Austin Powers

Yacht Rock made a quick trip to Austin, TX this past weekend for two shows, one private and one public.  I like Austin a lot, and I think we'll try and make it a regular stop on our schedule (if we can find the right room).

Friday:  insanely early flight.  Our carpool to the airport left midtown at 6:50 AM.  Ugh.  Worse still, I failed to sleep at all on the flight.  Maybe I'm dying--I always sleep on the plane.  I watched a movie instead.

First stop:  our hotel rooms, where Mark Cobb and I discovered that we had those sleep-number beds you always see on TV (but never in person).  100 is hard, 0 is soft.  Cobb's didn't work at first, and mine would change radically...and then we realized that he had the remote for my bed, and I had his.

Lunch stop in Austin:

I don't remember how you say "shrimp kebab" in Spanish, but that's what this was.  Very good.  This is the kind of Mexican/Turkish delight that The Great Bencuya would enjoy.

Our stage set up for gig number one in Austin.  The Van Halen Hot for Teacher backdrop (for Mom:  https://youtu.be/6M4_Ommfvv0?t=3m9s)

Lots of down time before this one got going.  Here's Zach playing with his new computer.  Somebody ripped off his laptop and iPad (and Kip's laptop and iPads) while the van was making a pit stop in between Chicago and Austin.  Boooooo.

Here's our pre-gig meal (not pictured:  salad, giant cookies).  Woo!  The picture does it justice.

Pretty happening for a corporate gig.  The dance floor was full pretty early, and stayed that way consistently until the end of our set.

Post gig, we returned to our sleep number beds, only to find that the damn TV wouldn't work, so we called the hotel's repairman at 1 in the morning to come check it out.

At first he thought it was the cable box.

Later on in the troubleshooting process, he figured out that the HTMI jack on the back of the TV was dead, so he left with our broken TV.

And a great sadness fell across the land.

Minutes later, he returned with a TV from an empty room!  Triumph!

Quite a tummy.

And the whole time, I was doing this.

Saturday:  our public gig on this two night stand in Austin.  Very snazzy gig poster!

I had some of that anti-Christian coffee from Starbucks.  Whatever...

Austin has a really cool trail system along both banks of the Colorado River.  I did the 10 mile loop.

Stevie Ray Vaughan statue on the opposite bank from our hotel.  No statues of Double Trouble.

At 1 PM, we checked out of the sleep number hotel and moved across town (over by the airport) to a different hotel.  Late check out and early check in equals much time laying on our backs watching TV.

I had lunch at a Subway.  There will be no pictures of my footlong.

Around 4 PM, we made our way to the venue to set up.  Much to our dismay, the stage was extremely small, and the lighting guy set up four lighting trusses against the back wall, making the space even more tight.  Everybody found a place to stand, but was invisible to the crowd due to a stack of speakers directly in front of me, and Pete stood a couple of feet back from his usual spot so as to avoid being hit in the face with the headstock of Monkeyboy's guitar.

Pre-gig meal: a cup of chili, and then tacos.

The Great Bencuya had a sandwich and fries. Very satisfying.

Tight stage and no real green room, but we made the best of it, and I thought the crowd was great!  Around 200 people, I heard.  The sound was naturally great--Kip and Zach nailed it again.  Good gig!

Look at all of this delicious pineapple that was thrown away.  A great sadness fell over the land.  WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, TEXAS!?  I COULD HAVE EATEN THIS!

...and then we packed up the trailer and left.  Once we'd finished, a DJ took over, and the music was so loud and obnoxious (and kept enough people in the only space where we could've packed up) that we pulled stuff off the stage and put it in cases out in the parking lot.

Yay Austin!  I'd love to find a way to come here more often.  Hopefully now that we've proven we can draw some kind of crowd, we'll be able to get into a room with a proper stage and dressing room.

Sunday:  slept like a dead guy on the plane.  I was home for about forty-five minutes before it was time to leave for double church gig duty.

In other news, it took ten days, five phone calls, and four unanswered voicemails, but that stinky hotel in Columbus, IN finally mailed my hat, belt, socks, and shades back to me.  I guess I should be thankful that they didn't ask me to pay the postage.  A few years ago in L.A., I left some things in a drawer in our hotel and it cost me forty bucks to get it back.


The final few shows of the year:

Thanksgiving Eve...sold out...never mind.

Brunch gig at Venkman's.  Hopefully we'll play this gig before the details change again.

The Vogue Theatre in Indianapolis.

A few Christmas shows at Venkman's.

There's also a New Year's Eve gig at the Park Tavern, but the poster is not...uh...ready.  I think the one that's out right now is kind of a rough draft.  I hope.

Dave and Dave Reunion

David Ellington and I played at Venkman's in Atlanta Sunday night.  Back together again after Dave's multiple trips out of town.

I had the burger.

Here's the audio:

As is often the case, my perception of how I (and we) played was much different from what I'm listening to as I sit here tonight.  Other than my multiple mistakes on The Serpent's Charm, things feel and sound pretty good, and I don't sound as hesitant and muddled as things seemed in my head at the time.

Check this out!  A local artist (you can see his other stuff here) drew this on the menu while he was listening to us.  Wow!

Up to Chicago

Yacht Rock had our final run of the year up to Chicago, with stops in Nashville and Columbus, IN along the way.  We had some really nice weather and good crowds at every stop!

Thursday:  first stop, Nashville.  The trip began with a quick "acoustic" show at an elementary school.  This was a freebee promo thing we did for a fan who teaches at the school.  Since we were late (no big surprise there), we forewent changing into our stage clothes and did this one in our street clothes.  Three songs, and we were done...and then the autographing began!  The large number of random pieces of paper I signed was way out of proportion to the way I played.

From there, on to the Mercy Lounge!

Back at our usual spot.  Not the greatest load in--there's a long ramp to the front door, and then either a flight of stairs or a passenger elevator--but the room has a pretty good vibe (especially compared to its larger downstairs neighbor, the Cannery Ballroom).  This was our first time using in ear monitors here, and the difference was huge, because unfortunately, this stage tends to get uncomfortably loud.  With in ears, it was just about perfect.

Great crowd, particularly for a Thursday.  370 in a room that holds 500 is just fine.  500 people in there starts to get sweaty and claustrophobic.  I remember thinking late in the first set that we were already playing like we were two or three days into a run--no rust even though we hadn't played together in almost a week.  The Mercy tends to bring a little bit of extra aggression to our performances there.  I dig it.

We probably would have sold it out if the venue hadn't used a picture of the Yacht Rock Schooner in the promo.  Nice try.

Dinner was a pulled pork sandwich from Peg Leg Porker, our newest find in Nashville.  I'm a fan.

Friday:  we got up at a reasonable hour and headed north to Columbus, Indiana for a private event--a fundraiser for the regional hospital.

The corn has been harvested, and this is what the midwest looks like right now...

...and then Peter got involved.

Easy gig!  Pete and Nick are both Columbus natives and apparently local celebrities.

The next morning I got up and went for a run.  Great weather.

Behold my room key.  For this location, perhaps it should say GET IT TOGETHER.  The rooms at this location we old, run down, and smelled terrible (a combination of dampness and chlorine from the indoor pool right outside my door and the still-lingering stench of cigarette smoke before this room became a "non smoking room").  On top of all that, a fly shared the room with me and bothered me the entire time that I was awake.

We had to check out by 1 PM, but we weren't due in Chicago until pretty late (the venue had a private event until 8 PM), so we headed to lunch.  First, however, was a stop at Walmart for supplies.

This is not a supply;  it's a picture frame.  I didn't buy it.  I hope she doesn't let him play his horn without his own mouthpiece and reed.  Totally unsanitary.

Greg Lee did a little shopping.  He was hoping to purchase a drone, but there were unfortunately none to be had.

He did not, however, come out empty handed!  His suitcase handle bit the dust, so he bought a new one.

The swap of clothes from the old bag to the new.

For whatever reason, I decided to Periscope this (for my mom and others who don't know what I'm talking about:  Periscope is an app that streams video live from my phone.  As I'm shooting video, people can sign in and watch it).

Anyway, Zach had a great time trying to destroy the suitcase.

Lunch was at Yat's (New Orleans food).  I love the original location on the north side of Indy.  This location was decent.  Points deducted because 1.  The dude behind the counter obviously did not want us to be there and was extremely reluctant to wait on us;  2.  Boiled/instant rice.  It hurts my soul.  Shame on you.

That being said, I had two orders of this, which they are saying is gumbo, though I'd never seen gumbo that was this color.  Whatever.  I wish they had regular sized spoons, too.  It would've helped mix up the "gumbo" and "rice."  As it was, all the "rice" was on the bottom.

We took a short walk around downtown Columbus.

This was a nifty indoor playground.  Cool.

 Finally, we gathered everybody at the van and headed up to Chicago.  More from Pete, this time interrupting my chance to photograph the northern Indiana wind farm.

Here's one unobstructed picture.  It's fuzzy enough that it looks like a painting.

So...we ate at the Whole Foods around the corner from the club.  One of our better food choices on this trip (I had Wendy's two days in a row).

Good gig!  We had to deal with what turned out to be a dead instrument cable in my keyboards during soundcheck, and I noticed when getting dressed that I'd left my white hat, white belt, and sunglasses in that dreadful hotel in Columbus, but the show was pretty smooth.  We played a little bit over ninety minutes, finishing with an encore of Born to Run.  The crowd was really good and energized, except for the asshole who was mad that his wife kept staring all dreamy-eyed at Pete and thus stood up against the stage with his back to us, trying in vain to win her back.  Eventually, he moved back--not a moment too soon.  Mentally, I'd already punted his head across the room seven or eight times, and I was lining up to try it for real.

photo cred:  Sagar Chowdhury

 Look!  Origami!  Nope--old set lists that fell out of the back of Monkey's guitar amp.

Sunday:  we slept for a few hours before heading to O'Hare for a really early flight home.  I was asleep before they closed the door and didn't wake up until we were on approach to Atlanta.

Pete and I waited outside for a ride back to get our cars.  Evidently some dipshit pulled up in front of the airport, ran inside, and didn't come back for a half hour or so.  The cops didn't like that very much.  I guess we were far enough away to not be in any danger.

Duo Duos

The Dave and Dave Duo was scheduled to play brunch and evening performances at Venkman's this past Sunday, but Ellington realized after I'd already confirmed the date that he would be out of town.  No big deal.

Matt Kaminski covered the brunch gig.  Dave and I have been playing this batch of tunes for a couple of years now, so it was pretty cool to hear another organist's approach to tunes with which I was very familiar.  Pretty cool--Matt's got his own thing, his own vocabulary, sounds, and approach.  I dug it!  Sometimes I wanted to stop playing and just watch to see how he was doing things I'd never heard before.

photo cred:  Matt

I recorded both sets.  You can check them out here:




In between brunch and the evening, there was just enough time to kill that I considered going home.  To do what?  I guess I could've gone and sat on the couch for an hour, but I stayed and broke in some new reeds and got ready for my next partner.  This may or may not have been my best move--my embouchure was pretty tired by the time we stepped on stage.

Matt had a evening gig with his group at Churchill Grounds (and I don't know of another jazz organist in Atlanta), so I reached out to my old friend Tyrone Jackson to come and play.  He doesn't own an organ (yet!), but he brought his 88 key custom Fender rhodes out.  Sweet.  It sounds as good as it looks.

I joked with him that this is his "beater" rhodes because he has a restored 73 suitcase at his house as well!

Tyrone is an incredible player, and it took all the brain power and ears I could muster just to keep up with him.  I chose songs that we'd played quite a bit when we used to do a lot of trio gigs--some of mine, some that I thought would work well as duets.

It was also wonderful to catch up with an old friend with whom I've been sharing the stage off and on for probably fifteen years.  I hope we can do it again soon!

Here's the two sets we played:

Makin' Bacon

Ahh--the bacon gig!  Yacht Rock has a standing yearly gig over by Druid Hills Country Club in Atlanta, and this was probably our sixth year in a row doing it.  In the early years, the gig was in early December (same night as the SEC Championship), but it comes earlier on the calendar these days--good for me, because we were so cold in the tent that first year, my EWI froze up and stopped working.

best costume prizes

The highlight of this gig (other than the outstanding costumes and the extremely cool hosts) is the candied bacon.  My bacon consumption was at an all time low this year (4 pieces!), probably down because of my guilt about how much Halloween candy I've eaten.  Greg thought that maybe the bacon wasn't as good this year.  I say "Who Cares!  It's bacon!  Eat it!"  He may have been joking.  Hard to tell from this picture.

Anyway, the gig was cool.  I do like an easy night of work.

Our illustrious sound crew of Zach and Kip.  Not sure what's happening in this picture.  Kip is either snorting a daisy or offering it up to a console.  Whatever it takes to make the gig sound great.