March 7th, 2023. The Spark with Bobby Thompson.

A good night – levels were a bit wonky at the beginning of the night, but once we got into it I logged into David’s new (to us) board and got the levels a little LESS wonky.

A small list tonight. Juels Bland eventually popped in too.

T’was a slow night at the spark, till it t’weren’t. I feel like I say that a lot.

I wonder if the lighting and everything, for as great as it looks on camera and “film”, if it’s dangerous to our MOOD. Like, if it’s too relaxing. A guy came out and threatened that “playing to open mics is 513 on my list of stuff to do now that I’m retired, so I’m just checking it out tonight – hope to be back in two weeks!” Frank went on to say that he was a lot more LIVELY than what was at the open mic.

Fine by me, man. Fine. By. Me.

It was a beautiful night, but yeah – it’s a little slow and moody.

Dan Sheer. My mother wrote me “don’t you think that Dan’s version of Puff is more wonderful than the original? I hope he has it copyrighted. Do you think it could be part of your repertoire sometime?”. He’s written more of a post-script than an actual different VERSION – but yes – he took some of the horror-of-aging out of the end of the song, and makes Puff’s cycle of change seem more… a cycle… rather than a sad, inevitable plummet towards old age and irrevelance.

We do this every Tuesday. Signup before 7. I start at 7. 7112 Willow Ave. in Takoma Park, MD.

We’d finally determined that all of our troubles were caused by the old Yamaha board that’d been in play at the Spark, and Dave replaced that with his FIRST digital board, an old Mackie DL1608. It was my first hands-on experience with the board – and it probably would’ve been easy except people needed to keep coming up and talking to Dave. Eventually we worked out the quirks, and the bugs, and I even downloaded some software to allow me to remote in with my phone, like a REAL digital board, and got the show up and running quite nicely.

Dave and I still don’t always see eye-to-eye on sound, but I think we’re getting a little better about how we work as a team.