Cruisin', Corporate Gigs, and the Carolinas

Greetings, readers! It's been almost a month since I updated the blog--my apologies! My world has rapidly accelerated back to pre-COVID speed, and I've been hanging on for dear life. Anyway, here we go!

Friday, March 25: We set sail on The Beach Boys Cruise out of Miami on the Norwegian Pearl, a boat we know very well (I think somebody said this was our sixteenth music cruise, and almost all of them have been on here). Norwegian used their downtime to update the cabins. I approve! It's mostly just a less orange color scheme, but the bathroom has been updated as well. 

The sail away show featured The Temptations. There is still one original guy and he's eighty-something years old.  The other fourteen guys are younger guys, replacements through the years. Are they still The Temptations at this point, or a cover band?

I noticed when when we were trying to get on board that there were a TON of horn players--an oddly disproportionate number of sax cases and trumpet bags--compared to usual. It was because The Temptations brought a ten piece horn section (five saxes, three trumpets, two trombones). Yay for horns!, even though these guys were of the chunky-black-Skechers-as-dress-shoes variety of dudes. Sounded pretty good, though, from what I could hear side stage. Out front, the vocals were so loud that they drowned everything else out. 

Our first show in the theater, late on the first night. 

It was easy (75 minutes), and we played to a very small audience.

Saturday, we hosted bingo in the same theater. Pete won the first round. It made the crowed immediately suspicious of us.

My usual routine for these cruises: sleep as much as possible, run on the treadmill, practice as much as I can without driving anybody crazy, play the gigs, eat the Indian food. All of these tasks were accomplished. Maybe I should also add "get sunburned," because I fell asleep in a deck chair on Sunday and got pretty red.

Anyway, I practiced flute on my balcony. Maybe it bugged Kip? Maybe he was just being grumpy. 

Our deck show was similar to the theater show in length (75 minutes) and attendance. Nick is still out with a ruptured achilles tendon, so Pete's wife Alyssa sang a handful of songs with us to help fill out the setlist. You can see most of both shows at this YouTube account: https://www.youtube.com/user/icetraders

We always have a band dinner at the teppanyaki restaurant, so we did it Saturday night.

Sunday, we awoke in Nassau, Bahamas. I've been here enough to not be bothered with getting off the boat. It looks like the port is expanding, or they got a great deal on concrete.

Nothing else to do (after my sunburn and run), so I practiced on my balcony, and the Carnival people kept telling me how much they enjoyed listening to me play. Kip was less enthusiastic about it.

Around 4 PM, all the boats started heading out. 

We went next.

For a few cruises, they showed some good movies that I'd never seen, but the TV viewing was pretty crappy on this boat. Whenever The Departed came on, though, I was hooked for at least forty-five minutes.

I caught The Beach Boys on the last night. There are two original guys left, and the rest are hired guns. It was a very polished show, coordinated with the video and the tracks. The sax player was good--he played a lot of bari and hand percussion, and of course, the sax solo on the dreaded Kokomo. 

Monday, we returned to Miami. Our flight wasn't until the afternoon, so we drank coffee, looked at our phones, ate lunch, looked at our phones, and finally boarded. I watched Julia (a bio about Julia Child) on the flight. Pretty interesting stuff!

Wednesday, March 30, Yacht Rock reassembled (with Nick on the front line on a stool) for a corporate event in Atlanta. Hello pollen! I have no idea for whom we were playing. Easy gig, though. The hardest part was trying to figure out where we loading in our gear.

Thursday, I played at Venkman's, sitting in on Nick's solo show. It was fun! Even though it was mostly the same stuff we always play, I only had saxophones, so I was free to improvise a bit more. 

Surprisingly, this show was not particularly well attended. I guess I thought people would have packed the place out, but no. It was also streamed on the internet, so maybe there was an audience there.

Beginning April 4th through the 10th, I was at the Stillwell Theater on the campus of Kennesaw State University, playing saxophone, flute, and clarinet in their production of The SpongeBob Musical. Why me instead of a college kid, you ask? I too, ask, but there is no answer. I'm guessing there wasn't anybody capable/comfortable/interested in doing it. Their loss is my gain, because I love playing shows, and most of the Yacht Rock guys were away on Spring Break. 

The pit was closed except for the conductor, so this was my view for the week. 

As you can see, my big ol' iPad was nice and bright in the dark. For this show, I finally invested in one of the big iPad Pros instead of using the provided book, and I'm never going back! Wow. Being able to clearly see the music! Being able to read my written notes! Reliable page turns! The ability to share my notated music with my subs without having to scan the entire book! I would recommend this setup to anybody doing a gig like this. 

Here are some solo highlights from my book:

On Sunday morning, I played a Palm Sunday service on clarinet and flute at a Methodist church, and it was the easiest check I'd earned in quite some time--basically playing out of the hymnal along with the choir and an organist who couldn't have cared less whether or not we (myself, a flutist, and a cellist) could be heard!

Wednesday, April 13, Yacht Rock played a corporate gig at the Intercontinental in Buckhead. Piece of cake gig, with loaders doing the godawful push down one of the longest hallways in Atlanta. Other than that, whatever. We were mostly paying attention.

Thursday, April 14, we embarked on a short run to North Carolina, beginning at The Fillmore in Charlotte. Good crowd, fun gig!

Friday, we left Charlotte at noon and headed to Raleigh, with a lunch stop in some random small town. The lady who made my sandwich was very considerate in my request for a special vegetarian order.

The Ritz in Raleigh is a place we've played once before--you can read about the ol' tube-socks-in-the-saxophone-bell incident here. It's a pretty good room--nice stage and an easy load in.

Gee wiz the stage was cold, though. They crank the air conditioner at load in, and the vents were blowing right on me. I'd brought a space heater for the following night in Asheville (an outdoor gig), but it was chilly enough here that I pulled it out of the backseat and turned it on for the first half of the night.

This gig was pretty good. I had a couple of moments where my brain started to brown out, but I mostly held it together. 

Post show hotel hallway: I think if you need this many tampons and pads, you probably need to go to the emergency room. Maybe this was some kind of insane girls' weekend or something. 

Saturday: I wasn't really looking forward to our gig in Asheville for two reasons: 1. it was going to be outdoors and kind of cold (in the 60s during the day and falling as the sun went down), 2. the last time we played here, this place looked like a junkyard with a stage. My memory is also tainted by the fact that the last time we played here was the day after we'd killed it at Chastain in Atlanta, and nobody felt like playing shitty gig in a junkyard on a small stage.

However! This place has massively upgraded, and the stage is huge and the production is way better and the green rooms are nicer. I can dig it now.

I had some problems with this one. Our fourth gig in a row was kind of wearing on me, and I was cold (even with my heater, the breeze in our faces made it tough). The pollen was also fairly strong and the breeze helped to cover everything with it, and that was annoying. When I see my gear again next week, I'll have to wipe everything down, so yay for that. And then there were bugs--lots of bugs--all over my keyboards, on the screen, in between the keys, walking around, coming and going. I got preoccupied with them. At one point, I managed to mute the organ sounds on my Nord, and I so then I had to troubleshoot that while playing a gig in a dark cloud of fog.

I couldn't get in the groove on this one--didn't play anything particularly inspiring. I didn't feel real great, and I was annoyed with all the strobes and blackouts that were happening with the lights--plus the hazer for the lights completely wiped me out a couple of times. The whole thing was frustrating. I was glad to get out of here. Maybe next time. Maybe we'll get back into The Orange Peel.

Sunday, April 17, we jumped in the van at 8 AM, and Hans delivered us back to Atlanta, leaving me just enough time to zoom home, eat lunch, grab a different set of gear, and head up to Kennesaw State to play the last SpongeBob show before the musical closed. Success!

We're in Atlanta all this weekend, with two nights at Venkman's and then a private thing on Saturday. Plus, I'll be back on my Sunday afternoon church gig. See you around town.