David Freeman Music

Another week of traveling and gigging! Here we go. Wednesday: I travelled to Charlotte, North Carolina with our second band, the Yacht Rock Schooner, for a gig at the National Whitewater Center. There's a huge rock climbing wall and long zip lines, but the main attraction is the giant manmade river where kayakers, rafters, and olympic hopefuls come to train. Pretty cool. Greg Lee and I were filling in for the usual guys on the gig, who are led by Greg's brother Ganesh. I only played sax and flute, so I tried to keep busy singing any background vocals I could handle. It feels strange to not play my keyboard parts that fit around the sax and flute parts. The gig was for web designers (their job was to take news stories and format them for news websites). There looked to be a couple of hundred of them. Unfortunately, the bar was approximately one hundred fifty yards to the right of the stage (down river!), so other than a painful few moments when they were ...

When did we last play a Yacht Rock gig?...as I write this, twenty-three days ago in Boston. Since then, it's been Zep/Who, a week off, and last Friday's project, the Talking Heads Stop Making Sense.  Around that, two other little gigs. Here it is. Thursday: I played a gig in a band centered around local celebrity chef Ford Fry. Mark Cobb has played multiple shows in Ford's band, and he pulled me in to be the utility guy, playing a little bit of saxophone, a little bit of keyboard, and a little bit of miscellaneous percussion. A dozen songs were picked (four Beatles, four Zeppelin, and four Stones). The event was some sort of private party for car people, and Ford was doing the catering. We were set up on stage at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. Sweet! I've never been on stage at the Fox. For me, this gig was all about playing keyboard with a great band (other than Ford and the lead singer, everybody else in the group was a professional musician--Mike Lemond, Be...

Yacht Rock (plus special guest Peter Stroud) played a show of all Led Zeppelin and The Who last night at the Variety Playhouse. As you might imagine, not much for me to do--of the twenty-six songs, I played on nine (2 background vocals, 2 tambourine part, 2 keyboard parts, 2 horn parts, and 1 cowbell part). Lotta hanging around... I watched a few songs from the floor... Watched a few from the balcony... Hung out in the green room... Here's my chart for the beginning of Stairway to Heaven.  I've seen a few others on the internet, and I don't agree with them. All of the moving stuff (particularly the entire second line) was difficult to play smoothly with the sustain pedal (but not overlap anything). Also, I made the mistake of not hearing my part against the acoustic guitar at soundcheck--at the gig, I had to back my volume way down so I could hear (and stay in time) with Monkeyboy. Quick load out from this one. I was home by 12:15 AM.

Good times in the great northeast! I'm a little late in blogging about this, but...so what. The past week has been a little hectic with rehearsals and a show (and life beyond all of that), so I blew it off.  Thursday: We flew in to BWI (Baltimore), where the crew, van, and trailer picked us up on our way to Silver Spring, Maryland for our first show. Silver Spring has a Fillmore--the brand "Fillmore" (like San Fran/Bill Graham Fillmore) has been hung on several cool rooms around the country by Live Nation. We've played a few of them: Charlotte, TLA in Philadelphia (which has since gone back to being the Theatre of the Living Arts, and Irving Plaza (which has gone back to being Irving Plaza). If we had a heavy schedule of Houses of Blues and Fillmores, that'd be cool with me. Nice crews and stages in every one. Maybe they should build one in Nashville? Anyway, this was maybe not a popular move with our friends at The Hamilton in DC, but I like this pl...