Charlotte's Washout

Yacht Rock headed north to Charlotte, NC Saturday morning for a show at the Oysterfest.  We arrived and loaded in just as the rain began.  It stopped long enough for us to drag gear to the outdoor stage, set up, and soundcheck.  

Unfortunately, the showers returned off and on up til and during the beginning of our first set.

I have no explanation for this.  It didn't work, by the way.

 It seemed like the weather was going to hold off, and by the end of the first set, we had a pretty decent crowd.  The forecast that I looked at said that the rain chance of rain was only about 50% until 9 PM.  Great...rainy load out.

Unfortunately, we didn't make it that far.  On the break, the rain picked back up, and at one point it got pretty heavy.  I hopped back on stage to check on everything (translation: I was tired of talking to people).  Bad news.  The rain had come through the corner where Zach and Kip had set their mixer.  Their electronics were wet and thus they'd been forced to shut everything down, ending the gig.  In the process of collecting microphones, they'd discovered that my gear (in the opposite corner) had also been blasted with rain.  My saxophones, flute, and piccolo were dripping with water.  There was an inch deep puddle in front of my keyboards.  Not good.

It was a very bad state of affairs.  If the pads on each instrument were soaked, they'd all have to be replaced (at around $200-250 per instrument)--a pretty grim feeling as I poured water out of one horn.  I did my best to dry each one inside and out, put them away, and hoped for the best.

My keyboards were relatively dry, and Zach had grabbed my EWI and laptop and moved them first, so they were ok.

That ended my night.

We loaded out in a steady rain, but the trailer was packed up by 10 PM, so we decided to head home instead of spending the night.  Back in Atlanta at 2:30 AM, home around 3:15 AM, all the gear unpacked and spread around my dining room table and floor by 4 AM.

Sunday, I checked out a few of my electronic things (laptop, effects pedal, Nord keyboard), and everything seemed fine.  I checked the piccolo and flute, and they seemed fine.  The tenor had a two leaks in the middle of the horn (A and F), which I doubt had anything to do with the rain.  The alto had a leak at the low C# and that pad had a big stain on it like it'd been saturated with water, so I'm guessing that's the extent of my rain damage.  

Zach's mixer had some more serious issues and will need to return to the manufacturer for repairs.

Purple Rain

The annual Yacht Rock presentation of Prince's Purple Rain is one of my favorite shows that we do.  The music is fun and weird and we do a good job with it.  This year's show exploded with the news that Prince had died; approximately half of the 1,000 tickets sold following his passing.  The Park Tavern (who hosts the show) then released an additional 2,000 tickets, all of which eventually sold out.  That's a lot of people packed under one tent!

Overall, I think we played a great gig.  We did have a technical issue with the click track and out off (used on a couple of the Purple Rain songs) being audible in the PA, but no one outside of the band seemed to recognize it, so maybe it wasn't as big a deal as we thought at the time.  My feeling is that with the 3,000 people talking and singing a cheering (and drinking), no one paid any attention to it, and once the song began, the click probably blended into everything else that was coming through the speakers.

That was the worst of it;  the good moments from the gig far outweigh that.  Highlights included guest vocalist 'Slick' Barnes' joyous performance of Boogie on Reggae Woman, the crowd's reaction to Let's Dance, the mother/daughter duet by Keisha and Courtney Jackson on I Feel for You, and the incredible energy from the crowd during the encore of 1999.

our man Peter Olson laying down some sweet keyboard sounds on The Beautiful Ones

ART!

Mojo Dojo

Wednesday night was another installment of Scott Glazer's Mojo Dojo at Blind Willie's.  Scott's put together music (mostly blues, 60s soul, and some other offbeat stuff) for two horns and rhythm section.  David Ellington has been the keyboardist as of late, joined by Nick Johnson on guitar.  The drummer's chair seems to rotate between several players, and the horns (trumpet and tenor sax) are usually Mace Hibbard and either Melvin Jones or Russell Gunn.  This month, however, Justin Powell and I were the horns, and Jon Chalden on drums.

It's a fun gig and a great hang!  Tyrone Jackson sat in on organ for a few songs in each set and blew us away.  Actually, pretty much everybody blew me away--I lost the onstage battle of volume and chops.  They go hand in hand for me--if I have to begin my solo at 85% intensity because of the onstage volume, it severely narrows my range of musical ideas.  Still, it was fun to be on stage with all of these guys, doing something completely different.  I'd love to have another shot at it!

One More

One more little private party for the weekend...Yacht Rock played an afternoon birthday party (I think--it may have been some other kind of party) at a restaurant in Buckhead.  If you were around Atlanta ten or fifteen years ago, there used to be a cluster of bars right in this area, but developers bought all of the property and made it a high end, Rodeo Drive sort of thing.  Ferraris and Aston Martins were parked outside.

Anyway, this one was a major throw and go.  We had all of our gear piled up at the back door, and on Kip's signal, we rushed in and set up.  I don't even remember if we sound checked.  Kip used one speaker as the PA.

We had Ganesh filling on drums today.  Excellent job.  Also, Zach was off doing something else all weekend, so we had Alan Smith assisting Kip with the audio for this handful of gigs.  Also excellent.

The party turned out to be thankfully very painless, a two hour gig with probably twenty-five minutes of speeches in the middle.  The crowd was not especially impressed with the fact that we were there (most of them were around the corner at the bar), but we did attract a few dancers (and, of course, some lady who requested Brown Eyed Girl, which almost ruined Mark Dannells' afternoon).  It was a perfectly low key event, and Monkeyboy punctuated it by sitting down for a song.

We finished at 6 PM, when the party had to turn the space back over to the restaurant.  We frantically pushed all of our gear out the back door and boogied out of there.  I kind of liked heading for home while the sun was still up.

It would have been a relaxing evening, but our annual Purple Rain show is this coming weekend, so there was much learning and reviewing.  Unfortunately, that kept me up all night.  If we can make it to next Monday, everything will be alright.

AAC

Yacht Rock played the annual spring party at the Atlanta Athletic Club Saturday night.  Not as many aggressive housewives as in years past--they turned out to be a pretty well behaved bunch.  Easy gig with no problems, and I was home around 12:30 AM.  Not too shabby.

I did a better job on Young Americans tonight--I've pretty much solidified the intro and the solo (the only parts I'm concerned with playing accurately--the rest is improvised).  One more night and I think I'll have it comfortably committed to memory.

Not So Young

Yacht Rock played a surprise birthday party in Buckhead last night.  Maybe 50 people in attendance, almost all in costumes.  I'd guess that it was a 70s themed party, but some chose the 60s by accident--ironic because everyone in attendance was old enough to recall what the 70s looked like.  Regardless, there was plenty for the eye to see.  Special shout out to Princess Leia in the New Hope outfit with the big hair buns and everything.  I admire your effort.

We added David Bowie's Young Americans to the set this weekend.  I thought I'd be really excited to play this song since it's 70s David Sanborn soloing over the entire song (hell, the entire record!), but it felt really long.  Maybe it's because the solo vocabulary is pretty rigidly a major pentatonic scale (with the occasional flatted third and flatted seventh).  Anyway, here's my chart.  The intro is important enough that subsequent Bowie tours used what Sanborn played as their intro.  The solo before the bridge is the only other spot where he gets pushed up in the mix and you focus on what he's doing.  Everything is just major pentatonic whatever.

I had to keep reminding myself to leave less space and play over the vocals and not care.

This is also entertaining.  I guess the microphone distortion on the sax is no big deal, or part of the appeal?

Encore

We (Yacht Rock) gave an encore performance of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon last night at Venkman's.  After that, we played a couple of Beatles songs, a couple of Zeppelin songs, and a couple of The Who songs (I wasn't involved in either the Zepp or Who).  I only play on about half of Dark Side, so it made for a short night for me, which was just fine after an usually long soundcheck and an eternity sitting in traffic in between checking and the gig.  Home by 11:30 PM, and that's only because I had to wait for the show to end so that I could collect my keyboard from the stage.