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Progressive Travels

The haphazard chronicles of a professional musician and his relentless pursuit of an otherwise boring life.

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Location: St. Jacob, Illinois, United States

If it ain't Baroque, fix it!

05 June 2005

Pass the Grey Poupon, Muffy

Saturday, 04 June 2005
BenWahBob was booked to play a private party for a friend of our singer, Dale. It was at Incline Village, a golf community/country club about five miles north of Foristell, MO. I had to work Saturday morning at 06:00, then go straight there from work that afternoon. Needless to say, this would make for a long day. I left work around 14:00 and arrived at the clubhouse just as the other band members were beginning to unload equipment. We had decided to use our drummer Bobby’s PA for this gig, since the pay wasn’t worth hiring someone to do it for us. This was one of those gigs where we cut someone a good deal on the price because they knew a member of the band. Big mistake. With just a week left before the gig, the details started changing at an alarming pace. Time schedules, load-in, set list changes, song requests... This was becoming more of a pain than it was worth.

Anyway...Bobby has a trailer with all of his PA equipment in it. So, he backed up to the pool area and we loaded in the gear. Since we didn’t need to start setting up until about 17:00, we had some time to kill. Bobby and Carlos suggested we all pile into Bobby’s truck to listen to some CDs. Uhh...OK, why not. This turned out to be a pleasant surprise. Apparently, the gig last weekend at the Black River was recorded from the mixing board. Carlos had taken the best tracks from the whole night and mixed them onto two CDs for potential demo use. The sound quality of these recordings was surprisingly good. I shouldn’t be so surprised, though. I have worked quite a bit with the soundman Mike Stevenson in the past. He always makes us sound great. This time the stage was so big and the outdoor venue so open that everything was coming through the PA, with no stage volume issues. It was the perfect scenario for recording. We listened to most of the remixed tracks, then Carlos gave us all copies of the two CDs, along with copies of the entire uncut show, for us to review on our own.

We began to set up our stuff next to the pool around 17:00. Immediately we noticed that power was going to be a potential problem. This turned out to be just the case. After we finally found someone to turn on the power to the building from which we were tapping, we had to reset the ground fault breakers several times. Not good. Whoever wired this place didn’t seem to have a clue what they were doing.

Once we got that out of the way, and figured out the clusterf--k someone left in Bobby’s PA rack, we actually had a pretty easy time. We played for three hours, with breaks every hour for raffles and giveaways, and we were done. We even enjoyed the catered dinner before we played. We tore down the equipment in record time and were out of there by 23:30. I must add, though, the difficulty in forcing myself not to jump into the swimming pool before I left. I kept telling myself that the long drive back to St. Jacob would be no more enjoyable in wet clothes. Logic won out... this time anyway. So, I listened to the BWB CDs during the drive home and considered pulling over once or twice to take a nap. It had indeed been a long day.

Next weekend I will be playing with Knucklehead Saturday night at Baha Rock Club on Main Street in St. Charles, MO, then again Sunday afternoon at Eddie’s in Granite City, IL for a cancer patient benefit with Jagertyme, Ivory Tiger, and several other bands. There should be plenty of blog fodder from that weekend.

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