I didn’t get a nap in.
So this has been quite a weekend – and I don’t know that I’ll get into it too intensely, but I’m grateful for a text. Whoever it was that texted me Saturday night to say “you inspired me to play I saw you play like our little spot was a stadium – tonight I played my 1st solo show and nobody came and I remembered you 2 playing balls out for a half dozen people and I knew how to play”. It was a good, timely text to get. I don’t know who it was from.
Friday night – we rolled in to what would’ve been a pretty cool venue in Baltimore. In Erie, PA in the summer the most that could be said for it was that it was BIG and the weather was nice. If someone had taken one of the covered pavilions that you have in state parks and stuck a stage on one end you’ve have had this spot. A couple of months ago I’d been trying to figure out how sound was going to get run and when I heard the answer a) that we can all bring stuff and run it for each other, backed by b) and ilyAIMY will probably be the most complicated thing on the bill – well, I volunteered because “a)” is the way you get really shitty sound, especially when you’re bringing acoustic guitars and hand percussion and “b)” means it’s an easy set up in any case…
But then no-one could be bothered to get in touch with me when I asked for tech. I heard later that at least one person had been “stressed out” by the request and had therefore ignored it. I asked again, then tried to put it together second-hand, or go through the one person on the bill that I knew… though we’d stayed as an ilyTrio, one acoustic duo had expanded and gone electric and gotten a drummer and a bass player.
The other acoustic duo had picked up a cajon player. Then the now-electric-quartet LOST the bass player (that’s cool, subtracting is way easier than adding) but where I started getting stressed out was when the OTHER electric quartet then turned into a QUINTET and then the words “horn section” went by. By sound check no-one but us and the band that had put everything in motion had arrived. By downbeat nothing had changed except the bartender had showed up to let the beer delivery in. At some point the last band joined forces with the second-to-last band and had become a 9-piece, and three of the other bands had all booked other gigs that night and when they HAD advertised the festival, they’d advertised their own times. i.e. our 8pm festival was being advertised to the majority of Erie as having a 10pm start time, or possibly even 11.
I’m not going down the rabbit hole on all of that. On the one hand, the next night as we played to another almost-empty room on the one hand I was grateful to know that I’d affected SOMEONE out there – on the other hand Friday night we played “with” (“with” because literally, of the latter three bands and 12 musicians, only 1 had arrived by our second-to-last song, and only 3 were there by the time we were getting off the stage) people who’d already learned alllll the wrong habits.
Don’t volunteer. I feel like I’m learning that lesson from a LOT of different quarters this year.Whatever – had great shoot-the-shit-sessions with Chris and Joylene of the Honest Mistakes over Joylene’s very, very nice bourbon, we enjoyed a particularly stunning
succession of perfect-weather days in Erie, PA, had a good time playing with one another if not performing for other people and are now headed back for another 100 or so hours at home before we head out to New Jersey for another very quick trip. The sky is blue, the Sheetz “steak n tater burrito with boom boom sauce” was better than I’d imagined and is sitting on my stomach better than I’d expected. For all that I’m eager to be home, the journey truly is the destination and we’ve got about three hours of that destination left. Maybe… just maybe… I’ll get a nap in.
In other news, my friend Acacia Sears wrote this today.
“I had a nightmare where Rob Hinkal died suddenly and unexpectedly and people… could not get over it. I certainly couldn’t. Everyone was a disaster. He is a pillar of the local music community, having dedicated years of his life to building it up and making it what it is today.”
I must admit, I spend a fair amount of time wondering why the HELL do I do what I do?!?! Little notes like this make me feel a little more Loved! (thanks Cacie!)
