datamusicata

Last weekend, John Batdorf (www.johnbatdorfmusic.com) and I did three shows in southern California. Friday and Sunday at clubs and Saturday night at a house concert series.

Friday night was a club in the inland empire that I always enjoy playing, the Fret House (www.covina.com/frethouse/). It was, however, an up hill battle to get folks in there. They usually only have music on Saturday nights and people just don’t think to go there on Friday nights. And the other snafu was that they somehow left the date off of their mailer. It was on their internet calendar, but not on the flyers and mailers that they distribute. And finally it was also supposed to be a Batdorf & Rodney show, but Mark didn’t make it, so I filled in with some All Wood and Stones with John.

We did a fun show for the small but appreciative crowd, and even did some CD sales, which I wasn’t expecting, as I thought they all had everything we did. The sound was fantastic. Good monitors, good house, good line of site and even ease of parking. It remains for us to put a goodly crowd in there. But it’s always a joy to play there. It is in the tradition of McCabes. A music store and a concert hall and has been doing it for decades.

Saturday night was Renee Bodee’s house concert series (www.jrp-graphics.com/bodiehouse/index.html). This was also supposed to be a Batdorf & Rodney date, but Mark didn’t make any of the shows that weekend, which is why I was sitting in. Renee has been doing this for eight years and like her counterpart and dear friends down the road Russ and Julie Paris (www.houseconcerts.us/houseconcerts.html),

she knows how to put together a house concert that is perfect for the performer and the audience. There really is no substitute for experience and the sold out audience that night really knew what could happen at a concert, and they did all they could to make that happen. Coupled with our enthusiasm and expertise, it was a magical evening for us all. Though we didn’t have monitors, the speakers were right next to us so that we could hear what we were doing. It was a perfect evening and lots of people took home the music of John and I, both individually and together.

Sunday evening was an early show at Bob Stane’s Backstage@the Coffee Gallery (www.coffeegallery.com/home.html), always a fun place to perform. This is not Bob’s first rodeo, as he founded and operated the Ice House in Pasadena for decades and ran it as one of the premier rooms in the country. Everyone who is famous played there at one time or another. After being retired for about six minutes, Bob decided to get his feet wet again and opened this intimate concert venue in Altadena.

For the audience, it’s a perfect place to see and hear their favorite performers. It sounds good and there is good line of site no matter where you sit. And we had a sold out show of truly wonderful folks who let us do what we do. That’s the kind of audiences that Bob has created for his room and that is the biggest plus for any venue.

For the performers (at least this performer), it’s a somewhat difficult room to work because of the placement of the speakers and the fact that there are no monitors. I still love working there and hope to continue to do so frequently, but I literally can’t hear what I’m doing up there and because of the lack of monitors, I can never do a lot of the stuff that I love doing in my show.

The use of effects, which I play into, to create layers of sound and groove, not to mention my looping box, that allows me to record sound on sound live in front of everyone. I usually use that effect at the end for the FINALE impact, but I’ve never been able to use any of it at the Backstage because of the absence of monitors. The speakers are placed up and away from the performers and are surrounded by what appears to be bags of grain, so to us on stage, the sound is muffled and so far away that I cannot use my effects at all, as I can’t play with them…speed of sound and all that.

So what you can see is that every night is different, every stage is different, every audience is different and there is always something with which you have to deal except on those rare evenings when every single thing just falls into place. We play hundreds of gigs hoping that that happens again.