Friday: Buckhead Theatre. This place is starting to grow on me now that Live Nation has taken it over and tried to make it into a legitimate music venue. The sound is getting better, and they now have a local crew to drag your gear to and from the parking lot.
We added Say Say Say this week. Much like a few weeks ago when we added Fleetwood Mac's Little Lies, I was initially a bit disappointed. Ugh--another eighties song. When are we going to add You Make Loving Fun? However, just like Little Lies, this one is fun to play, so I'm cool with it. Plus, whenever we do a gig with horns, this one will make Rob giddy with delight.
I Just Wanna Stop by Gino Vanelli made a comeback. We played this one for a while in the first couple of years of the band, but it went away soon after I started playing keyboards. I never was able to do a good job on the string part, so I started over with a new chart this time. Getting the voicings correct took a lot of time to figure out and then get into my hands.
Ernie Watts played the sax solo. I'd show you my transcription of what he played, but I think it's a pretty lame solo, so I don't play that one note for note--I just follow the general idea of it.
This gig was pretty slammin'! It was sold out (yay!), and from what I could tell, they were generally an excellent crowd with good energy. I had a really good time on this one, and we played really well.
Mark Cobb nearly pulled off his most daring Africa drum fill ever, a phrase so devastatingly hip that it might have buckled every knee in the room...but he dropped a stick and we all survived.
At the end of the night, I pointed to my cases and said, "These are ready to go" and two crew guys brought them out to my truck. It never gets old!
Here's video of the show:
Here are some pictures by one of our favorite photographers, Emily Butler.
Home by 12:30 AM! Woo!
Saturday: We played a charity event in Duluth, GA--our second year doing this gig, a pretty vanilla two set show in a country club. Super nice people, but compared to the night before, not very exciting. We may have been watching Star Wars on the back half of the stage, and I may have quoted to cantina band theme in a flute solo, which I may have played during the cantina scene in the movie.
I did have a good solo on Turn Your Love Around, so I guess my night wasn't completely brain dead.
