Three Bands One Night
I miss playing shows, so allow me to blather about one of those times where I played with three bands in one night on August 20th, 2004.
So Casino Royale, cover band extraordinaire, had a gig at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Lisabell and I carpooled over to SF during rush hour. During the chaos downtown a red light camera blinked as I zoomed through a clogged intersection and then I almost went the wrong way down a one way street. Somehow neither of these moving violations resulted in a ticket.
Given there were several musical acts that evening the gear was backlined, so loading in was super easy. We were led by security to the dining area set up for all the performers. Our bandmates and the Kitty Kitty Bang Bang dancers showed up one by one as we filled the dressing room and talked shop.
At these cover band gigs you can basically count on a shortened set because things always run late but the venues have a hard cut-off time. Such was the case tonight, but I still was anxious to get on stage before downbeat so I could suss out the keyboard situation. People assume keyboardists know how all keyboards work, which is infuriating. The brands and models all have wildly different sounds and byzantine interfaces. It's sometimes like getting into a rental car in a foreign country where they drive on the opposite side of the road and it's a manual transmission - you kinda want a few minutes to mess around in the parking lot first, you know? Anyway getting access required some nagging and diplomacy but they finally let me check things out.
There were four keyboards set up in Wakeman style for the headliners, and for simplicity the stage manager assigned to me only one - a Korg Triton. Fair enough, even though it only had five octaves. I smartly brought headphones for this purpose and started to figure out how it worked, but wasn't getting any sound. After five panicked minutes I realized this beater keyboard had a busted headphone jack. I begged the soundperson to put the volume up in the monitors so I could test the sound selections. They complied.
I've never used a Triton before, and found myself quite frustrated at the difficulty in finding the right patches. All I needed at a minimum was a piano, an electric piano, and a basic organ. Maybe if we're lucky I'd also dig out a clav, marimba and string pad. But none of these were obvious to locate. Everything was layered synthy bullshit. I did finally get a piano and rhodes and called it good enough.
We started the set at 8pm, around when people were being let into the huge atrium. So this was but one night of a week-long Cisco conference, where each of the evenings had a different continental theme. Tonight was Africa (so, naturally, they hired a band that largely plays Burt Bacharach hits from the 60's). The decorations were astounding. This event clearly cost a lot of money - some dot coms really pulled out all the stops for these shindigs. Of course the one thousand people who poured in were nerds disinterested in music and dancing. They just milled about at the various tables serving food and drinks.
Just before we started I noticed in horror that the G# closest to middle C was broken on the keyboard. And we have a bunch of songs in E major and F minor. There was a second Korg Triton as part of this rig, and I quickly convinced the sound person to dial that one up as well. Crisis averted, and luckily it had the same patches as the first one. I started the opening piano riff to "Walk On By" and we were off and running. Or walking, as the case may be.
The hour long set blew by, and we stopped right at 9pm. The band quickly fled the scene. I drove Lisabell home, and got home myself right at 10pm. Jenya and I changed into our rock clothes, I threw all my guitar gear into the car and we headed to the Starry Plough.
We arrived and the first band was still only halfway through. Cool. I relaxed and caught up with bandmates and friends and fellow music geeks until it was time for me to set up for the Three Piece Combo set.
Jon, Alex, and I comfortably got our gear on stage and I tuned my guitar for a while before I realized I had my whammy pedal on (stupidly in the chain before the tuner) and thus was about 1.5 half steps flat. Doh! Took me a few more minutes to recalibrate after that mistake.
We played a pretty good set, including the debut of "No Meal." This tune started in 21/8, which could really be felt as a basic shuffly 7, except that I would play a rhythmic riff on top that would be two half-note triplets, then a pause of 5 eighth notes, then two more half-note triplets. In other words, A real toe-tapper! I admit I'm not a fan of "you must crack the code to enjoy this" subgenre of math rock but it sure is fun watching your friends' stumped faces as your blast out that shit.
This was back in the day when Three Piece Combo sets contained shticks (to make up for the lack of vocals and our unwillingness to ever address the audience). In this case, we had a dry erase board with the entire set list on it for everybody to see, and after each tune was finished we'd cross the name off.
And then, to wrap things up, I had whole 'nother epic set playing guitar in Research & Development. This included our debut of the 13 minute epic "Motherlode" as well as a jammy 15 minute version of "Blackjack." This was Jake's last show with the band, and thus he had free reign on the mic. He barked at the audience for not dancing enough.
Phew! I did it! I was home by 2:30am. For the record, I literally made over 1000% the money at the Casino Royale show than I did playing with the two bands at the Plough. We all know that remuneration in the music industry has zero to do with musical complexity or originality. And that's fine.