2 Gig weekend

I just had an extremely cool weekend, music-wise. My band had a gig Friday night in Atlanta and one Saturday night here in Nashville. Our singer hosts a local TV show and puts on a "Horror Hootenanny" every year. This was the 7th year and my first year to play it. Our band played it last year, but I was on vacation and had a stunt bassist. The Atlanta show was the 1st annual Horror Hootenanny South.

We rented a van and drove down Friday afternoon. We were playing first, so we started setting up. The venue had contracted a sound guy and he started off by asking the drummer and I to help run his mic cable. I should have realized that his tangled mess of cable was a sign that he wasn't a good sound guy, but it didn't dawn on me at the time. We started sound checking and it was a disaster. He couldn't get anything going into the drummer's monitor. He had the mic about 2 feet away from the guitarist's amp. He came up and started messing with my and the guitarist's settings on our amps (he about lost a hand over that one). He had no talk back mic, so he was talking from about 15 feet away and we couldn't hear him. We sound checked for almost an hour and never did get a good sound in the monitors.

The owner said ATL is a late town, so we waited til 10:30 to go on. We played our first few songs back to back and I noticed the guitarist from one of the bands playing with us coming up and checking one of the forward facing PA speakers. When we stopped, someone yelled out that they couldn't hear us. There was nothing coming through the PA. So we just cranked our amps, flipped the singer's monitor toward the crowd and kept playing. We were down there with another Nashville band, The Creeping Cruds, and Psychocharger, who flew into Nashville from New York, then drove down with the Cruds. The Cruds played after us and didn't have any problems. When Psychocharger was setting up, they couldn't get any sound through the monitors. The sound guy just shrugged his shoulders and couldn't fix it. They traveled that far and didn't get to play. Tempers were quite hot, to say the least. We all did get paid and our take from the door plus sales of a few CDs and t-shirts covered the van rental. We loaded up and drove back that night. I drove the 4 hours back to our drummer's house and then had a 45 minute drive to my house. I got home at 6:45am. I couldn't stay asleep, so started Saturday off w/ just a few hours sleep.

Saturday night, we played here at The Muse. Same 3 bands, plus a couple other local bands. We had a great turnout and when we went on 2nd, the floor was packed. We played one of our best shows yet. I get more comfortable on stage each time we play. We sold some more merch that night and got a lot of compliments. A guy that our singer had invited has already asked us to play his Halloween festival in Chattanooga, TN next year. My son made it home from college this weekend, so he got to go with me Saturday. He got to be part of the show when we had an actor jump up on stage with a fake hand and my son and another friend grabbed him and held him down so our singer could cut off his hand and spray the crowd with fake blood. You can see the footage of that here... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flIXiyBTdK8&feature=autofb

Me on stage in ATL

Me and the bass player from Psychocharger in Nashville