Yesterday was great and awful and too hot and too cold and a LOT of fun and a lot of waiting and a lot of… extremes.
We played two festivals back to back – one down the street in Ellicott City and then one in the city celebrating the fifth anniversary of Monument City Brewing in Baltimore. It involved a lot more organization than usual and probably involved a lot more organization than needed but I got the band over to the house at 10am so we could load the whole of everyone and their gear plus Sharif’s whole family (surprise!) into the two cars we were allowed to have for parking at Monument City. Set lists were written, extra gear was packed, backup tech sheets were printed… and I guess all that organization paid off. We got longer-than-advertised soundchecks, we used none of the back up gear, AND we had a great time.
10am saw us doing the usual : loading and cross-loading and shooting the shit, but trying NOT to use the word “shit” because Sharif’s children were in attendance. Once we were done waiting for the habitually late cohorts, we were out the door and down the road to Ellicott City where we got to snuggle the vans right up to the stage, load-in casually and start soundchecking at which point a number of things promptly went wrong.
Random thought : please don’t tell me how many years you’ve been doing this. Show me how those years have paid off by creating exquisite sound in a swift and organized fashion!
Well – as you may guess that’s not SUCH a random thought. I’d been pleasantly surprised that the sound person for the Ellicott City SpringFest had been in pretty regular contact since Wednesday (first to bug me for a tech sheet and then to apologize for not seeing my tech sheet from last week). We’d chatted about gear needs, extra monitor requirements, the fact that a couple of his DIs were MIA so needed me to bring extras, the fact that he FOUND the DIs so we didn’t need to bring extras … In general I worry about non-folk festivals dealing with us because they’re used to rock band after rock band after rock band and sort of always seem surprised when you don’t bring amps – so I was really glad to have the communication.
We showed up. They were surprised we didn’t have amps.
Anywho – we got up on stage and in position fully an hour early and slowly worked through line checks. Amusingly after every other line someone would come up and say “so, since we’re running early, you want to just start in five minutes?” And I’d have to say “but I still need an XLR for that cajon and this vocal still isn’t working and we’ve lost the cello”. I appreciated the OPTIMISM if not the attention to detail.
Anywho, we reached a “good enough” point about 20 minutes in, at which point my pedal board failed. A LOT of lines seemed to fail and generally the sound person quickly decided to change up how he was dealing with our acoustic instruments – but my pedal board , was alllllll problematic – and allllll me. I eventually pulled everything out and went direct into my DI sans any other bells and whistles (or more accurately wah pedals or tuners) and we kicked off about five minutes early, launching the whole festival with a feisty song – Glom of Nit. [today I pulled the board apart and found a crappy connector that was causing the problem]
Sound was… imperfect… but within the boundaries of Acoustic Band at a Rock Festival Sound (e.g. we could hear one another just enough to make sure we were mostly playing together, there wasn’t TOO much feedback and afterwards heard that the “sound was amazing!!!”), but monitor levels kept creeping (Joey was wincing by the end of Kashmir) and shifting. We had a couple of missteps that I think CAN be fairly blamed on the difficult sound, and 45 minutes later we were getting off the stage and out of the way for the next band, off to the next festival.
Now : I’ve been doing this for a long time. Long enough that I recognize certain “types” of sound engineers and kind accept that “good enough” is where we’re going to land for a lot of things. Being told “I’ve been doing this for 40 years” + “I’m a drummer too” and hearing a huge amount of hiss pouring out of a monitor speaker tells me ALL I need to know about a man’s hearing and I often try to split the difference betwixt what I’d like and what I expect is possible with the materials (and personnel) on hand.
And I kind of point to ilyAIMY as being complicated and sort of blame myself for not simplifying in some way for events like this, knowing that we can be hard to mix and we’re DEFINITELY unconventional and I wasn’t really blaming the sound crew for our difficulties…
Until we got to festival number two.
I was nervous about Monument City because I had NOT heard anything from the engineer. I didn’t have ANY details really, but rolling up to THIS stage it was immediately clear that we were at a whole other level of production value. Beyond that, the sound engineers had run down our tech sheet in advance, enough to ask intelligent questions, but rather than refer to it, they just asked me to walk through the stage, point and explain and we were running lines sans confusion within five minutes. They were quick, orderly, none of the hissing or sputtering that we’d been getting from the previous stage. No confusion over lines. No snide remarks.
No (another completely random example here) handing me a TRS cable, me asking “did you mean to hand me a TRS cable?” and getting a blank look in response…
We even had enough time for me to do a rough repair of my pedal board, testing it through the monitors, and wiring things back up. Everything exuded competence and sonic fidelity.
And it sounded great!
Shame about the generator.
Heading out of the second chorus of our opening song the entire stage goes dead. We jam for another minute or so (because playing through a short power outage and coming back in as the sound kicks in still jamming makes you HEROES) but eventually we cut it all off as it becomes clear that the generator has suffered a catastrophic mechanical failure and the venue was going to have to get another one in.
Holy crap. I’m disappointed for sure, but it’s a beautiful day and…
Well, there’s a couple of different ways to deal with stuff like this. I must admit generally I’m in situations where half-assed grumpy apologies are REALLY just ways to shift blame, and I guess there IS something to be said for the fact that the venue had hired a production company, and the production company had hired a generator – and so all the people onsite were genuinely blameless – but the attitude of everyone was easy-going, focused on solving the problem, and then calm and cool and graceful.
Caleb Stine eventually whipped out his guitar and fiddle and we slowly gathered round and just jammed for an hour or so, rounding out the session with a rousing chorus of “when the gennie comes marching in!!!” as a big white truck rolled through the crowd towing another 200amp generator bigger than my car.
Lines swapped, generator plugged in, power SURGED to the stage and we swung back into action with 20 minutes or so left of our original hour and a half set. However – with some swift negotiation with the next acts plus some real generosity from the headliner (Kelly Bell) we were told we’d have 45 minutes as we hit the stage, which blossomed into a full hour by the end of the second song. Rather than pay attention to the set list, I just kicked off with New American, told Rowan “Charm and Strange” was next and then went down the line and told Heather to pick the next tune. We round-robined through the hour and had a great time as the sun set and the crowd surged and all was right with the world.
The blues band after us was solid, great playing, the food trucks provided spectacular ingestibles (oh my – rattlesnake and rabbit sausage? yes please – just to say I did!) and then Kelly Bell took the stage and I finally understood what the buzz was all about.
He – and his band – truly are incredible. Alas, they only played one real METAL tune which was just enough to whet my appetite for more of a genre that apparently they only casually touch. Eventually the night was just too cold and we retreated back home, ha, about 3 hours past when we’d expected to leave – but it was an amazing day. Full of ups and downs.
An intense day.
I’d have it no other way.