This trip was literally all over the map. We began in Nashville and finished in Costa Rica. In between were stops in Indianapolis, Chicago, Las Vegas, and New York. We hit all four time zones and temperature changes between 22 and 87 degrees, loading gear in snow and ice one day, sound checking on a beach just a week later. Van rides, plane rides, rickshaw--somehow, we made it.
Thursday, March 6 (Atlanta to Nashville): We hit the road and played the Mercy Lounge on a Thursday night. Not the most insane crowd--just under 300 in attendance. Not bad for a Thursday!
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| soundcheck |
Before the gig, we had pizza at Desano. I kid you not--I ate an entire pizza. Totally worth it.
This gig was a good first night. I'm not bummed about the numbers at all--the room felt really full, and we were all really surprised that count didn't reflect that. Nashville was happy to see us, and we them. It's a fun room to play.
Friday, March 7 (Nashville to Indianapolis): Ah yes, the homecoming! Three of the band (Nick, Pete, and Cobb) are Indiana natives, and five of the seven are Indiana U. grads.
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| gross |
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| I have taken this turn before |
We moved over to The Vogue for this show (last time we jammed everybody into a smaller place called Radio Radio). The Vogue is a cool room, almost the size of the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta, but with a much smaller stage. It's in Broad Ripple, a pretty hip part of town.
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| the Vogue dressing room is absurdly small |
Pretty good show. It's very cool to be received that well on our second gig in Indy. At 840 people, we were less than a hundred from a sellout. How about that? Way awesome. I want to come back more often.
At some point, it'd be cool if Indiana University would give us a nod. Hey School of Music, remember us? None of us is Joshua Bell, but we're successful grads with careers in music.
Rachel Fox took some really nice pictures of us. You can find them here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/foxrf88/sets/72157642177100483/
Here's one.
Saturday, March 8 (Indianapolis to Chicago): The midwestern musician's dream...playing Chicago. Hell yeah! Last time (our first time) we were in the House of Blues. Amazing, but maybe too big of a room for us to begin the siege. For this run, we were at the much more economical Lincoln Hall.
Before leaving Indy, we stopped for lunch at an excellent New Orleans restaurant called Yats. Very good jambalaya. I texted my mom about it.
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| yuck |
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| I got the last of the jambalaya--after my order, they wiped it off the board |
This is what boredom will do to you:
Another small stage, but it wasn't too bad because it was really dead (acoustically).
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| a bigger, colder dressing room than Indy |
This is where the trip began to get difficult. We got to our hotel rooms around 2:30 AM, but unfortunately with daylight savings time, it was now 3:30. Ouch. We repacked, dumping dirty clothes in garbage bags to ride back to Atlanta in the trailer (Hans drove us and ran sound). In bed a little after 4 AM and then up in time to make a 6 AM lobby call.
Sunday, March 9 (Chicago to Las Vegas): Our hotel was right near O'Hare, so no problem getting to the airport for our flight to Las Vegas with a layover in Salt Lake City.
Here's me taking a picture of us pulling our gear out at O'Hare instead of grabbing the bag with all the keyboard sustain and expression pedals. Nice work, dumb ass. We had to ship the bag to New York.
Chicago Delta guy gave us no grief about the size or weight of our gear. Good dude.
We made it to Vegas for four days of rehearsal and then a rehearsal and performance on the fifth day. Here's my hotel room.
Before rehearsal we had a pit stop for lunch at In-n-Out Burger, which apparently was the only place serving lunch in the state of Nevada that day. The line almost went out the door. Mark Dannells devoured my chocolate shake.
This gig had horns! I led the horn section and wrote the horn arrangements. On trumpet we had Darren English, seen here playing trombone.
On trombone, we had Rich Sherrington, seen here playing Darren's trumpet.
We were in a rehearsal studio just off the strip. This is my view.
On the other hand, here's the view from my room at night. We had individual rooms.
Here's my daytime view. The airport was straight out in front of me.
More rehearsal.
After the first day, they changed the final song of the show to Two Tickets to Paradise, so I had to crank out a chart. First I sketched some stuff out in pencil; then, on a borrowed laptop, I downloaded a free demo version of Finale (music notation software) and made horn charts. It took three hours. I missed dinner at some hole in the wall Italian restaurant.
The next day, we emailed pdfs of the charts to another computer that was connected to a printer. Confused? It wasn't easy. I will say that once we finally got all the charts and editing done, the gig was much more fun for me, and I was really happy with everything I wrote (which is not always the case).
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| Darren doodle |
Later on, I walked around with these two. We took a quick look at the Luxor next door (the one shaped like a pyramid).
Back at Mandalay Bay, we encountered another yacht rock band playing. We play the same stuff they do. They knew who we were. It was kind of weird.
Another day, another rehearsal.
Wednesday afternoon we moved from the rehearsal studio over to the Mandalay Bay Arena.
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| miniature key lime pies |
The Arena is super cool.
The horns had a riser to ourselves.
More rehearsal.
That night I went up to the Foundation Room, a bar located on the roof of Mandalay Bay. Beautiful view!
Here we are right before the show. Darren English, Rich Sherrington, and me.
A few pictures from the show. Great gig! This was ton of fun. We really felt like rock stars.
The show was quick--I think the whole thing lasted thirty minutes, and we done around 3 PM. After killing the afternoon doing nothing more productive than eating, we left Mandalay Bay at 9:30 PM for the airport. Our flight was the red eye to New York, leaving Vegas at 11:30 PM and arriving at JFK at 7:30 AM. Ouch.
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| 24 hours from this moment, we would be finishing a show in NYC |
We had to argue with the Delta counter people about our gear. They let us go without paying because the tickets were purchased on a Delta AmEx or something random--some kind of special privilege, I guess. The fact that Delta's argument (or in the case, allowance) is different every time only highlights the fact that their own musical instrument policy is arbitrary and unclear to those charged with enforcing it.
Friday, March 14 (Las Vegas to New York City): Ouch. This one hurt. I didn't sleep well on the plane. To make matters worse, we flew into JFK, which is a horrible horrible horrible horrible HORRIBLE airport. Why are the terminals each two miles long? We were going to try and take the train to the hotel, but ended up getting everything into two taxis.
Pete had a ten minute argument with the desk lady about our rooms and early check in fees and the room we'd paid for the night before. It was difficult to stand there and wait. I was near death.
They finally squared it away, and I ran up to my room and dove into bed for a few hours. We had a 2 PM lobby call so we could go by the NYC Twitter office for a meet and greet/Q and A. They are HUGE fans and cool people. I ate multiple bananas and drank coffee until I began to sweat.
Pete and I were left out, but we made the best of it.
Once again, coffee saved my life.
On to the venue! We dumped our gear before a food stop at Schnipper's. Kind of like Grindhouse Burgers (if you live in Atlanta). Burgers, fries, mac and cheese, milkshakes. I can dig it.
Yay! We sold out the Gramercy Theatre (650 people). The gig was pretty rockin'--the crowd was really fantastic, even though the stage sound was not as good as it has been in the past. New York is such an incredible place to play. We always have fun.
We got back to our hotel late at night, I want to say around 2:30 AM (it was an hour ride from the Gramercy back out to the JFK Marriott).
Saturday, March 15 (New York City to Liberia, Costa Rica): I was in bed by 3:30, but up at 4:45 in order to catch the 5 AM shuttle back to JFK (the worst airport ever) for our flight to Costa Rica.
We lost the battle with Delta agent about our gear, but this time they "combined" the weight of Bencuya's keyboard and my sax case and only charged us for one overweight item. Thanks? I made all my usual arguments, but the dude said it was because we were flying internationally--the limit for flights to Central America was 50 lbs. Does that mean that you won't try and charge me when we fly back to the US? Whatever. Delta's full of shit.
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| wildfires are all the rage in Costa Rica |
We played a fiftieth birthday party for the owner of Imperial Beer, which I think might be the only beer in Costa Rica. The venue was an hour van ride from the airport on a recklessly fast two lane highway.
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| local cattle drive |
To reach the stage, we had to get back in the taxi van and ride down a dirt road parallel to the beach down to the next resort. There, things were taking shape. It was quite a view, and as hot here as it was cold the day before in NYC).
Not bad, huh? What are your plans for your fiftieth birthday party?
Soundcheck took forever. There was a crew of at least ten men helping set things up, but only two spoke any English. With the heat and lack of sleep, it made for some extra frustration.
Post soundcheck, we had about two hours to kill before the gig. I opted to sleep. Here's my room.
After caffeinating myself, we took the van ride back to the stage for our performance. When we got there, Debi Nova was performing. She's a major babe. Check it out:
Damn!
Following her were fire twirler people. I think there were four people. It was really spectacular on a dark beach.
Unfortunately, sparks from their performance set the cover over the stage on fire. As I was sitting at my keyboards watching the end of the show, a dude came up to me with a fire extinguisher and asked me to move.
Ultimately, they decided that opening up a fire extinguisher with all of gear right there might not be a great idea, so they held a guy up and he smothered the fire with his bare hands, going round and round until it ceased glowing. Wow!
We played one ninety minute set. Our playing was fine and the stage sound was good (and the setting was incredible).
Monkeyboy had a particularly rippin' solo on Two Tickets to Paradise this night.
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| six toms. seriously. |
The screen on my top keyboard was permanently messed up--the liquid crystals wouldn't go back to the bottom, so I could barely see what my sounds were. Even tougher with sunglasses on. Bottom keyboard for the night was the beastly Nord Stage. Lots of knobs.
Following the gig, we had a little bit of time before the van came to take us back to our rooms. I took it all in...it's a pretty badass gig when it's Saturday night and you're eating freshly made tacos on a Costa Rican beach. I got three in before we had to split. Everywhere we went on this trip we had good food, and the lady cooking tortillas on the beach that night made sure that this was no exception.
I guess we were back to our rooms around 10:30 PM. At midnight, there was a ten minute barrage of fireworks. It sounded like Costa Rica was under artillery bombardment. Either that, or the birthday boy had received a howitzer as a present.
The most insane birthday party ever!
Sunday, March 16 (Liberia, Costa Rica to Atlanta): We were as giddy about going home. All of our gear and suitcases were loaded into a beat up Toyota Four Runner and we followed in a van for the ride back to the airport.
The flight was long, but not too terrible. We watched the movie Nebraska. That killed a couple of hours.
Baggage claim took forever, customs was pretty speedy, and we were home free. It was a long ten days!
