Dave and Dave

Dave and I played a brunch at Venkman's, once again jumping on stage immediately after the puppet show ended.

Rough gig.  I couldn't get anything going, and I had more than a few mental errors.  Not my best playing.

Thursday

Thursday was another corporate event--this time, a fundraiser for a recycling center in Atlanta.  Pretty painless, though we did have many familiar faces in the crowd to help us along.

The vendor meals came in plastic boxes, the beer was in cans and bottles, the cups were paper, and the water was bottled.  To the best of my knowledge, we recycled none of it.  Not off to a good start.

Soundcheck.  Kip demonstrated his singular drum technique.

Ready to go.

Hanging out between sets.

photo cred:  Peter Olson!

On the way back to Marietta, I got stuck in a massive traffic jam at I-75 and I-285.  This lane closing, the rain falling on my gear in the back of the truck, my urgent need to pee, and the fact that the "need gasoline" light had come on a while ago called for evasive maneuvers, so I bailed onto 285 to Cobb Parkway.  At least that solved some of my problems.

Tuesday

Woo!  Tuesday night gig!

But first, a little bit of gear maintenance:  my Nord (the red keyboard) has been jumping out of the cleats that hold it in place inside the case, so I added some extra foam to the inside of the lid to hopefully hold it down.  I also made two blocks of foam to add to The Great Bencuya's Nord keyboard case.  Hopefully that will keep the keyboards from banging around inside the cases.

So...we had a gig at the Aquarium, in the ballroom.  The belugas are doing well.

This was another one of those low excitement corporate gigs.  They pay really well, though, so I can only complain so much.  It was weird to me, though, that they used the entire ballroom (which is pretty big), but they only had a couple of hundred people there.

As I was dragging my gear out at the end of the night, some dude from the party asked if I was the drummer.

"No."

"Wait--you play the, uh, skin flute!" (and pantomimed playing the EWI).

"No.  I was the keyboard player."  Not entirely untrue.  

Birmingham

Yacht Rock travelled to Birmingham, Alabama for the first time to play a show at Saturn, a really nice room in a gentrified neighborhood on the east side of town.

This is a great place to play!  Easy load in, big stage, good size room.

To add to the great performance space, there is a large apartment upstairs that serves as the green room, complete with pool table, kitchen, two and a half baths, couches, a record player, and lots of beds.  For a hundred bucks, the band can spend the night there.  Wow!

I remember this thing from my childhood, but I don't remember what it did.  Now it's a lamp.

We ate around the corner at a restaurant called Wasabi Juan, which was (as you might guess) a sushi and Mexican restaurant.  Total stoner food.  I had some kind of Thai-spring roll-burrito thing, with a chips and salsa as a side.  It was different, but good.

The was an entertaining gig.  My only really bad moment was on (ironically) Couldn't Get it Right, where I had a major brain fart and couldn't recall what I was supposed to play during the verse.  Everything else was pretty solid.

We spent the night upstairs, which was really convenient--Kip decided that it would be best to leave the gear in the building instead of loading it into the trailer, so no load out and no driving after the show.

The bed I chose, was unfortunately dirty--when I pulled the sheet back to climb in, there was...uh...plenty of someone else's body hair on the sheets.  Hmm...not sure how worked up I should be about that.  I decided it was too late to go searching for a different place, so I slept on top of the sheet, under the blanket and a sleeping bag.

We woke up early on Sunday morning with the intention of fueling up at the coffee shop downstairs before our return to Atlanta, but it didn't open until 10  AM.  What?  What kind of coffee shop isn't open Sunday morning?  Where's the brunch crowd?  Ugh.  We had to drive a few miles to find caffeine.  Not cool.  Plus, I left the green room bananas on the counter, so we had none to eat on the way home.  Booooo.

Dud

A dud of a gig last night for a bunch of doctors.  A couple of sets of us playing while they stood around in the back of the room and talked.

nobody on the dance floor for "Power of Love"

Highlights:

1.  Easy load in

2.  Monkeyboy's new amp logo (designed by Kip)

3.  Easy load out

Georgia Music Day

Yacht Rock was recruited to close out the ceremonies at Georgia Music Day at the state capital building Wednesday.  I really don't know exactly what the specifics of the day were--as usual, I showed up and did what I was told.

photo cred:  Peter Olson

We played Brandy acoustically (acoustic guitars, bas, shaker, saxophone, and a single keyboard), most of us planted in a line on wooden stools.  As we launched into the song, I noticed that everyone except Nick had a microphone.  He strode directly to the podium and performed the entire song like he was delivering a speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  It was amazing.  In a room full of big time music people, Nick laid claim to being the baddest motherfucker in the room.

500 Songs

Yacht Rock ended the weekend with a nice afternoon gig at Park Tavern, part of a food and music festival for 500 Songs for Kids.  It was a really comfortable show, playing for a crowd sprinkled with friends and familiar faces.  On top of that, there were twenty-something restaurants present, and I did my best to eat all the tacos and gumbo available.

It was really weird to load out of the Park Tavern when the sun was still up, though.

Duo at Oglethorpe

David Ellington and I played an afternoon duo gig at Oglethorpe University Saturday afternoon.  I'm not sure what the occasion was.  We were background music for some type of reception in the student center (which is beautiful, by the way).

Special thanks to the student who, with a mouth full of food, leaned across the organ to tell Ellington we needed to stop at 4:30 so her boss could do something.  He spent the break wiping that off.

Also thank you to Mr. Enthusiasm, whose dragging claps on two and four almost brought one tune to a halt.  Later on when he yelled for Mr. Magic from across the room, I knew we were in trouble, and soon after that when he sat down in front of us a sang Oye Como Va at full volume while I was soloing, I almost screamed.  I bet your teenage son was really proud of you.

Anyway...most of this is really good.  Check it out.

Madness in Athens

Yacht Rock was back in Athens Friday night, this time for a private party at a country club.  We were there plenty early to set everything up, soundcheck, and eat (we headed out to an excellent Mexican restaurant).  By the time we returned, the audience was pretty drunk and disorderly--lots of really bitchy demands for the hand percussion, people falling onto the stage, people trying to get on stage, one girl swinging a guitar cable like a jump rope while the guitar was being played, and a woman who repeatedly slapped Pete in the leg with a party favor while he was trying to play.  When we're the sane ones who are scolding people over their behavior, that's saying something!  

There's a special sort of attitude that comes around when alcohol meets affluence, the kind of thing that makes you wonder how they'd like it if we came to their jobs during the week, sat on their desks, spilled a beer, yelled at them when they were on the phone, and insisted on using their computer to look at porn.  It's all in good fun until it's no longer fun.

Anyway, all's well that ends well;  ninety-eight percent of those people were harmless.  We finished up at 1 AM (a rare three set night!), packed the trailer, and headed back to Atlanta.  Home at 4:05 AM.

More Keyboard Stand Crap

The keyboard stand thing continues to frustrate Mark Bencuya and me.  In Houston last week, my eyebolt solution took a hit when one of the bolts failed--the threads had once again flattened out in one spot, and thus would not tighten properly.  We swapped it for a fresh eyebolt and played the gig.

However, I'm still wondering: why?  I brought Bencuya's stand home, retapped the threads in the stand, cleaned up the threads on the eyebolts, and reinstalled everything.  I could already see, though, that the threads were beginning to flatten out in one spot just from one gig, so it is only a matter of time before it needs more repair.

In checking my own keyboard stand, my eyebolts began to hop off the threads right then.  It made me wonder:  if the threads in the stand are good and the threads on the bolt are good (and their sizes match), what is causing the bolt to deform when they are tightened?

I now believe that the root of the problem is a strong spring that fits in the joint of the keyboard stand.  When the bolt is tightened, the spring is putting too much force on the threads, causing them to flatten and eventually fail.

No springs for me, and even after tightening and loosing these bolts several times, the threads still look good.  Maybe this is the solution?  I'm less sure of this than ever.

Houston

Yacht Rock was hired for a particularly cool gig last weekend in Houston, performing revival-style for a corporate concert at Minute Maid Park in Houston (home of the Astros).  They built a stage over the third base dugout and we played facing the stands.  We backed Elliot Lurie (Looking Glass), Peter Beckett and Ronn Moss (Player), Matthew Wilder, and Eddie Money, and Ambrosia played their own short set as the opener.

I've never been to Houston before, but I've heard that the summers are pretty miserable.  The weather on this day couldn't have been more perfect.

The grounds crew spent much of our set up taking care of the field, which equated to water everywhere, including these puddles perilously close to the power supply.

Ambrosia's soundcheck.  Every time they came to a spot that was originally a sax solo, I wanted to throw stuff.  Greg subbed on bass for them and NAILED IT!

So...a run down of the show:  Nights on Broadway, You Make My Dreams, no problem;  Dancing in the Moonlight and Brandy with Elliott, just fine;  Still the One and Africa, all good;  Kid's American and Break My Stride with Matthew, easy;  This Time I'm in it for Love, at a frantic tempo, but that's how they want it;  How Long in a different key and plenty of "I can't tell which guitar is supposed to be soloing right now";  Baby Come Back with more dramatic fermatas than ever;  Taking it to the Streets--the batteries died on my tenor microphone right when we started this tune, so I had to sit out the first verse to swap them with the alto batteries (which probably means it'll die again in another gig or two);  then the Eddie Money stuff.

Eddie changed endings and his song order at soundcheck, grilling us at the rehearsal.  At the gig, however, all the endings kind of went out the window.  He also sang more at soundcheck than he did at the gig (during the show, we played an entire chorus of Shakin' with only the background "woahs").  I tried to sing along to myself to keep my place in the song, because without the lead vocal, it would be easy to lose your place.

I'm not sure what the final order was, but I think it might have been Two Tickets to Paradise, Baby Hold on to Me, Shakin', and then Take Me Home Tonight ("Does anybody have room in their car for me?" was his joke).

We came off stage after that so they could shoot off fireworks, but the audience demanded an encore...but we don't know any more Eddie Money songs!  Eddie suggested we do a truncated version of Two Tickets, and we decided to go into Footloose to close out the evening.

Word never got to Monkey about the change, and he ended up playing the beginning of Footloose on the wrong guitar (tuned a half step down).  Then he flipped out and started cursing.  Once we got off stage, Nick dragged him into the dressing room and laid into him for screaming obscenities into a microphone.  Yikes!  Fortunately, Kip had muted Monkey's vocal as soon as he realized that he was probably going to go berserk.

Anyway, the fireworks went on for at least ten to fifteen minutes, giving us plenty of time for a long gig post mortem.

We brought a lot of gear to this one (quite a bit of Kip and Zach's PA).  Pete made sure the pack was correct.

The next day, we flew home.  I bought the only banana in Houston (Bush) Airport for $1.41.