It’s the last slow day, the last quiet night. For a while at least. And that’s a good thing. I’ve gotten slack and slow and I can’t wait to swing my guitar back into feisty action. Last weekend was such a fantastic double night of shows that I’m definitely trying not to expect TOO much out of THIS weekend’s triumvirate – but I’m looking forward to it nonetheless.
It’s gotta be better than the week’s been.
Another friend’s brother died. It seems like every extroverted artist kid has a sibling that’s introverted and doesn’t know how to handle their depression. And another friend had a stroke. I don’t have a lot of news on that, though it sounds like Joel Pomerantz – of bowling and Electric Maid fame – is at least responsive again after having been flown to Baltimore.
So there’s hope. With the weekend there’s a little glow. And no matter how bad MY week was, plenty of people have had it way worse. I’m mostly just sad for others, exhausted by the relentless heat (that’s now relented) and disappointed in my performance from this Wednesday’s Lair show – mostly simply because of the heat and sadness for others.
I guess music doesn’t ALWAYS soothe me. Especially when the air closes in, making it hard to move. Sticking to my guitar, slick with sweat – my Living room was far more comfortable than our show on Saturday night – but without the audience to feed on, the excitement of the lights and buzz of the crowd – I just couldn’t keep my energy up. Failed some people Wednesday night, not least of all myself.
I don’t remember the last time I came away from such a bad day feeling good. I GUESS all the “bad” stuff really happened at one remove, even though it made me sweat plenty. The morning was eaten screaming alive by tech issues – that weren’t effecting ME – just a client – that I couldn’t actually fix, that were totally someone else’s fault AND responsibility to fix. The show had a massive clusterfuck caused by a lack of preparedness by our sound engineer, but also fixed by the massive preparedness of our sound engineer. A friend who would have normally attended that show was away dealing with the death of her mother. Another friend’s kid was in a car accident (everyone’s okay). The cat’s terrified of fireworks, we have mysterious data useage and our data plans are becoming problematic, the world is on fire…. but man, the weather’s beautiful and I personally feel great.
I didn’t feel so hot yesteday morning.
I’ve been in the process of moving a client over to Bandzoogle – because it’d be a LOT cheaper than what they’re doing, and I don’t want to do web development / redevelopment anymore – AND BZ would be something I’d be able to pass along to others sans the absolutely massively embarrassing learning curve that’d be involved if I had to handover the THING I’d been kluging and rebuilding over the past many years…
And we had a “surprise – we’ve got to go Live NOW” with the site this week and I’ve been spending a lot of time getting it up and running… we sold tickets for about 12 hours and then between 10 and 11am yesterday morning suddenly the site went from my pleasantly arranged (if generic) Bandzoogle site to a “this domain is expired” splash page which – in addition to being highly embarrassing – was just NOT POSSIBLE.
So – I got on chat with the domain host… which promptly got me nowhere… and then promptly got on the phone with the domain host. This got me nowhere, but took me more time as they, rather than look at my problem, got tied up in wanting to call the client (who’s hired me because they’d be useless at this stuff) and who wasn’t LISTENING to me! Fortunately, while I was on hold with them a third time I spotted that ALL of Bandzoogle was down with the same message (I paged through a couple of friends’ sites who I knew were hosted there and they all had the same problem too) and when the woman finally got back around to me I apologized and explained that the problem was with another party. I guess I could’ve hung up on her, but I wanted to say “sorry” cause I’d been getting pretty pissed off…
Well, I jury-rigged some forwarders on the backend and then just kept watching Bandzoogle for resolution… not a LOT of fun, but again – a circus whose monkeys I was neither accountable nor responsible for.
Then it was off to Bethesda for a show at their “Streetery”. This was just… so good. This year THEY were providing sound so all we had to do was show up and plug in, the day was beautiful, we were next door to a Dunkin Donuts so I got their last chocolate donut, I mean – everything was so perfect except how the sound guy kept plugging and unplugging things and was beginning to visibly sweat.
I went and checked in.
The board wasn’t working.
Like… the BOARD wasn’t working.
And it was one of the very, very few times when I hadn’t just thrown my board in the car for shits and also giggles.
In post, it turns out that nothing was wrong with the board. He’d just brought some new gear to try out on us and hadn’t learned all the ins-and-outs of the extended system. As I think about it further, I’m actually a little pissed about this because he was ACTUALLY trying this gear out in prep for a larger band that was playing there next week. But I’m mollified and somewhat chilled by the fact that he managed to jury-rig a “system” by using daisy-chained two input QSC speakers and splitters – a solution that I think most engineers would’ve simply been incapable of making work. We balanced levels with our volume knobs, and though he didn’t have enough channels to run the cajon through the mains – surprisingly – running the cajon’s SM57 through the subwoofers worked quite well.
It wasn’t perfect. Heather, with her lower-gain guitar, definitely took the brunt of the technical issues. But if you didn’t know what was going on, it must’ve come across okay.
Afterwards we listened to Sean Chyun at the bar across the street and had a leisurely dinner. Friendly people. Great dinner. A suspicious cop asking me “Pray tell how in the WORLD did THIS happen” as I moved the barriers to let our car out. I explained we were the band. He ruminated and then said “that would explain it” and moved on.
It explained it. We moved on. thunk