Last night was a much needed boost. The ilyAIMY and Pesky J. Nixon show at Caffe Lena was sold out and beautiful, high energy, charismatic and fun. Saratoga Springs, rocked, check. The whole day was sunshiney and beautiful and today is following suit as we make our way BACK south to do a radio show in Montclair, NJ.
This whole run is made up of dates put together from NERFA connections and as such they’re not really on our tried and true beaten path. They are venues that we’d often have trouble booking on our own, but the Pesky ilyAIMY combo package hath proven irresistible and we built the tour out of that connection.
Pesky J. Nixon performing at Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, NY. By the latter half of the Caffe Lena show I noticed that Pesky J. Nixon was sporting some ilyPride on Jake’s squeezebox! Love the interplay! We even got Ethan and Jake to give whiskery man smooches! (long story)
Now comes the dead spot though. We do the radio show tonight in Montclair, NJ and then bum around Rhode Island and Connecticut for a hot minute. We’re just lining up open mics to re-cement and renew some connections, and maybe pick up some new venues in the area. I have high hopes for at least two of the CT venues that book music regularly. I want to check them out and see if they’d be a good match for us, and maybe be able to pick them up as a couple of other keystones in the region. We might even hook up with a couple of other friends in the area. It’s kind of fly-by-the-seat of our pants, but we got nowhere’s else to beeeee.
It’s interesting to play shows with PJN and as we get to know them better, I see how they’re seasoned in a totally different way from us. We’re road warriors, we make the best of difficult situations, we play bar gigs and make ends meet, we stay on couches all across the country and have slowly built a network that usually works and sometimes fails us in spectacular fashion. We’ve built a PA system that we Love, have a specific approach to a lot of different things, are anal about some, more relaxed about others…
PJN is used to the folk venue scene, they hug venue owners and have learned to trust venue sound guys (we’re often wary of them – mostly because we often encounter them in environments where acoustic guitars are rather alien and djembes quite literally unheard of). It’s a different type of swagger, different type of confidence. It would be fascinating to do the venues that we normally do with Pesky in tow – whether it be our stronghold at Teavolve or our local and Lovely New Deal Café, or our coffeehouse havens like Victoria Station or Coffee Amici or Saint Charles or our bar lynchpins like Columbus Bar, Dogfish Head or Stagger. I can’t imagine those shows… and yet I’m SO damned curious. It’d definitely be grittier. Sigh. If only touring was really practical with more people…
