Kelly Zullo doing the only thing you CAN do while waiting to be soundchecked… sleeping on the couch.
We have a Zullo. Kelly Zullo from Nashville, TN to be specific. We met her in Indianapolis about a year ago and then played another show with her the last time we were in Nashville and she came into town yesterday to play Laurelpalooza… and tonight though she’s fighting off a cold and miserable I admire her intensely.
Kelly and Gibson restringing her Gibson.
Traveling with herself and her Lovely dog, Gibson and making a huge soud with her guitar (a Gibson)… well, I THOUGHT I was over that whole “falling for a chick with a guitar” thing, but I could just stare at her hands forever.
Inside the warehouse-like interior of Sonar, getting ready for soundcheck from their absolutely beautiful stage. Places like this is what we SHOULD be playing and what we SHOULD be filling.
Monday night I was glad I got an opportunity to actually soundcheck with her guitar early in the day, otherwise I wouldn’t have known WHERE to put all her bass and she proceeded to blow the minds of all those watching – and then yesterday she and I hung out on the back porch of the Lloydholme, jamming our little hearts out. I introduced her to my Thunderchief and she was all like DAMN. (yeah, I wish – NO – that’s my baritone guitar) and we played Superstition and many a thing in B.
After showing that our guitar virtuosities complimented one another nicely, we loaded up my Saturn and headed into the city to play SONAR. I’d been SO looking forward to this show, I wanted to see Jimmie’s Chicken Shack again, maybe even hang out for a bit, but the danger of Perk’s collapse had me angling towards an early departure to get back and play what had the potential for being the last open mic at College Perk ever… so we showed up, sound-checked in the aircraft-hanger-sized main room of SONAR and eventually played to about 6 people. It sucked. We had maybe 15 in the room by the end of our set, but it quickly became apparent that things were NOT going according to plan… I hope it went a lot better later in the evening and that the Baltimore Sun doesn’t post any of the myriad photographs they took of us next to a caption like “and local failures, ilyAMEE (misspelled so as not to give them unwarranted advertisement) play to 6 people at the Baltimore Women’s Shelter Benefit…”
We didn’t get back to the house till 1 in the morning and me and Kelly and Gibson stayed up till the wee hours talking about music and women and reading childrens books and fending off Gibson’s drooly affections. Now I have to get up far too early to work at HMT but it’s been a very, very good weekend.
