Anyway, beyond this date (this year it's the 15th), the calendar slows down for most musicians. For us at Yacht Rock, we were fortunate to have two mid week gigs before our big holiday special on the 15th.
Tuesday: The Miller Theatre in Augusta. Beautiful room, easy load in, multiple dressing rooms, great acoustics. We played some sort of fundraiser that was not particularly well attended.
Still, what a great room! I would love to come back here for a regular Yacht Rock show. Excellent on all counts.
Thursday: Stamford, Connecticut. We had an early flight--9:40 AM--which meant that the carpool meet up was at 7:45, which meant that I had to leave home at 7, which meant that I had to get up at 6:30, so why was I texting Bencuya stupid shit at 1 AM? That's just what we do.
Arriving early in the afternoon gave us ample time to eat lunch and crash/run on the treadmill for an hour. I passed out in the green room for a while before the gig.
This gig was pretty rough. The Fantom I was issued (top keyboard) was in pretty bad shape--the card reader didn't work, so I had to import my settings from my laptop, a few control buttons didn't work, and a few keys didn't work. Great! I was also given some shitty Yamaha volume pedals. My whole setup was wonky.
There's more! This room sounded TERRIBLE, and the crowd was, for the most part, not interested. We played most of the gig to an at best sparsely populated dance floor. The majority was across the room with their backs to us.
Special shout out to the stink bug that crawled out of my wireless microphone receiver. Considering that it hasn't been outside of my fly-date-case since the Fenway/Boston gig a month earlier, that's impressive, and I would guess that it probably crawled IN there six weeks previous to that when we played an outdoor gig in Louisville. Can bugs hold their breath for that long? That thing earned its freedom.
Saturday: EPIC holiday special at The Roxy in Atlanta. Wow! 2,500+ in attendance.
For this one, we added Keisha and Kourtney Jackson on background vocals, a horn section (Rob Opitz, trumpet; John Sandfort, tenor sax and flute; and Tim Pitchford, trombone), and Pete's wife Alyssa on guest vocals.
The Roxy is an incredibly good room--looks great, sounds great, big stage, easy load in, loaders!--all my usual superlatives. We played really well (for the most part!). I had some weird nervousness issues that came and went in the first half of the gig (this weird thing where my embouchure would basically disintegrate while I was playing), but I had a solid night on all my horns once things finally settled down.
Here's the setlist:
That's it! We're off until December 28, when we appear at the Alabama Theatre in Birmingham. See y'all there.