“Damn, I needed that”.
It seemed to be a common theme through ALL of us last night. A deeply felt RELEASE as we played New Deal Café and just fell into ourselves. It was a surreally powerful night, not because of any insane connection or that feeling you get sometimes when you’re getting something off your chest – just the joy of playing effortlessly with friends FOR friends in a friendly venue.
This week’s been uniquely stressful in combining various aspects of Life in new and horrible ways as if experimenting with ways to DAMAGE my well-being. Allergies ramping, mortgage information requests piling in, HVAC confusion, extra hours at the Sandy Spring Museum stacked up against my own gigging in ways that mean I didn’t sleep through the middle of the week. The departure of Doug Peach from the museum meaning communication issues and angsts. Every time we felt like we had a handle on Life, the Universe or Anything on the trifecta would find some new and ingenious way of twisting the knife.
And so, yeah, I needed that.
New Deal Café’s shows are always a vast swath of emotions nowadays. I have tangled feelings about the venue, a history that now extends through more than half of my Life, and yet it is absoLUTEly a place where we’re almost always assured a “sell-out” crowd. Over the past QUARTER CENTURY in which I’ve played open mics, shows and showcases at the New Deal it’s the place where I met Rowan, was booked for some of my various First Gigs through Richard McMullin, romanced people both accessible and in-… it’s a venue that’s swung from being a learning experience in being well-taken-care-of, to infuriating changes in management that meant everything was broken and everything was in flux. I think that NOT being more involved with this venue, joining with its leadership in some way, whether I’m Greenbeltian or not, may be one of my few REAL disservices to my own community.
It’s been a place that’s shifted its food policy in ways that delighted me and then pissed me off. A place where the sound system was awesome, slowly fell apart, was replaced by a fundraiser that I personally put together… and then randomly was sold off in a move by something that sure felt like betrayal. And then replaced again by something that was NOT cheap that revolutionized my own understanding of modern mixers in the form of the QSC TM16, a board that then their own volunteers quickly showed spectacular ignorance of. They battled through COVID in admirable ways, have done battle with their local community in crappy ways, Heather and I have BOTH celebrated birthdays there and in the wide swath of venues, there’s no other place that contains SO MUCH baggage all in one building.
Heh. In other words there is no other place that feels so much like REAL LIFE.
We showed up really early yesterday, dodging traffic and getting in before the piano player rolled in. Being able to leisurely wire up the stage before the Big Gear (drums, percussion and keys) come in makes everything an AWFUL lot easier. And things were going beautifully according to plan as I finished front-stage setup JUST as Sharif and Joey and Rowan rolled in. We lined checked, sound checked, rang out the monitors and I was eating really good fried chicken when… one of the NDC sound engineers rolled in.
I was nonplussed.
So – for YEARS at this point, really since they moved to the TM16 platform and I’d encountered enough of their volunteer sound engineers who didn’t know the mixer nearly as well as I did, I’ve requested the Café NOT to schedule an engineer for nights with us. I can take care of it. It’s not perfect, and I think I’ll continue to hate their monitors forever, but I don’t suck at running sound from the stage, and we at least know what we’re getting. I was definitely cantankerous about having a sound engineer foisted on me and he did NOT take the hint that I HAD THIS ALL WORKED OUT and did NOT NEED HIM and THAT’S COOL YOU CAN GO HOME. He had a number of reasons why he wasn’t going to do that and when it came down to it, he’s “staff” (for as much as NDC has staff) and I’m not. I got really, really worried when, in looking at what I had laid out on the stage, he asked “what are the cajuns?”
Well, sloooowly over the course of the piano player’s set (where we get to just sit and eat and worry) he sort of won me over. He asked questions about why I had things routed and setup the way I did, intelligent questions, and when I answered those questions he was onboard. The show kicked off and I was worried, and maintained working on things in the monitors, leaving FOH to Scott, and I promptly broke a string.
That gave me a chance to listen to things from the front while I restrung and it seemed like things were going okay. I got back on stage and I spent the next couple of songs discombobulated. A tuning kerfuffle (I played the entirety of “everything hurts” with one string tuned two steps down) and a couple of EQ problems later and I feel like we finally hit our stride.
And then we got to really play with the OTHER huge variable, the one we’d PURPOSEFULLY introduced : John Peiffer on harmonica.
THIS was an absolute joy and probably went a long way towards taking ourselves out of ourselves and just PLAYING. His harmonica, soulful as appropriate, ferocious when called for, was the perfect addition and we had a great time with sitting in on about a third of the set – if not a third of the songs – as tunes stretched out to nearly double-length to maximize use of his wonderfulness.
I think about halfway through the second set, though I was aware of a pretty freakin chatty portion of the audience (a NDC standard for chatter was set when they installed the bar and it’s something I’ve come to at least not get entirely enraged over), I felt like things finally fell into place. The sound was solid, we could just PLAY and … it was amazing.
I thanked Scott, we squoze our friends, I tried not to think about COVID. Slow, relaxed breakdown.
Fantastic night that also gave me anger, sadness, joy and lusty thoughts… and as is so often the case, the New Deal Café IS Life in microcosm.
Heh. Plus we get paid.
We were home a little after midnight, the cat sasses us from over a shoulder, flopped over and demanded Love. We watched the Muppets and went to bed.
A good night indeed.
