church gig on Sunday nights anymore;  usually there's nothing worth writing about.  However, last night gave me a story to tell.

In the past six to nine months, the vocalists in the group have decided that they don't like the sound;  specifically, they don't like the way that I run the P.A.  Even though I'm listening to what it sounds like in the cathedral (I've been doing this gig now for fifteen years--I know what the room sounds like), and listening on headphones, the singers will complain about what they hear (there are no monitors, just singers with handheld microphones standing around the piano), or roll their eyes, or decide on their own that their microphones aren't working and will pass to each other the microphone with the gain turned highest (set for a weaker singer), at which point they will turn to me wanting like they're proving a point (I guess that would be if I set all the microphones right at the point where they will begin to distort, they'd all be really loud, and then they'd be satisfied, and who cares if you can't hear any of the instruments halfway back in the church).

Our set up is a twenty-four channel analog mixer plugged into the amps that drive the speakers.  No monitors, no compression.  I have control over the gain, the EQ, and level.

A month ago, I'd finally had enough of the vocalists and informed the music director that either that bullshit with the vocalists must stop, or I would quit.  That put an end to it.

Last night, I was getting everything dialed in on headphones when the singers swapped microphones mid-song, causing me to flip out, throw my headphones, and cuss out the music director, only to figure out minutes later that the routing of one microphone channel was incorrect--the reason why I could see it on the meter and hear it in my headphones, but it was not making it to the speakers in the church.

Nice going.  I wanted to crawl in the piano and die.  Apologies all around after mass.  Damn.