IL/IN

Back on the road!

Friday: Chicago--one of our favorite places to be. This would be our second time playing the House of Blues in Chicago (the first was a strange but awesome one, filled with ticket-giveaway-recipients). This time was no fluke--we've done very well at Joe's on Weed Street and Joe's in Rosemont, and now we were moving up to a bigger, more awesome venue.

Load in is an alley under Dearborn Ave, right at the river. This dude's job (evidently) is to sit in a folding chair, facing the building. I'm not sure if the plan is for him to stop people from coming out, or going in.

The last time we played here, I was immediately awed by the size of the room. This time I walked in and said, "Oh, it's a House of Blues." It's about the same size as every other HoB we've played. Funny how times change.

In between soundcheck and the show, I went for a run around town. Chicago landmarks!

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot!

 

Daley Plaza (Blues Brothers, Ferris Bueller)

Chicago Board of Trade

(for Beth)

The Bean! Not in either movie, but I had to grab a picture when I went by

Anyway...the gig! The show was pretty good, in my estimation. Maybe we were a bit rusty because we hadn't played a show in a couple of weeks, and there was a technical problem when Greg's amp died in the middle of I Can't Go for That, but my in ears mix sounded good and I was genuinely excited to play a real gig in a real venue. I guess I just love Chicago. I don't think I played anything memorable, but I still had a good time. Hope we come back to twice as many people next time (940 in the room with us for this one).

Oh yeah, nothing memorable, except that I got the first chord of the first song wrong. That was stupid, but it got better after that.

photo by Kip Conner

Saturday: Movin' on! We played the Mallow Run Winery outside of Indianapolis for our Saturday gig. We did this same gig two years ago (you can read about it right here). The place was paaaaaaacked. Like, maybe a couple of thousand people? It's entirely possible.

The weather was great (high of maybe 80?), the audience was huge, and there was, of course, big love for those of us who graduated from Indiana U. No love for Monkeyboy, though, who was introduced as not from Indiana, loves the University of Kentucky, and is a huge Tom Brady fan!

Once again, nothing memorable was played, but I had an excellent time. My in ear mix was even better than the night before. This is the best week of gigs I've had in a while.

Goodnight Indiana--we'll be back in a few weeks!

Big Band

I got to play bari sax with the Atlanta Latin Jazz Orchestra last night at Cafe 290. Good stuff! This is my third time on the gig, so now I'm starting to get the hang of it.

I felt good about my preparation for the gig. It definitely helped that I'd worked at least half of the tunes up to performance speed for the previous gigs, but I still started slowly about a week ago, playing through everything and gradually revving them up to latin band tempi! It made me realize how much I like working through songs that way--I still love to practice.

Right Back to the Scene of the Crime

That's right, just as we get all of our stolen gear replaced and maybe things are sort of back to normal, it's time to go back to Kentucky!

Thursday: Flew to Lexington for a public gig. This set up is in the airport.

Pretty good crowd for a Thursday (just over 250)! This was my first show with my rebuilt rack for my EWI and wireless. It worked ok--my cable coming out of my mixer vastly underperformed, and it made everything sound kind of weak--even after having Zach boost it, my mix never quite settled into anything.

For some reason, my MIDI got the hiccups in the middle of the Africa solo and hung a note, so I had to stop and slap the space bar, which totally sucked. I'm not sure why that happened. Computers have bad days?

Anyway...Thursday gig in an old distillery warehouse in front of a couple of hundred people...whatever.

Friday: After the Lexington show, we drove the seventy-five miles to Louisville, arriving somewhere around 3 AM. People started waking up just before noon with thoughts of how to kill the day, since our gig this evening wouldn't begin until midnight (yuck). Most of the guys went to the movies. I wasn't really interested in that, so I went for a long run instead, followed by a giant veggie burrito.

The venue for this evening's show: the Belle of Louisville. There were shows going on up the river from us (on shore), and we were the nightcap show for the hardiest of partiers. Midnight show.

Small stage and a long room. Thank god this one had a crew to most of the dragging of gear off the trailer, up a flight of stairs, and down the length of this deck.

Another less-than-wonderful sounding room! It wasn't terrible, but we were crammed on to a tiny stage, so every microphone had lots of room bleed into it. Plus, the fatigue of the day and the condition of the attendees. Tough to find the excitement in this one.

Back to our hotel rooms after 3 AM, and then we had to bounce back up for an 8:30 lobby call.

Saturday: Fly day! We turned the van and trailer over to one of our crew guys to drive it home, and the nine of us headed to the airport Bencuya went on vacation, and the rest of us went to Orlando for a corporate gig.

A big ol' ballroom in a giant hotel. My backline (rental) gear was immaculate. Everything looked brand new!

The view from my balcony. Also, Florida is flat.

my room. Nice!

Dustin Cottrell joined us for this show on the main keyboard position. Excellent work!

This gig, thankfully, was crazy easy. We played from roughly 9 to 10:15 PM. The gear was great, and the room sounded wonderful--we were plenty spread out, and it was really dead. My mix was awesome. The people for whom we were playing were also very cool. What a relief.

That's me, and that's me. Photo cred: Pete.

In bed before midnight. Not asleep, but in bed.

However, not everything was great. The WIFI at the Marriott SUUUUUUCCCCCCCKKKKKKED. Get it together! This is a Marriott trend--we had the same bullshit in Savannah, where if you want internet that can handle anything more than text, you have to pay. For this, I hate you. I hope a sinkhole eats your parking lot.

Sunday: Flying home. A few of us were on the shuttle that left the hotel before 7 AM (ugh), which was a fortunate move because Kip and I encountered two of the biggest morons airport security has at work. The bag scanner person rejected approximately 50 percent of the bags, and the guy doing the follow up hand searches was equally inept.

I go through security with 2 saxophones, 1 EWI, and a backpack full of electronics. The backpack made it fine, but both saxophones were flagged for a search. In the first one, dude went looking for a 9 volt battery in my EWI (by the way, there's a 9 volt battery in my backpack that you didn't catch). There is no 9 volt battery in the EWI, however. When he told me what he was searching (in vain) for, I told him that there were 4 AA batteries in the EWI. "Same thing," he said. How so?

In the tenor gig bag, he went through my pouch with extra reeds, a mini screwdriver, chapstick, etc, and took out a pen knife. Keep it, Inspector Clouseau!

Kip's suitcase was pulled after scanning, rescanned, rescanned again, hand searched (looking for a needle, she said), and finally scanned one more time. No needle was ever found.

The other guys in the band made it through in five minutes on other lines. Kip and I lost today. Unbelievable.

Beatulz

The blog isn't dead...I just have no gigs...except for last night. We had a rare Please Pleaserock Me (Yacht Rock Revue plays the Beatles) gig at Venkman's, with a few subs--Ganesh on drums (filling in for Mark Cobb), Greg on bass (filling in for Pete), and local legend Tim Smith on second guitar and tambourine (filling in for Greg). Even the horn section was a little bit different--no Greg at all and Derrick White filling in for Richard Sherrington on trombone. Because of this (and maybe the fact that we haven't played a Beatles show since January's Variety Playhouse set), the set list was very straightforward.

There was nothing for the horns to do until the last ten songs of the night, beginning with Yellow Submarine. Here are the charts:

Unfortunately, we haven't played this song in several years, preceding the addition of iPads to our arsenal (and trombone to our horn section). So...in my preparation for this gig, I checked my iPad for a chart--no chart, no problem. I didn't give it a second thought. On the gig, however, we were called back from hiding in the green room to come play on this song, and right before the tune began, I remembered this little part, but none of us (especially Derrick) had a part to play, so...the little part came and went, and we had to stand there and take the kick in the nuts. It was...awkward...humiliating...not so great. How could two measures be so painful?

Then we skipped a couple of horn songs, I played another bullshit solo on Oh Darling! (complete with an "I meant to do that" tritone substitution on the second chord), and our night was over. At least the load out was quick (tenor, bari, one keyboard, so small percussion), and the horn hang during the first two thirds of the show was pleasant.

Moving on! Looks like I need to make a trombone part for Yellow Submarine (and not having a double bar before the second chorus on the alto part is really bugging me while I write this).

If you missed it, I spent some of the down time between gigs finally getting the rest of my transcription of Pete Christlieb's solos on FM onto the computer. The original handwritten transcription was lost (left on stage) in a massive wave of tequila in Cabo early on in Yacht Rock history, but I had a scan of it in a blog post.

In other news, we'll be in Kentucky this week, and maybe we'll get our gear back?

Manchester Music Hall (Thursday): https://www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/1467736?utm_medium=bks

Forecastle (Friday): https://www1.ticketmaster.com/event/16005299E37BD263#efeat4212

Aaaaaaand...this came out...ironically filmed at a show in Birmingham, Alabama.

North Carolina (x2) and Venkman's

A few more gigs this past weekend, wobbling along with some spare parts in place of our missing (stolen) gear.

Friday: Charlotte, NC. We've tried Charlotte a few times over the years, and it's been hit and miss. For the couple of successful gigs at the NC Music Factory outdoor loading dock gig  (including the one where the stage light caught fire), we've had a couple of rain outs and an ice storm. I didn't know what to expect for our show at the The Underground - Fillmore Charlotte.

Good news! We had a very successful show, and eight hundred people showed up (sellout is 830, so we just missed it!). Still--awesome news. Like Birmingham and Chattanooga, it's great that another close city (within a reasonable drive from Atlanta) has finally caught fire. I'm excited to see this.

pre-gig pizza party with The Great Bencuya

Saturday: Gig number two was a wedding reception in Asheville, and after late checkout, we had a rather pleasant van ride through the mountains. We were greeted with really nice weather and a easy load in.

beware of the giant chandelier!

We learned Rainbow Connection for the first dance. It took me a lot of practice in a short week to get the string part together.

This wedding was a very small event--I think there were maybe seventy-five guests, and once we started playing, people were in and out of the room the whole night, but maybe only about fifteen were dancing at any one time. The adjoining patio seemed to be more popular (and with the weather being so great, no one could blame them). The doors to outside were open, so I'm sure people we still enjoying the music, even if they weren't planted on the dance floor.

This one ended at 10 PM, and we were in our hotel rooms by midnight, which was very nice.

Sunday: We left Asheville at 9 AM, got back to Atlanta just after noon, divided gear, and went our separate ways, reconvening at 4 PM to set up for a Yacht Rock Unplugged gig at Venkman's. I think it went ok. I messed up five measures of Rainbow Connection, some of the Hey 19 (which I attempted on soprano sax), the big string solo thing in Sara Smile, the end of the sax solo on Only the Good Die Young, and some flute parts in Africa. Not my night, I guess. It was nice to play my nice flute and piccolo (as opposed to my "road" flute and picc that live with my Yacht Rock gear).