Sooooo...this shit continues with no end in sight.
There hasn't been much to write about over the past month or two. Outside of a few potential gigs that never materialized, my performances have been limited to recording a few "livestream" concerts with the Yacht Rock Revue. No one seems to mind that they're not actually live, and it allows our team to edit everything into a better performance. From our side of the production, it's definitely strange; the feeling is much closer to a rehearsal than a show, and it's difficult to overcome the reality that we're playing to an empty room. We're doing it, though. It's all we've got at the moment.
A few weeks ago, we played a corporate convention in Oklahoma City, and it too was a livestream. It was set up more or less as a television show, with several "sets" in different ballrooms.
On the first night, we set up our gear, sound checked, ate, and waited on a rehearsal that never happened.
Our call for the second day wasn't until 4:30 PM, so most of us wandered around the immediate vicinity to the hotel, which was dominated by a minor league baseball stadium.
I also ventured over towards the state capital.
This machine is called a pump jack. It sure is weird to see one installed in the median of a four lane road.
Any... day two was our performance. Here is the monitor showing the multiple cameras throughout the building.
The hosts of the evening (in some other room) managed the evening, passing off the show to us for a few songs, to the comedian Sinbad for a five minute segment, back to us, off to (of all people!) Michael MacDonald at home in California, and back to us. All in all, I think we played around fifteen songs--a very easy night.
Two days later, we were involved in a drive in concert at a parking lot north of Atlanta. The event was sold out (yay!), but it rained--poured!--from soundcheck all the way through load out at the end of the night. It's hard to say how the show went--of the people who showed up (it was a "rain or shine" gig), most were forced to stay in their cars because of the storm.
We are entering the season where my hands go numb if I'm cold, so I was pretty seriously concerned that it would happen on this night and I wouldn't play well. Fortunately, the temperature stayed high enough (and I wore an extra shirt to try and keep myself warm). Things were sticky though, in the high humidity, and that's my excuse for messing up two measures of the Africa solo.
This is probably our final public performance of the year, appropriately enough. What a mess this year has been.
