The Yacht Rock Revue played a breast cancer benefit at Ansley Golf Club in midtown. It was a pretty easy gig, though the time frame was very long--6:30 to midnight. Other than that, it was no big deal. Straight Yacht Rock stuff. After the previous night's humid show, it was great to be in air conditioning, too!
We set up and soundchecked (with a monster PA! I've played gigs in the same room with NO PA!). I guess we got a little carried away going over tunes, because the coordinator came in and asked if we were finished because they wanted to open the doors. Oops. We changed really fast and played a hour set.
Included in the first set was Sailing by Christopher Cross. Dedicated readers will recall my death at the Variety Playhouse a few months back. This time, I nailed it. No problems. It was good to put that one to bed--I don't have to carry around the self doubt (or as much self doubt). I've been looking for another opportunity.
Also included in the set was Little Jeannie. I worked on it some more before the gig and I think it paid off. I was twice as good as the night before. Hopefully we'll keep that one in the set list--it's fun to play.
We then took a break...for something like two hours! We sat in a the massage room and drank scotch. Scotch is gross. I'm not a very experienced drinker, but geez. No thanks.
We came back around 10 PM and played two sets. The crowd was WASTED. Holy cow could those people drink. Included in the second set was What a Fool Believes. I think I've found my sound. I'm going to sit on this one for a while and see if I get comfortable with it.
Maybe I've said this before, but it's funny to me that I really don't play much saxophone on the gig, and yet people constantly praise me for my sax playing. We played around thirty-five songs; maybe nine or ten had saxophone parts--not necessarily solos. People eat it up. What can I say?
No blog post would be complete without an EWI disaster, right? Here you go: the plug separated from the power supply on my laptop and fell on the floor, but I didn't notice. In the middle of the final set, I suddenly noticed that my laptop would not wake up. Why? No more power. I'd drained the battery. The cable was still attached to the laptop and the prongs were still in the power strip, but the brick of the power supply was on the floor. Great! I plugged it back in and turned the laptop back on. Mainstage came back and everything looked good.
I should mention that I was doing all of this while we were playing. It's like trying to dismantle a bomb before the song ends. YOU NOW HAVE THREE AND A HALF MINUTES TO TROUBLESHOOT THIS VERY BAD PROBLEM!
The problem was that thus: the program came back on, but the the MIDI convertor was not receiving MIDI information. I closed down Mainstage and restarted it. No luck. I rebooted the computer. No luck. I rebooted Mainstage again. No luck. We'd moved into another song so I was now trying to play a keyboard part and fix my laptop. At one point while I was bent over frantically doing triage, Mark Cobb reached over and played part of his drum groove on the top my head. The eventual solution was to unplug the USB cable and then plug it back in. That fixed it. Damnit!
Also during this set, we were given a round of tequila. Great. Just as nasty as scotch.
The set ended and we were invited to an afterparty (no thank you). More and more drunk people and they all dug us. That's cool, but they probably won't help load out gear!
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