Feb 12th - From the Road (by Joel Simches - Sound guy)
The first thing you'll notice about the Music Hall of Williamsburg is the marquee. It is simply amazing. It is like From the Road (by Joel Simches - Sound guy)
I never feel like I'm officially on tour until I've had my first nasty post-Waffle House Gastric Episode. That happened yesterday and so I feel the tour is officially under way. Actually we're in the middle of the second week of the evil Step Grandmamma of all tours. Touring with Bang Camaro is always fun. Everyone is in good spirits, lots of joking around and playful verbal jabs at one another...We started at Madison Square Garden to play the pregame show at a Titans game. I've never seen an actual professional Lacrosse game. This was a slick production aimed at trying to make this game interesting. This production looked like the WWE in Vegas. Lots of flamethrowers, big jumbotron graphics and 20 sec music cues for every move.
It was pretty silly. Loads of young kids and their families rocking out to Bang crammed into a tiny section of seating in the back of the arena. Many of these kids were fans of Rock Band so many autographs were signed for the mini prepubescent horde, star struck by the tight guitar work and sheer lunacy of the event.
The next day began the road show proper with our first club show at Maxwell's in Hoboken. It is really comforting to come into a venue I have already mixed in. The room, the people, the familiar faces and the ice already broken. Maxwell's is small but the place was packed and we had our first guest choir appearance. Next came an off the hook show at the Music Hall in Williamsburg. 23 people on stage and there was good rocking had by all. I mixed the show on a Yamaha PM5D.My second show ever mixing on this board. I feel as if I am starting to finally get the hang of this whole digital thing. For the rest of this tour we're traveling stripped to the bare essentials. The cost and logistics of touring with a band this size is extreme and at this point people are still trying to take time from their day jobs to make the shows happen. From this show onward we lose half our choir and our merch person to fend for ourselves..
The traveling band consists of 12 core band members and myself behind the board. Some band members will come and go and others will join us only on selected shows. The guest choir members seem to keep it fresh and interesting. Last night's show in Raleigh was the first ever where one of our guests brought his own moonshine for our enjoyment. Never having tried homemade stuff and always keen to try anything at least once I had at it and if my hangover this morning is any indication, my level of enjoyment cannot be charted. The shows have been successful and even on off days like a Monday in Philly or Tuesday in Baltimore, we came away with new fans, and promises for bigger and better things from the local promoters. Morgan is kicking ass, pulling double duty as merch seller and choir singer. We've been selling lots of sweet new tour jerseys and hats to enthusiastic new fans.
Last night's show was promoted by this guy, Tom Quick, who also had a camera crew to shoot a television special to be aired one of these days. Tom has some serious history, having hung with Dio back in the Elf days and being the lead singer for the McCoys (remember the song "Hang on Sloopy?"). We exchanged many memorable stories of being in bands and being on the road, some of which were captured by their three-person camera crew.
Traveling with the Camaro is always fun. For a band of 20 guys, the operation is pretty tight. I usually find working with bands on the road to be very much like herding cats. There is very little drama working with these guys and fewer meltdowns than any of the other bands I've worked with. Things could not be running more smoothly. We basically have three people handling the tour management, including myself, and, as I said, Morgan has been digging into his new role and handling his duties with aplomb. As I get to do this more and more, the typical bumps in the road seem less significant. My road experience seems to have been an asset to this band than the liability it always seemed to be to others. No one feels their toes being stepped on or their jobs being threatened here. For a bunch of insane party animals, this band seriously has their touring shit together more than any other band I've worked with. It is still fun for me to be here. Hopefully this feeling will sustain itself through the end of the tour, when nerves usually get a little frayed.
So far nobody's been killed.
I hope that's a good thing.