Thursday: Flew to Lexington for a public gig. This set up is in the airport.
Pretty good crowd for a Thursday (just over 250)! This was my first show with my rebuilt rack for my EWI and wireless. It worked ok--my cable coming out of my mixer vastly underperformed, and it made everything sound kind of weak--even after having Zach boost it, my mix never quite settled into anything.
For some reason, my MIDI got the hiccups in the middle of the Africa solo and hung a note, so I had to stop and slap the space bar, which totally sucked. I'm not sure why that happened. Computers have bad days?
Anyway...Thursday gig in an old distillery warehouse in front of a couple of hundred people...whatever.
Friday: After the Lexington show, we drove the seventy-five miles to Louisville, arriving somewhere around 3 AM. People started waking up just before noon with thoughts of how to kill the day, since our gig this evening wouldn't begin until midnight (yuck). Most of the guys went to the movies. I wasn't really interested in that, so I went for a long run instead, followed by a giant veggie burrito.
The venue for this evening's show: the Belle of Louisville. There were shows going on up the river from us (on shore), and we were the nightcap show for the hardiest of partiers. Midnight show.
Small stage and a long room. Thank god this one had a crew to most of the dragging of gear off the trailer, up a flight of stairs, and down the length of this deck.
Another less-than-wonderful sounding room! It wasn't terrible, but we were crammed on to a tiny stage, so every microphone had lots of room bleed into it. Plus, the fatigue of the day and the condition of the attendees. Tough to find the excitement in this one.
Back to our hotel rooms after 3 AM, and then we had to bounce back up for an 8:30 lobby call.
Saturday: Fly day! We turned the van and trailer over to one of our crew guys to drive it home, and the nine of us headed to the airport Bencuya went on vacation, and the rest of us went to Orlando for a corporate gig.
A big ol' ballroom in a giant hotel. My backline (rental) gear was immaculate. Everything looked brand new!
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| The view from my balcony. Also, Florida is flat. |
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| my room. Nice! |
Dustin Cottrell joined us for this show on the main keyboard position. Excellent work!
This gig, thankfully, was crazy easy. We played from roughly 9 to 10:15 PM. The gear was great, and the room sounded wonderful--we were plenty spread out, and it was really dead. My mix was awesome. The people for whom we were playing were also very cool. What a relief.
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| That's me, and that's me. Photo cred: Pete. |
In bed before midnight. Not asleep, but in bed.
Sunday: Flying home. A few of us were on the shuttle that left the hotel before 7 AM (ugh), which was a fortunate move because Kip and I encountered two of the biggest morons airport security has at work. The bag scanner person rejected approximately 50 percent of the bags, and the guy doing the follow up hand searches was equally inept.
I go through security with 2 saxophones, 1 EWI, and a backpack full of electronics. The backpack made it fine, but both saxophones were flagged for a search. In the first one, dude went looking for a 9 volt battery in my EWI (by the way, there's a 9 volt battery in my backpack that you didn't catch). There is no 9 volt battery in the EWI, however. When he told me what he was searching (in vain) for, I told him that there were 4 AA batteries in the EWI. "Same thing," he said. How so?
In the tenor gig bag, he went through my pouch with extra reeds, a mini screwdriver, chapstick, etc, and took out a pen knife. Keep it, Inspector Clouseau!
Kip's suitcase was pulled after scanning, rescanned, rescanned again, hand searched (looking for a needle, she said), and finally scanned one more time. No needle was ever found.
The other guys in the band made it through in five minutes on other lines. Kip and I lost today. Unbelievable.