cat. But a neighbourhood cat that comes and visits? That counts as a win!
October 16th, 2017 at Teavolve had Silver Strings, MD in the house. Though they have one additional member who’s a lot younger, the guys who showed up tonight are all about 20 years my senior and still rocking. I Love watching them as inspiration – as reminder that I don’t have to hang it up any time soon. Great performance, wonderful night… plus I got some more work out of it!
Sitting in traffic on I-66 – a long, very straight 35mph road clogged with SUVs and food trucks at 3 in the afternoon. We’re creeping at 10 miles an hour passing low-speed accident after low-speed accident and my cynicism is sure that every single one is caused by cellphone stupidity. I see it as the reason why driverless cars can’t come fast enough, Heather sees it as why Armageddon can’t come fast enough. We’ll agree to disagree.
October 22nd, 2017 in Gaithersburg, MD the day after our wedding we held a post-Nups PLOJ!
So – the PLOJ had been planned because Kristen had initially been adamantly AGAINST us playing our own wedding. I felt that music is a really important part of our relationship and our Lives and that I really needed it to be part of the party – she didn’t want a pot luck wedding so I took ANOTHER srtep backwards and we had two separate events – effectively the wedding for her and the PLOJ for me. Nothing went according to plan. After the wedding band we’d hired dropped out a couple of weeks ahead of the ceremony, we asked all the musicians that were attending if THEY’D play instead – and then we jumped on the bill as well. Lulu’s Fate, Tinsmith, Mosno Al-Moseeki, ilyAIMY – I mean we had at LEAST four bands already in the house! And that really meant that my LIFE was finally fully integrated on the day-of! But we still had the PLOJ scheduled. As we were werapping up and cleaning up at Saint Mark’s on the 21st, I was beginning to DREAD the jam the next day because all of its purposes had been fulfilled already, and now it was a vestigial event – especially since all the family members who I wanted to share this part of my Life with were going to go do other things instead : on Kristen’s side (barring her mom) they got a headstart on the drive home and on my side they had another all-family party to get over the fact that I’d been so judicious in handing our invites to the wedding. Now – just as the wedding did – it all turned out for the best: we had a bunch of friends come that we couldn’t invite to the ceremony itself AND we had a great time AND we got rid of a lot of the extra food and drink from the wedding! Bang! Great party. Now – if I’d had it all to do again though… the math that we had an extra party to accomodate the music that ended up happening at the wedding and we couldn’t invite a lot of people to the wedding because we didn’t have enough food to feed them and yet had to have a whole other party to get rid of the extra food… well… logistics are dumb.
Police officers seem to creep from one accident to the next, filling out reports and probably asking the same questions over and over again, as we exit the DC metro area plunging further into rural Virginia the grey of the weather gets more and more oppressive, and the breakaway moments when cars can make up some time get more and more aggressive. Suddenly we hit the gas and we’re doing 60, like escape velocity’s finally within our reach.
Heather and Kristen and I plunge southwest towards Charlottesville, VA for our first post-Nups little music run. Crossing state lines to go play someone else’s nups. As the weather shapes up grey and freezing for Saturday’s ceremony with an old friend and fan in Gastonia, NC I tell myself we shouldn’t rub it in that our own wedding took place under beautiful sunshiney skies and mid-seventy degree weather on the same date that they’d ORIGINALLY scheduled for their wedding.
It’s been an exciting couple of months. Takoma Park Folk Festival, my wedding… opportunities and chaos.
I’m not sure how much detail I want to go into because though some interesting things are coming to pass I haven’t seen it all actually FUNCTION yet… but after getting his hands on Cicada a local studio owner and engineer contacted me, impressed at my chops, and offered me some work though his recording studio. I’ve been out there for two learning sessions and have a LOT to learn, but my first hours assisting someone’s recording project are next week and I’m PRETTY sure I won’t come across as an idiot! If things go as planned, he’s thinking that my reputation in the community will draw some business, that I’ll be able to not just assist on his jobs but engineer my own as well – a vast upgrade from my basement studio digs… I’m eager to get to play with high end microphones and real microphone pre-amps. I’m spending my spare attention span reading manuals and leaning where familiar functions with alien names Live in Protools and grappling with learning the real nomenclature of a world in which up until now I’ve been almost entirely self-taught.
I’m not going to gripe, because it’s better to have too much than too little, but the next morning (October 23rd) we were back home and realizing we had a LOT of stuff to sort through – and so I made breakfast and piled some of it up and took a picture.The Monday after my wedding found me right back at Teavolve like nothing had ever happened. The week before almost ALL the regulars had put together a special set to celebrate my last open mic as an unmarried rob, and it was uber-flattering (though Dave Godbey had initially threatened a “roast” and I’d been worried about where THAT might go!) – but by October 23rd everything was back to normal plus or minus a particularly amazing featured artist – 5J Barrow from New York City (above). (above is 5J Barrow, not New York City).Chuck the Madd Ox shot a couple of really fun photo collages at the Teavolve Open Mic after my wedding. Lower left includes Joseph Desimone, a recent regular at the open mic.
Next to that, Greg Lukens, who mastered Cicada, was also impressed with working with me on the project and wants to embark on some “passing of knowledge”. He’s got a lot to say about having reached the stage of his career where he wants to make sure his knowledge and experience with audio engineering can be passed on to other people. I’m flattered to be invited to learn from someone who’s done such amazing things and who speaks so easily about sonic properties, giving them an almost sculptural existence… and next week I’ll return to his place and practice my non-visual metaphors while learning most-specifically about reverb in both the studio and Live settings.
With Greg I’m not sure how well his experience with the latter will overlap with mine, but if I ever end up running sound for Rush at an arena, it’ll be good to know what they’ve done in the past re: reverb.
I’m forty fucking two and I’ve got SO much to learn.
