Re: My worst looping gig...

"Yesterday was probably the worst gig I ever experienced...totally horrific. Just about everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong. To start, the night before my 85 year old grandma slipped on the hardwood for of my kitchen and landed on the back of her head, knocking her out unconscious, and bleeding profusely. We had to call the ambulance, take her to the emergency room at the hospital, and she has been in the hospital since. She is fine and they are keeping her in the hospital as a precaution, to observe her, take a cat scan to ensure there is no internal bleeding, etc....main point being that I was up until at least midnight the night before the gig, and then I got up a 5:30am to pickup my percussionist and drive 3.5 hours to the art festival. It was a arts festival that I signed up for...a pro bono gig to support the arts. [postscript - my grandmother passed away a few months later]

So here is where the nightmare starts. We get to this little town where the art fair is, and not only is it totally overcast, but there is new snow on the mountains nearby (September), and we can see our breath as we get out of my Jeep. First bad sign....my fingers don't work to well on the guitar when it's that cold. So, it starts to warm up a bit, and we discover that the sound man is behind schedule. We were supposed to start at 11:30am, but we didn't even start doing a sound check until 11:45pm. Then I had some major technical difficulties with my system, getting both my guitar and the percussion to loop through my Gibson Echoplexes, and come through the main channel of my mixer board...that takes a while to troubleshoot. In the mean time...the lady that is coordinating the whole thing is pressuring us to start playing....so while we are working the bugs out, she decides to have the act after us start part of their show, which incidentally was her singing in full vibrato, church-lady style. Gasp! She finishes her song and we finally start playing....but what the $#@!*&%!? My looped signal is not coming through the main PA speakers....so in the panic mode, I just start playing solo guitar style...some jingle-jangle jazz stuff...Aaron, my percussionist and good friend adapts and plays his ashiko along with me...no loops though...after that song, I decide to push a few buttons on the board, and what the hell...my looped signal is coming through, but there are no monitors, no percussion in the loops, and the looped signal is not coming through my headphone signal, which is what we were using for our monitors. Okay, I can deal with that...I can just rely on what I hear in the main PA speakers. So we limp through our shorten set, and then I discover probably the most ludicrous thing about this event...the lady who coordinated it built ABSOLUTELY NO transitions between the acts! Totally unbelievable. In other words, there is no setup or teardown time before or after acts [and only one stage]. So she's practically yelling at us to get our gear off the stage so that the next act can start in, ehhhh, 30 seconds? Yeah right. We manage to just scoot my rack off to the side, but the real kicker is that at 3pm we are scheduled to play again, meaning we have to set all this shit up again with no transition time, thus eating into our set.

But it gets more ludicrous. After we get off the stage, we discover what is lined up for the other performing acts. Totally crazy...5 old blue hair women and a man who are dancing and singing on the state to pre-recorded music. I mean, this is freakin' hilarious, everything from the Charleston to clog dancing. And it's the same damn performers each time...they just changed into different costumes in their tent and played musical chairs. This was starting to seem like a sick and twisted joke. Who the hell is going to come listen to an improvisational and avant-garde looping duo when what they have to lure them into the area are blue-haired church ladies singing with the most unbearable vibrato, barely hobbling around with some old dance moves, etc? Talk about a marketing/promotional fiasco.

And the temperature outside gets colder, and colder....then my wife calls me from home, and she had to take our 4-month girl twin to the emergency room because she was cold, hands purple, etc...she was fine eventually...long story but we discovered the source. And to top it off, my wife and her mother (staying with us at the time) have both acquired the stomach flu and are vomiting, trying to take care of the twins. They end up calling our nanny to work on the weekend to help out.

So, 3pm comes around and the schedule is now 1 hour behind....remember, no transitions. I'm freezing, and I feel like I'm getting sick....yes, most likely the stomach flu. We probably won't start playing until at least 4:30, which puts me back home later than 9pm...not acceptable given the situation at home. So I negotiate with the lady coordinator and she thinks its fine that we just not play and leave. So we pack are stuff up and drive off like bats out of hell.....good riddens, man.

Aaron drives my Jeep because I have the cold chills and hot flashes, plus I feel like I'm going to vomit. We finally make it home, I crawl into bed, and spend the a good portion of the night in the bathroom, ejecting fluids from every orifice in my body."





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