Yacht Rock played a gig last night at a house--a surprise birthday party for a local golf pro. The local golf pro's good friend is Stewart Cink (he of PGA fame), and the party was at Cink's house.
Unbelievable house! With the exception of a house in Buckhead where I once did a solo sax gig, this was the most insanely extravagant house I've ever been inside. Let's just say, does your basement have enough space for a stage?
Here are some pictures (keep in mind that this is all basement!)
Stewart Cink's office
The gig was one of our better performances. Bencuya was back; his solo on Hey Nineteen made my previous night's effort seem really really bad. I was embarrassed just watching him play.
The rest of the band played well. It was a low pressure gig, but nobody blew it off. Good stuff all around.
Yacht Rock played the 10 High last night without the one and only Mark Bencuya, who was on vacation. Eric Frampton covered his role. Much like my exciting outing with the Schooner at the Dixie Tavern, some of the keyboard parts were flipped--super cool because I got to play some different parts! It was really fun, and I only sucked real bad occasionally.
I took TWO keyboard solos! One on Hey Nineteen (that's me on rhodes),
Tyrone Jackson and I played a duo gig last night at the Hyatt downtown. Since it was just the two of us, I plopped a Real Book on the music stand in front of us and away we went.
I looked pretty good, but didn't play well. Some of it was that I just didn't have it…I just couldn't get going. I think the bigger issue was that I had a couple of uninspiring reeds. I am listening to the recording as I type this and the sound is fine--sounds like me!--but it was hard work. I had to put to much effort into playing the gig. Sometimes it just flows. Tonight--nope!
Anyway, I settled on a reed that was like a 2x4. I made it through the night, but that reed wore me out. Looks like a trip to the store tomorrow to buy another box.
Here's the audio:
A few thoughts:
1. The first note of El Gaucho is an E, not a G like the book says. I made this mistake the last time I played this tune out the book.
2. Tyrone suggested Half Nelson, a tune I haven't given much thought to about fifteen years! The chords came back to me; the melody did not.
3. I'd never played The Night has a Thousand Eyes. It's hard not hear Coltrane on that one.
4. I had set up my tenor and soprano, but had only played the former. One of the techie dorks came over while were playing Voyage and said, "Are you going to play your soprano? I'm a sax player too. I play soprano, alto, and tenor." Then I kicked him in the teeth. Just kidding. That's the reason I played soprano on Out of Nowhere, though. The techie dork came around again later to see what were playing--I avoided eye contact.
Yacht Rock played a wedding at the Capital City Club in Brookhaven Saturday night. Weddings can be fun--it can be another gig you play, and there might be half a dozen really cool moments. On the other hand, a wedding reception can drag on forever--you're playing a gig (usually in a four hour block) in a room with poor acoustics in front of an audience who isn't there to see you. It can become a drag really early.
This particular reception was the latter…we pushed on through it, but everybody was checking the clock.
When we started, I noticed that'd left the volume on my amplifier really low, so as a challenge, I backed it down--in fact, I played just about all of the second and third sets with the volume completely off (independent of my signal going to the PA, so it didn't effect what I sounded like in the room…presumably). Even though the volume knob was at zero, I could still hear the sounds in my head--pretty cool.
It was kind of curious that nobody else in the band mentioned my lack of on stage sound. Was it acoustics or indifference?
My two Sunday church gigs were pretty regular. Looking back, I can't think of anything significant about either one. Both sounded good. Easy stuff.
Yacht Rock played the 40 Watt in Athens last night. Another terrific gig!
I think we've got our thing in Athens down. We know how to navigate, where to eat, where the record store is. The crowds are really good now--last night was not as packed as the Georgia Theatre gig, but it was solid--maybe three quarters full. They loved us, we loved them; we played two encores!
The first set went really well for me until the very end. The last tune was Easy Lover, and when we started I noticed that my bell sound didn't have any delay on it. Weird, I thought. Then when I went to the main synth lick, it DID have delay on it. Somehow I've managed to switch the effects routing. I tried to do my best playing the marimba parts on the verse with my left hand while scrolling with my right. Difficult! What I eventually ended up doing was bringing up that synth sound in the patch category and flipping back and forth between the performance (with the keyboard split) and the patch to get through the set.
Shortly into the second set, the batteries on my EWI went down, and so I stole the four AA batteries from my sax transmitters to power it (it happened in Hey Nineteen, so I played my opening lick and then had two verses/choruses to get the thing back up and running before the solo!). I spent the remainder of the gig trying to mentally plan if I needed batteries in a saxophone where they would come from. This came true on Caribbean Queen--I play EWI on the intro, and then I had the first verse to steal batteries from my MIDI transmitter (also AA batteries), stick them in my tenor, and be ready to play at the chorus on the keyboard. It's a lot to think about.
Hopefully my gear will settle down tonight.
We had a really good time! The sound at the 40 Watt is really good. I wish they were all like that.
Fully recovered from last week's excitement, Yacht Rock returned (most of us) to the 10 High for our usual Thursday night gig. Nick is still on vacation and Dannells is still in California.
Nothing too unusual about this one. We were a little worried because the wet weather had knocked out power in a few spots around town, but things were fine and the crowd was decent.
I had the pleasure of playing a nice quartet gig at CNN Center Wednesday night. The band this time was Louis Heriveaux on keyboard, Kevin Smith on bass, and Marlon Patton on drums. Great playing! It was a real pleasure to have these guys play with me--each one has a strong personality on his instrument. There were lots of creative moments…and I tried to keep up!
Here's audio from the gig:
For the most part, we played to an empty room (it was more like a canyon). The first set was supposed to be a cocktail hour, so the crowd was off to the side. The second set was a buffet dinner, but even then it was only a couple of hundred people spread out. It didn't feel like much.
They ignored us; we ignored them. A lady who got on the elevator with me after the gig asked where I was playing, and her friend said "He was playing the whole night!" The first lady replied, "I must have missed it." Yep.
Yacht Rock returned to Atlanta after a tour up to the northeast. Along the way we dealt with technical difficulties, tension conventions, and the silliness of being in a van all day.
Wednesday: we met up at the office, loaded the van and headed to North Carolina. Our first gig was in Greensboro (or as we came to find out, Greensboring) at the Blind Tiger. The room looked great; I think the capacity was something like four hundred. The PA was bigger than the Variety Playhouse's (capacity of 1,100). The stage was a good size.
So…guess how many people showed up? Maybe twenty over the course of the entire evening. Actually, make that nineteen plus a dog. Ouch!
the last cigarette machine in the universe
From what I understood, the Blind Tiger used to be located in the midst of a bar scene with lots of foot traffic, but they moved to this bigger/better location. Plus, it was Wednesday night…anyway, not the most exciting gig of our lives (though everybody held it together and played well when we could have blown it off).
Thursday: we got up and drove to Washington DC to play at the Mason Inn.
Just south of Richmond (in Petersburg), we stopped at a BBQ joint called Saucy's that had been constructed out of a steel shipping container. It was crazy good (just for the record: me=Memphis guy, so pork or chicken please, and none of that North Carolina vinegar BS). I had a third of a rack of ribs. Dannells did too. It turns out that the guys who run/own it are musicians too, so we hung out for a minute and traded stories. The ribs were so good, I licked the sauce out of the aluminum foil when I was finished.
We were supposed to play here last time (when it was called the Gin and Tonic), but they were renovating so we were moved to Saloun (you can read about that here). Just like last time, we snagged a parking spot right outside the front door. Nice.
That was the last sane thing that happened.
We walked in, and immediately noticed that they'd just painted the stage, maybe the night before, and it was still a bit sticky (and wet in some places!). Hmm. We let it dry for another hour, then came back and loaded in. Still sticky.
I was not able to set up much because the guy with the PA (we'll call him Vincent) showed up with his PA to set up. Vincent set up gear like the gig was happening in twelve hours instead of three. I'm not sure if he was trying to be thorough, or maybe he'd only set it up once before, but he was not swift. Mentally, I murdered him at a much quicker pace.
Vincent, steadily impeding progress
my gear, not on the stage
hurry up Vincent!
So, the gig was supposed to start at 9:30 PM. Vincent started loading in at 6…at 9 he still hadn't run microphone lines. At 9:40 we were crammed on stage (Cobb in the corner, Greg in front of him, Bencuya next to me, Dannells in front of us--facing me--and Nick and Ganesh back to back with him). Nick finally flipped out on Vincent at 9:55. Ten minutes later (after Nick had pushed Vincent out of the way and taken over the line check/level set) we were up and running.
This gig went great. It was super loud and the set up was totally weird, but people loved it and we played well. The capacity of the room was somewhere above two hundred, but the door guys (we'll call them security) kept sending people in. They admitted later that there were over four hundred people in there. Some of them were insanely hot women.
Cool! Awesome gig! We loaded out like there was some kind of time limit, with cases on the sidewalk and gear coming out one piece at a time. At one point I was loading the back of the van while a drunk guy was peeing on the street-side front corner of the trailer. I'll leave that to your imagination--no photos.
We drove off into Maryland to spend the night and nearly hit a deer that was standing in the middle of the highway.
Friday: we piled into the van and drove to New York City for a gig at Brooklyn's Knitting Factory. Kind of a big deal…we got to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn early in the afternoon, parked the van under the BQE in an unattended lot, and wandered off to find pizza (Dannells' choice). We ended up at some hipster pizza place. The pizza was ok. It did get great reviews on Yelp!
After a quick check on the van, we did another loop through the neighborhood. It was a hipster paradise.
We loaded in, set up, soundchecked. Every club should be like this! They had a direct hallway from the room to the street, so no dragging gear through the crowd. Nice. The whole place was like a nicer, slightly larger version of Smith's Olde Bar (without the stairs).
After some food, we got dressed and played. I think this might have been one of our best gigs ever. Everybody played well. Everything sounded good. We were something like eleven people shy of selling out the club. Hell yeah!
We finished right at 11:30 PM. The room was cleared, we loaded out (again in record time), and the DJ began (and presumably the room filled again, but we were long gone). We got a spot on the street right in front, so we loaded the everything in the trailer and walked across the street to the Fat Sow to celebrate. We drank, we ate (more insanely good BBQ). Dannells got crazy.
ordering whiskey
the execution
Back to the van! We grabbed our suitcases (Dear van, please be here tomorrow with all of your doors and windows intact, and a trailer still attached to your hitch) and headed to our hotel across Brooklyn.
Saturday: we woke up around noon to heavy, wet snow falling. Uh oh. As quickly as we could, we cabbed/car'ed it back to the van to begin making our way to Massachusetts for the big private gig that was supposed to fund the bulk of this tour.
Video!
We got in the van and headed north out of the city. At our first pit stop for gas, urine, and coffee, the van would not restart. Uh oh. We sat there for about ten minutes, and then it started. Back in business!
The snow got heavier and the roads got worse. In the NYC suburbs, Nick made the call to the client to inform him that we would not be able to make it. We got off the interstate at Bedford, NY. The van got stuck in the snow. We got unstuck, tried to get up the entrance ramp southbound, and got stuck. We backed up and headed off on a secondary road, where we once again got stuck. We backed down to a gas station and waited it out for a few hours (the whole time with the engine running out of fear that it might never start again).
At dusk, the decision was made to try it again. We headed off on the same road and made it over the first hump. About a mile down the road, we got stuck on an incline in a curve. Traffic at this spot (probably a little two lane country road in real life) was crazy--some people blew past us with no problems; some got stuck and then got unstuck. Some nearly slid into us; some slid into the ditch. We tried to pay off private snowplowers with cash, but nobody would do much to help us. Eventually we got unstuck; made it down the street a little bit and got stuck again. Firetrucks blew past us. Ambulances streaked by. We got unstuck again. We made it another mile or two, then got stuck. We got unstuck and trudged on, only to take a wrong turn! Uh oh. Finally, the interstate! Yay! I think it took us about six hours to go five miles.
The main roads weren't too bad, so we made our way back to Manhattan and unloaded Mark Cobb, Nick, and his wife, Elliott in Tribeca.
The remaining five of us slept in Secaucus, NJ. None slept harder than our heroic driver Greg Lee.
Sunday: we woke to clear skies and melting snow. The van would not start--it appeared that we might have run out of gas (perhaps the gauge wasn't working?). Ganesh and I walked to a gas station and purchased a can and three gallons worth of fuel. We got back, started the van, and away we went!
First order of business: get Mark Dannells to the Newark airport. Done. The remaining four of us (Mark Bencuya, Greg Lee, Ganesh, and myself drove to Charlotte (with a lunch/fuel stop south of Baltimore). The van began behaving normally. We even shut it off! How about that!
By Sunday night we were going insane. At one point Greg was expounding on the virtues of trail mix ("M & Ms…peanuts…raisins…genius!").
Monday: we did the four hour trip to Atlanta without any problems. A quick stop at the office to unload gear, and we went our separate ways.
