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.

The Noog

Chattanooga, of course!  Yacht Rock played our first club gig (our only other appearance being at the Riverbend Festival earlier in the year) at the Revelry Room, and sold it out!  Looks like we might be making it up to Tennessee a little more often.

Things didn't begin well, however.  The Revelry Room has only been open for four weeks, and by the looks of it, they're still trying to sort things out.  For example, we loaded in off a muddy street (with no ramp option so everything had to be carried up some stairs).  The stage was dirty, covered in glitter and dust.  A few of the guys found a broom and a shop vac and cleaned that up before we started setting up.  Not very rock and roll.

 The green room stuff on our rider also took a while to materialize, and when it did, the bananas we just a little too green.  In five or six days when these are ready, I'll be happy.  I'm guessing that whomever did the shopping for our requests isn't the fruit pro that I am.  Frickin' green bananas!  What the hell?  Maybe we should submit a paint chip with the correct color of yellow.

The room itself was very live--a medium sized concrete floor box.  Soundcheck sounded ok;  we knew it would change a lot when the people showed up.

Greg, Bencuya, Monkeyboy, and I ate at a place called Blue Orleans around the corner from the club. Excellent, excellent, excellent New Orleans food.  Also, the hostess was cute.

The gig...was pretty fantastic!  Five hundred people is more than I thought we'd see on a rainy night, but it was packed, and the crowd had great energy.  Super fun!  I met a couple of cool people who'd seen us at different places around the southeast.  The word is out.

I hope we play Chattanooga again, maybe at the sister club to this place, Track 29?  That looks like a much better room (just checking out photos on the internet).  Also, I want to eat at Blue Orleans again as soon as possible.

Trio

David Ellington, Kevin Smith, and I played a trio gig last night at the World Congress Center.  Weren't we just here a couple of weeks ago?

Some funny stuff (to me):

1.  The gig was for Roland, but Dave brought his Nord and a QSC powered speaker.

2.  The Roland people checked Dave's keyboard out to see if it was made by them, which is funny because a bright red Nord keyboard is one of the most easily identifiable instruments out there.  We guessed that maybe these people weren't from the music division.

3.  I was asked to bring a PA.  We got in the room, which was small enough that we probably didn't need a PA, only to find a production team of three in the back of the room and their PA (with small line arrays and a sub on either side of the stage) fanned out to cover the room.  I wonder why we wouldn't have just plugged into their system?

4.  We were given thirty minutes to set up while they flipped the room, but the client opened the doors twenty-five minutes early.  We started fifteen minutes earlier than the contract and played two hours straight (ugh).  At the end of our two hour contract, I went back and let the production guys know to kick on their music.  As I returned to the stage, the client said that we were supposed to play another fifteen minutes.  When I let her know that we'd started fifteen minutes early, she had no idea (but was cool with it, and turned out to be very appreciative of the music).

5.  We were set up on one wing of a wide stage, and one of the Roland dudes climbed onto the back of the stage and pushed me out of the way so that he could photobomb an official photo in front of center stage.  He thought he was really funny.

So...after all that...nice gig!   We played well, though I messed up a few times.

Thrillered

Yacht Rock finished our two night stand at Venkman's with an encore performance of Michael Jackson's Thriller.  Third time's the charm?  I think the few things that we might have sacrificed in terms of accuracy (I'm pretty sure I reverted back to older background vocal parts in a few spots) were made up by the relaxed feel of the set.  We may have been more precise at the Variety Playhouse show, but we had more fun at this one.

The second set was comprised of 80s tunes from our set list.  No big surprises.

For I Wish, Pete comes to my position and plays my keyboard, and I go up to his spot and play EWI.  As I moved up front, I checked my EWI and it worked fine.  However, once the song started, I had no sound in my in ears!  I went back to check my laptop, which registered that it was getting MIDI signal, but there was nothing in my ears, so after fiddling with it for a little bit, I switched to saxophone and finished out the song.

Upon returning to my keyboards for I Can't Go for That, I found that I also had no sound from my keyboards.  During the first verse, they finally came back on.  I guessed (and our monitor guy, Zach, confirmed) that Zach had muted my keyboard line when I came out front--something he does on Silly Love Songs when Nick is playing piano at my position--and forgotten that the EWI signal was coming down the same line.  Which means that my attempt to troubleshoot the EWI was coming through loud and clear to everybody else, including the audience.  Oops!  I think it might be better if I played sax on that one from now on.

Original Recipe

Yacht Rock celebrated our eighth year of existence by recreating our original set list.  Some of these we haven't played in eight years.  Preparing for this was a pretty hard grind--there were only a few that needed my attention, but at this point in the year, I'm so fried on trying to learn anything new that I am easily frustrated.

It'd be great if we kept all of these new old ones, not only because of the work it took to learn them, but also because they sound waaaaaaaaaay better than they did eight years ago.

Noteworthy:

Things We Do for Love is a new old one.  Difficult vocal harmonies, easy keyboard part.  Forgot multiple times to clap during the "Like walking in the rain" part.

Lonely Boy.  I wanted to sing this one.  Nick sang it instead.  He crashed and burned at the last verse.

Magic (Pilot).  Easy vocal part (for me), tricky keyboard part.

Heart Hotels.  I love the way this song builds and grooves, and it's got an EWI solo (Tom Scott on a Lyricon on the original, and-at least once live-Fogelberg activated some Michael Brecker!)



Damn.  That's some good shit (the solos).  We were trying to get on a Fogelberg tribute album a few years ago so we performed it with saxophone--closer to this version.  It's fun either way.

This is It.  Challenging vocally and instrumentally.  I like it, though, and if we could ever convince Kenny Loggins to hang out with us, I'd rather play this than the firkin' Danger Zone.

Sundown.  An easy one for me (tambourine), and a chance for Mark Cobb to come out front.  Nick on drums.

Kiss You All Over was played often during the first year of the band.  This song got a shout out on our Facebook page, but that probably won't be enough to keep it in the setlist.

Love is Alive.  Must be really hard to sing because we play the shit out of it and it always seems to go over well, but it never stays in the set list rotation.

We even brought back the wigs for this gig.  I remember now how hot and scratchy they are.

In other news, I replaced my purple sax effects pedal (the Digitech Vocal 300) with a Line 6 M9.  First gig with it sounded good!  It'll probably take several more gigs to dial it in, but I'm about 80% there just from playing with it at home.

Plus, it's got a looper...you know, a caddie, a looper...a jock...