The 2014 Yacht Rock Revival was this past Saturday at Park Tavern on the edge of Piedmont Park. If you weren't there, you missed the best one yet! The weather was terrible earlier in the day, but cleared off enough to make it a very special evening.
This one was by far the easiest one for me. Three contributing factors: 1. We don't add much new material these days, so the band songs (without the original artists) were the same stuff we've been doing for a long time; 2. we've played with most of the original artists before and most of their songs we repeats; 3. the new songs that were added had no saxophone and almost no keyboard.
Pablo Cruise opened for us with a seventy-five minute set. Good stuff and great playing, with plenty of chopsy stuff in between their big hits! Pretty cool guys, too, though I wonder if there was some sort of contest among the four of them to see how many times they could insert the word "fuckin'" into their banter between songs. They said it so many times that they began to sound like little kids learning to cuss.
Our set was excellent. Fun all the way through, and no disasters. We even had fireworks during Maneater and Africa, courtesy of a party elsewhere in the park. Everything ended right on the dot at 11 PM. Perfection!
Congratulations to Nick, Pete, Kristen, Kip, Nackers, Rebecca, and the whole Pleaserock crew for another awesome event! Also, thanks our outstanding guests Pablo Cruise, Walter Egan, Peter Beckett and Ronn Moss of Player, Robbie Dupree, Jeff Carlisi of .38 Special, and Gary Wright for performing with us!
with Walter Egan |
with Peter Beckett and Ronn Moss |
with Jeff Carlisi |
Walter Egan watching from the wings |
"GET A ROOM!"
My Sunday night church gig, by comparison, was not this exciting or entertaining. Also, there were no fireworks. Such is life.