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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!

17 January 2006

Electronic Sweat

Friday, 13 January 2006
First gig of the year...and it has to fall on Friday the 13th. That figures. As it happens, it had been a pretty uneventful day. Work went along OK, I came home and ate dinner, loaded the equipment, and waited for Dawna. She was supposed to be stopping by after she picked up the kids. She was bringing me an electronic muscle stimulator for Carlos. Apparently, his Friday wasn’t as smooth as mine, and he had a crick in his neck. She didn’t arrive until almost 20:30, so we had little time together. I quickly rode off into the already-set sun.

About halfway there, my phone rang...it was Bobby...his mixer was making some funny popping and crackling noises and he wanted to know if I could bring mine. I explained that by the time I turned around and drove back to St. Jacob, dug it out of the back of my shed where it had gotten buried after I stopped using it with Knucklehead, removed it from the rack and loaded everything else back in the shed, then drove to Rusty’s in Edwardsville, it would probably be 23:00 or later. He said he would make some phone calls to see what else he could track down.

While thinking about this situation, on top of the myriad of other things that are constantly flitting through my head, I missed my exit off of I-270. So, I had to go on to the IL-157 exit and weave my way through the construction mess going through Glen Carbon and into Edwardsville. It was well after 21:00 when I finally arrived at Rusty’s.

While I was loading my stuff into the club, both Bobby and Eddie were explaining to me in more detail what the mixer had been doing. Bobby thought it might be condensation from sitting outside in a garage. After Eddie told me the problem stopped when he turned off the board’s phantom power, I agreed. I figured once the equipment warmed up sufficiently, it would happen no more. I guessed correctly. After I had set up my amp and the lights, I went over and un-muted the troublesome channel, cranked the gain, level, and high EQ, and it was quiet as a mouse. Eddie said he wasn’t going to use the condenser mics for cymbals, so he wouldn’t need the phantom power anyway. He said that the Presonus compressor was acting funny for a while as well, but had unbent itself after it warmed up. Tragedy seemed to have been averted.

We had decided some weeks ago that this Rusty’s gig was to be something of a tune-up for our first time in at the Phoenix Super Club the following week. Since we never have the time to practice any more, this was a good idea. We hadn’t played since before the middle of December, and were a bit rusty (pun intended) in the first set. I can usually brush it off after the first few songs, but I couldn’t seem to find the groove with Bobby at all in that set. I seemed to always be just slightly off in one direction or the other. It wasn’t awful or anything, but it was aggravating me to no end.

The rest of the night seemed to go more smoothly, though. Once we got back into the proverbial swing of things, it was the same BenWahBob from last year. Dale had removed the heavier-hitting stuff from the set list to focus more on the danceable rock stuff we would be playing at Phoenix. That meant no Rush, or Zeppelin, or Sabbath, or Ozzy. Oh...the sacrifices I make sometimes. I guess Deron would refer to this as BenWahWhore – akin to his references to the Knucklehead version known as Knucklewhore – this lightening of the set list to attract dancers, mostly female of course. But then, compared to Knucklehead, the regular BWB set list is relatively light. Different bands with different missions, I guess. We did end up doing Ozzy’s I Don’t Know by request, and later did Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song, too. Hopefully, that was enough of a fix to get me by for a while. We’ll see.

The crowd was nice early in the evening, but thinned quickly as midnight approached. Around 01:00 it seemed to pick up again with a new crowd. They stayed at the back near the bar, though, and never really got into what we were doing – which was fine, because we were suppose to be rehearsing anyway. We ended the night without the usual grandeur of War Pigs, packed up our stuff, and went home. I listened to the Ice Age CD The Great Divide for the drive home, and didn’t miss any of my exits this time.

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