Before we can go on another Wandering – we’ve got to spend some time with the CAT! This was TOTALLY a bald eagle. But I didn’t have my big lens hooked to my camera and… uhm.. yeah. You’ll just have to believe me. (somewhere on the highway in Connecticut)
So at around the same time as we were playing one of the best rock rooms we’ve ever laid foot in, playing with one of the best metal bands I know (yes White Rose Confession, STILL, after all these years!), a write up for NEXT Saturday’s show was busily proclaiming us one of the “best bands in contemporary folk”.
Sigh – labels, labels, labels. I really wish we could transport our audiences every once in a while – just to see what would happen. I’d Love to show Pesky J Nixon or the NERFA crew what it is that we did in the Cannery last night. And wouldn’t mind finding out what the Grey Curtain (the second band last night) or Super Bob would think of one of our coffeehouse sets. And above all of course, I just wish there was a venue out there that we could fill on a regular basis where we could be ourselves right across the spectrum.
Huh. I have no idea why this is a Connecticut thing, but beyond the welcome centre, we saw stones stacked like this in a couple of places in the area. Kristen’s mom’s cat, Luigi, kind of hates us. He managed to put up with us for our short stay, but he gave me a LOT of looks like this… this newspaper was sitting at Kristen’s mom’s place. I hadn’t realized how close she was to the Ovation factory. Though I knew Kaman was based out of Connecticut and that Kaman had designed and built Ovation – and though I knew Kaman had recently been bought by Fender – I hadn’t entirely made the connection that that meant Fender now owned Ovation. And so Fender has now done what they’ve done with many companies before – purchased it while swearing nothing’s going to change – and then cut costs, eliminated the lines and left a token sliver of the entity so they can claim they’ve just streamlined it. Farewell American-made Ovations – I’m sure the rest of the line’s not too far behind. Kristen’s mom knows us perhaps… too well?
The New Deal Café comes close. Teavolve’s right there too – but we still can’t get as crazy as we’d like there. We’ve got some language stipulations there that don’t get relaxedtill the end of the night. And we’re running our own sound, no lights – no real stage.
Last week’s show at the State Theatre and last NIGHT’S show at The Cannery really spoiled me. Big light shows, amazing sound – in the case of the Cannery last night, some of the best sound we’ve ever had. What REALLY impressed me was not just that Chris (our spectacular, snowy-maned soundguy) could make ilyAIMY sound pristine on stage, and not just that Chris could make White Rose sound amazing – but that he could do BOTH. Most venues can do the acoustic thing but don’t really know what to make of drumkits and amps – or vice versa. But have real trouble dealing with both over the course of one night.
Now any time I have that conversation with anyone someone will no doubt speak up and say something like “wellllll any PROFESSIONAL won’t have that problem” blah blah blah – we’ve worked with a LOT of people and PLENTY of professionals have that problem! Last night was simply one of the best sounding rooms I’ve ever been in, and I was chatting with Chris, that’s not just the room, and it’s not just the gear, and it’s not just the man behind the board – it’s a pretty magical combination of all of the above.
Stoughton House of Brews has a beautiful little corner stage. They offered a rocking chair – I politiely declined. It doesn’t LOOK like a place where we regularly BRING IT – but it was broughten. And I can’t rock while rocking. In Stooughton, MA. Laura Grill’s happy turtle. I shushed everyone so we could listen to him chomping on his watermelon! Dizzy the gigantic cat is guarding Heather, reinforcing the idea that after a long, long night – she does NOT wish to be disturbed!
If I was following everything correctly (and who knows, dear reader, you know how my muddled mind works), Chris cut his teeth on Motown bands and was telling me stories of running sound for The Blues Brothers (my mom would’ve LOVED this guy), he’s custom built the subwoofers in the room (yeah, those things up front that somehow without being TOO LOUD were still blasting me with puffs of air that quite literally) and was using a slowly accrued custom rig combining some really fabulous digital routing, analog effects, and everything in between. The speakers and a lot of the hardware came from a closed down House of Blues, and walking in and seeing all the QSCs on stage always makes me feel a little more comfortable, and then Chris was describing how the room was designed, pointing out all the subtly beautiful (or perhaps beautifully subtle, because you just have the IMPRESSION of being in a big box theatre) features that had apparently been designed by Boston’s sound engineer (yeah, THAT Boston)… no right angles in the room, no hard surfaces, sonically dead – add to that a high-end digital projection screen and pretty amazing lights and you’ve got a room that looks and sounds like nothing we’ve ever been in.
Movies and fractal designs and swooshes and lights being mostly-manually controlled by another guy in the sound booth – a tasteful volume level (I like things loud, but not as loud as I used to – and this really was a killer level of “I coooould use my earplugs, but I REALLY don’t need them) – a marvelous night in one of the most amazing rooms we’ve ever played. Unfortunately the area has a Reputation. We had lots of people who had really negative things to say about Southbridge, MA – I guess it’s pretty redneck and there was definitely the assumption that if we were playing in Southbridge we were playing a crappy dive bar. Nothing could be further from the truth – and I hope word about this place spreads. This is a real MUSIC venue – not just some place that happensto have music. I frankly really, really wish we had something that felt like this back home.
After ilyAIMY rocked the Cannery stage in Southbridge, MA it was The Grey Curtain’s turn. It was their fourth performance together, and they were pretty tight despite that! In addition – it was the guitarist’s fourth time on ANY stage ever – so they got extra points for that. And the singer had just gotten out of surgery. AND the band formed accidentally after the singer won a songwriting contest in which he hadn’t read the fine print – part of his winnings was a performance slot at a local event… so he put the band together on the fly in order to fulfill the performance requirement! The sounded great – and good times were had! White Rose Confession tearing the fucking roof off at the Cannery in Southbridge, MA. Still one of my favourite bands. Mike is an epic vocalist, Jay is a monster behind the drumkit and Ato is a master of tone, a classy Zakk Wylde – and then you add three-part vocal harmonies to balls-to-the-wall rock tunes and you’ve got a recipe for one of the best bands we know. At first I thought Mike was going to wipe his sweat off on our setlist and get Sharpie all over his forehead – but actually he was holding it up to introduce the fact that White Rose Confession was about to launch into rearview, the most bad-ass ilyAIMY cover yet known to man. (at the Cannery in Southbridge, MA). Heather sporting a White Rose Confession shirt joining them on stage for their tune “Creatures” – just as it appears on their album of the same name! Mike Lussier being an epic vocalist – and sporting an old ilyAIMY shirt to boot! Jay gives us a photobomb as Heather and Mike show off their sort-of-matching tattoos and sort of matching jackets and sort of matching t-shirts!
