Corner Number Three

We got home Monday afternoon, and Thursday, January 20, we were back in the van, this time headed to Columbia, South Carolina. Remember the gig we played here a month ago? (it's in here) This is the followup to that gig. Here's the show poster.

This place we played didn't seem like much from the outside, and it held the generic name of "township auditorium," but wow! What a room!

Our gear was still making its way home from the Pacific Northwest, so we used backline (rented) gear for this one (and I brought my spare saxophones, flutes, etc). 

When I first tried to install my settings on the Fantom (top keyboard), the drive didn't work, so I tried to do it using a USB cable from my laptop. Still no luck, and then it looked like ALL the sounds on the keyboard were gone. HOLY SHIT! MASSIVE PANIC! I was freaking out. The backline guy was like, "I can make it happen!"...whatever. I tried the USB cable upload one more time, and the keyboard burped and came to life! Disaster averted! I guess that it had been sitting in storage for a few years and it needed to reset before it was ready for action.

Anyway, it took me ten minutes or so to calm down. Jeez. 

This place had lots of places downstairs to hide, so I got in a good warmup, and the show was a piece of cake. As you might imagine, we did not fill the place up, but the floor had a good amount of people and the vibes were excellent, and the gear was just fine (and my "fly date" wireless microphone stuff was, as usual, flawless!).

We drove home the next day. Twenty-four hours later, we were at the airport, headed to Ft. Lauderdale for a pair of gigs--it was some kind of a wine festival (rosé) combined with a breast cancer benefit. At least, that's what it seemed like. Lots of pink.

We arrived right around lunch, so after checking into our hotel, I headed off in search of food, eventually landing at a Mexican place. It was awful (loud Pitbull-ish music, annoying South Florida people), but the food was ok. It's surprising to me that with so many superficial people in the neighborhood, there are very few vegetarian/vegan options. The veggie fajitas option was not on the menu--I had to ask as a special order.

On the other hand, our hotel was really cool, and only two blocks from the gig, so it was a quick walk back and forth. I'm guessing that at some point, these were Art Deco studio apartments, and now it's a boutique hotel? I dig it.

This gear was also backlined, this time from SIR in Miami. Everything worked fine--no crazy Fantom shit. Small stage, though, which was a drag, and I've probably got a good amount of the beach in my computer and saxophone mechanisms. 

Pre gig dinner was catered. Gnocchi!

The first show was underwhelming, to say the least. My in ear monitors kept dropping out, we didn't have much of an audience, and it felt like we were just something else in this little circus that they'd built on the edge of the beach. We also don't have much notoriety in the area, so we were just "some band playing 70s music."

As is often the case in Florida, we finished about fifteen minutes before a rainstorm was going to clobber the stage, so I had to sprint to get everything of mine packed up and headed back to the hotel, and the SIR guys were panicked to get their tarps on everything.

The following day's show didn't begin until 1:30 PM, so after sleeping late, drinking a gallon of coffee, and going for a run, we sound checked, ate lunch (the same gnocchi as the night before!) and hit it again, this time to a much more energetic crowd. Plenty of strange stuff happening in front of the stage, but whatever.

At 3 PM, we finished, and by 4 PM, we were in the shuttle to the airport--home in time to see the end of the day's football games.

No Yacht Rock gigs for the following week, but I did sub for a friend on a local high school production of the musical All Shook Up, which uses a lot of Elvis songs, but doesn't directly have anything to do with Elvis. It borrows a few elements from the Elvis movie Roustabout, though (the outsider, the motorcycle, the conflicts with the locals, the forbidden love interest). It's pretty bad.

Anyway, as I'm learning, the orchestra was all local pro musicians, so it was a pretty good hang.

The storyline for this musical is pretty stupid, but I really enjoyed watching the high school kids give it their all! I played bari sax and bass clarinet on this one. It dawned on me at the end of my last day that I've been playing on the same bari reeds for almost two years. It might be time to switch them out.

Corner Pockets

January 7, 2022: And we're off! Yacht Rock met up at the airport for a morning flight to Boston, only to have the flight cancel within thirty minutes of taking off due to bad weather in the northeast. We were rescheduled on early afternoon flights, so...four hours of hanging around the airport started with lunch at TGI Fridays.

Our plane from Atlanta was further delayed--we sat on the runway for a half hour before taking off (which was fine, because I was already asleep), and then we had to do a few loops off the Massachusetts coast before the runway opened for us to land.

 

It looks there were no sharks close to Boston (in case we had to ditch and swim to shore). Three great whites and one mako.

We finally got in around 5 PM, collected most of our luggage (neither Mark Cobb's nor my suitcase made it!), and made our way to the Boston House of Blues for a very quick set up and soundcheck before they opened the doors.

The gig was kind of a blur. We were tired and stressed out about the travel and the frantic setup. I don't remember much about it. Kind of a smallish crowd, too--700 tickets sold, but there were lots of no-shows.

After the gig, I wandered around to several convenience stores before I finally found one that was open and could sell me a contacts case and a bottle of saline solution. It took about a half hour. I hugged someone's golden retriever who was out for a short walk at midnight, and it made me feel better about my situation.

Long, cold day.

January 8: Still no suitcase, but I felt a lot better after a good night's sleep. I headed over to the closest Indian restaurant, happy that it was open.

The hotel we stayed at, The Verb, was on the opposite side of Fenway Park from the House of Blues, and its rock and roll vibe was greatly appreciated!

The best thing about this room was the record player--you could swap records out in the lobby, but I never did. My room had Sgt. Pepper's, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (there was also a copy of Carlos Santana's greatest hits, but I passed on that). It was a really nice way to spend the afternoon, and also the wind down time after the gigs.

Knowing that I'd have lots of down time, I brought my clarinet and practiced some in the room as well.

Our missing suitcases showed up around 4:30 PM, so I was able to squeeze in a run before soundcheck.

Night two was waaaay easier, obviously, and we had a significantly larger crowd.

The next morning, we got cars to the airport and flew home, as the gear headed west to another corner of the country.

New Year's Eve 2021

A New Year's Eve gig never materialized for the Yacht Rock Revue, but I ended up working anyway, subbing for my friend Bryan Lopes in the Rupert's Orchestra. They had a NYE wedding in Alabama that night, and Lopes tested positive for COVID earlier in the week and had to sit it out. The horns and rhythm section in the band have been the same for the last twenty-five years, so this was also a great opportunity to catch up with several colleagues with whom I hadn't played in five or six years.

Look at this feast! Obviously their rider is not on the same level as the YRR demands. I peeled the turkey off a few of those sandwiches and ate lettuce, bread, and tomato. I also had a bag of cheetos and two cookies. And a water. It was sad.

Kevin kept an eye the Georgia game from behind the stage on songs with no horns. 

I've subbed in Rupert's since the mid-ninties, and at this point, I think I've seen every chart they play with any frequency. This Dancing Queen chart, I'm sure I've read it sixty times at this point. We also played several other Rupert's regulars (September, Get Down Tonight, Respect, Midnight Train to Georgia) as well as some newer stuff that I haven't encountered in the last ten years (the Taylor Swift stuff, the Maroon 5 stuff, the Bruno Mars stuff). All good! I really enjoyed getting back to my roots, so to speak, playing saxophone, reading charts in a horn section.

Anyway, it was fun, and I crushed it, if I do say so myself! At midnight, I FaceTimed my wife as we played Auld Lang Sine, the gig ended, and I was on the road back to Atlanta ten minutes later.

One last Christmas video I made is my arrangement of John Lennon's Happy Xmas (War is Over). Check out the bari duet, but also, enjoy that organ playing! Yeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhh.