Today there was a lot of day in my day. Or maybe I’m sad and exhausted, but the weather was unsettled and I was unsettled and today was marked by highs and lows – and though I AM sad and exhausted, it doesn’t change the day.
Actually – I’ve got a beautiful variation of sad. I think it might be joy. But I don’t know that most people would recognize it. They don’t talk about it if they do.
Today we played at Red Shedman Brewing at Linganore Winery in Mount Airy, MD. It was the last gig we had scheduled for outdoors, and though we’ve got a couple of INdoors things still on the calendar, the outdoors gigs are beautifully guilt-free.
I mean, I GET that we’re all trying to find some new normal, but when you’re playing outdoors, you can pretend like we’ve all already found some level of equilibrium, even in the more rural stretches of Maryland. You can JUST worry about the weather, the sound, the playing, the drive and you can gather your friends to a show sans the greater concerns of COVID and mask-shaming and the bullshit that seems to pervade so much of our world.
So it sucked that even from a week out it looked like we were going to get rained out.
Red Shedman’s a low-impact gig though, and I’ve enjoyed playing them with Rowan or with Heather in the past – and tonight we were going to be a trio – all three of us and I was really excited to jam together. I was sad about the weather, but Jimmy Stewart happened to be the act ahead of me and the owners of Red Shedman have a VERY high threshold for canceling gigs – the artists are welcome to call it off – but even if there’s no-one there to listen you get the guarantee for showing up, and the stage is completely covered (and covered well) so there’s no risk to the gear.
We figured no matter what, unless the venue canceled, we’d come out and just play – to one another if that’s all it was – but we also tried to maintain some optimism about the weather, which looked to clear RIGHT as we were going to load in.
Whelp – getting my act together to leave early, the sun is shining and the air is warm – hard to believe we’re supposed to have thunderstorms storming in. I did a bunch of last minute prep, tearing down the gear that I’d used in last night’s webcast with Greg Klyma to pack it up and load it out. Checked my tires while I was at it and popped the hood to boot. I even took a couple of minutes to yank out the jack on my baritone and remount it since it’d been a little tetchy recently. Then all my productive-ready-to-GOness got stalled as I lost my keys, rummaged and rummaged, FOUND my keys, almost left, realized I didn’t have fingerpicks, pulled over, realized I DID have fingerpicks, got on the highway and IMMEDIATELY the skies turned black. Shortly onto 70 traffic slowed to a crawl to get around what appeared to be part of a house that’d been dropped right on one of the entry ramps so you had mutiple lanes converging on the spot at speed suddenly realizing “oh shit, that’s a carpet and a table and like … flooring? wtf” as you swerve to miss it.
In any case, the drive was beautiful. Unsettled and high and low, stop and go, bright and beautiful one moment, black and drizzling the next. Rolling into Linganore Winecellars I was impressed by just how many cars were packed into the fields around the winery, but the actual field where we play was practically abandoned. Jimmy was up on the covered stage playing to a couple of hardcore fans who had a tent set up, and there were a couple of other tents scattered around with carefully angled umbrellas blocking out the sideways rain, but pretty much it was just grey sky, grey mud, and… joy. We already knew the gig was going to be this way – we could listen to Jimmy in the meantime and holy crap the taco truck that I’ve never gotten to get food from is still here and… I Love dancing in the rain.
So fuck it.
We had hot poutine from one truck, we had chorizo street tacos from another – the food was hot, delicious, the air was cold, delicious, Jimmy’s tunes were beautiful and it wasn’t perfect but it was pretty damned close.
And then one of the owners came down and told Jimmy that he was moving us in-doors.
We pop our head inside and see a LOT of people all crammed inside the huge brewery space and – well – we’re not quite sure about this but I guess we’ll make it work. We can push out a ways to make room for Rowan when he pops in but – Heather text Rowan to let him know cause with his daughter being too young to be vaccinated he’s got to be a lot more careful than the rest of us and it’s about 3pm so he’s probably still got time to NOT leave… we broke down Jimmy’s sound system, and rather than set his back up for his last set, just to break it down and then set up ours for our set, we move the car and haul the ilyRig up the back stairs and into the crowded interior of Red Shedman.
At this point we’re a little rattled because we don’t REALLY want to be crammed in with this many people and it’s a bar setting and though the staff’s masked, no-one else is. We stay masked as we set everything up but I quickly relax into routine and there’s a lot of pride with how it takes Heather and me 15 minutes to set up the full sound system, wired and ready for us and Rowan plus a couple of leads set up for Jimmy… and that’s when two DISASTERS happen.
1) Rowan shows up. And he brought his wife and daughter. And there’s no way he’s sticking around. He’s apologetic and I’M apologetic and I’m mortified because he’s just driven almost an hour to be here but… yeah – there’s no way they can stay in this environment.
2) The Behringer doesn’t connect to my phone. I’m trying to apologize and express my mortification, but I’m already apologizing and mortified over the fact that the Behringer X18, which I’ve FINALLY learned to trust enough that here we are sans any real backup, isn’t connecting to its control app. And over the years I’ve seen this happen twice, but Rowan’s been running his for the last two years and never had an issue, and I’ve been running mine for the last month without and issue but holy shit it’s NOT connecting and … what do I do?!?!? The X18 has NO controls on it, it’s simply an interface box…
I eventually get it up and running just by refreshing, refreshing and standing very close to the antenna – my theory is that the bar had like 50+ people in it and that was 50+ cell phone all poking at my wifi and that we were just in a saturated environment. I got the mixer running long enough to get channnels for Jimmy up and running, get a rough EQ and level for the room and then… lost the connection. So, I spend the rest of Jimmy’s set trying to let his music soothe me as I’m refreshing, shutting off the wireless, restarting the access point, restarting my phone, trying different settings and eventually I’ve again got a connection for long enough that I can unmute all of the ilyAIMY channels so that even if I lose my connection again, all we have to do is shut off all the speakers, plug everything in, and then turn them back on again.
Easy… peasy?
From the outside it must’ve looked like I was furiously texting or something, but I swear I was focused on the show every second and with nothing else to do I relaxed into the night. We swapped over, got up and… and it was a great show. We had about a dozen people there specifically for US and… they would’ve been there outside too because one of the front tables was totally occupied by their dripping tents because they’d set up outside first. Hell or quite literally high water, they were there for us. I was so sad we didn’t have Rowan there with us, but Heather and I settled back into that mode where you play your hardest and overwhelm the room and that’s a WHOLE lot easier when all the front tables are clapping and singing along letting the rest of the room know that it was okay to enjoy the music…
It was a loud night. I spent a lot of the day cold and wet but the food was great and the people were warm and we hung out and loaded out and I chatted with the barstaff and … well… great gig but apparently the owners had decided that morning to move the music indoors, just … no-one told the musicians. That could’ve been a LOT smoother. Rowan could’ve NOT brought Ella. We could’ve done a couple of things differently if there’d been some damned communication. And also, as long as we’re outside you can have the illusion that lots of people are just there picnicking and the brewery itself isn’t making money hand over fist. Moving us indoors gave a very intense view of the number of people buying beer and pizza and whatever else they were serving. It hammered home that they’re just screwing the musicians with the obscenely low payout there. We did okay with tips (and certainly would’ve done worse outside), but I don’t think we’ll be returning unless the can budge on that price. Not because it wasn’t fun, satisfying, or whatever – but because you’ve got to draw a line some place.
And so I’m actually getting kinda angry on the load out, what-could-have-beens and feeling kind of shafted – but then… loading out through those back stairs again I pause. The back room is the actual brewey – a huge concrete loading dock of a space that’s separated by glass and a thin wall from the PARTY of the interior but it’s almost silent. And the smell is beautiful. Yeast and warmth and just a bit of the beer complexity, but it’s one of the most homey smells imaginable. And I’m back to being overwhelmed by the beauty of it all.
I drive home in the cold wet air listening to music too loud and driving a little too fast.
It’s maybe a let down to say that the emotional capstone of it all was getting home and watching an episode of Ted Lasso with Kristen. I don’t remember the last time I cared so much about the characters on a television show and this episode brought tears to us both. Maybe I was simply sad and exhausted, but it was beautiful too. And Kristen and I were sad together on a day that was filled with highs and lows and it ended on a pretty exquisite high, but I’ll leave that at THAT.
There was a lot of day to my day long into the night and it’s been a while since I had a day this bad that felt this good.
