Tag: Shows

26 Sep – Eddie’s Attic (Atlanta)
w/ Mrs. Fun
30 Sep – Eddie’s Attic (Atlanta)
w/ Kitty Snyder, Blake Guthrie

One band show, one solo show, same club. Welcome back to playing shows, Paul.

So I took some time off, obviously. Partly due to being a little overexposed in town, mostly due to head space and trying to sort it all out. We haven’t rehearsed since late July, I think, and we got together once before the show Friday. But rehearsal went well and felt good, and we’ll be starting back up next week. The show went well, too, a little rusty but overall pretty tight. A nice sized crowd, not as big as would have been nice for a Friday, but with Mrs. Fun being an out of town band the crowd was mainly our draw. The crowd also included a long-time ex of mine as well as the first girl I ever kissed in my life. It was also Andrea from Daemon’s birthday so we played “Antmusic” for her.

Mrs. Fun are just that.

Tuesday was a solo show, a benefit for the Dekalb County Humane Society, a strange place to be for me having just had to put an 18 year old cat to sleep the week before and made the mistake of bringing it up during the show and started to choke myself up. But the show itself was good, a bigger crowd than Friday and they seemed to enjoy themselves. Kitty Snyder played with her band afterwards and I find that I am really a big fan of hers. Just in time for her to announce at the end of her show that she’s taking a year off from performing to write a novel.

Greg from chain poets came out and I got to talk to him for a bit, I haven’t seen him in a while. We talked about the need to do another outlandish cover song together soon. I talked to Todd, the owner for a bit after the show and he talked about having us in more often and was really very complimentary. I have seen a little complaining about the new ownership at Eddie’s but I would like to say that, while I appreciate that some of the changes he’s made might seem a bit jarring, he really cares about the place and is trying to keep it alive. I loved Eddie and supported him as well, but I hope everyone will give Todd the time to really put his ideas into motion.

There’s also a new soundman at the club, his name is Shalom. He just happens to have run sound for a lot of Jellyfish shows and was in charge of the box set that came out last year. His first night was the previous Tuesday running sound for the weaklazyliar show at Eddie’s and the sound was amazing (THEY were amazing, I might add. One of them, I can’t recall who, said they had finally decided they weren’t a ROCK band, and it showed, and I mean that in the sense that they really seemed to come into their own this show, playing who they were and just sounding damn incredible). He got the permanent job based on that show and happened to run sound for both of my shows and I loved how it sounded, and he seemed to really like my stuff, solo and with the band. Damn nice guy, too. How I lucked into having him running sound at a club I play regularly I don’t know, but it’s cool as hell.

23 Sept – 12th and Porter (Nashville, TN)
24 Sept – the Slow Bar (Nashville, TN)

I suppose I’m really going to have to change my method of writing these if I’m going to be playing several shows in a row, if only because they’re going to get fairly repetitive.

Monday I drove up to Nashville for two shows. I was staying the night with Adam McIntyre, the person who hopped onstage at the CD release party to play bass on “Picture Book,” and his wife. They put up with me sleeping on their extremely comfortable couch for a day. Monday night was “12 at 12th” (in other words, open mic night at 12th and Porter) and I was the first act up. Two songs, and the crowd was bigger than I used to see when I was still doing open mics at Eddie’s Attic here. Couldn’t see the crowd at all but they cheered, and in the glare of the light I could see someone tapping their feet near the front of the stage. We’ll see if it gets me back into the club.

I felt badly for the next act, though, he had an amazing string of bad luck. He was playing five songs, and midway through the first song his cord began to short out, so he was forced to stop and switch cords. He finished that song and played the next, and then midway through his third song he broke a string. The emcee came up to occupy the crowd while the guy switched strings quickly, and once he was set he just went straight into his fourth song (I guess figuring he was losing time as it was). Then he started in on his fifth song and another string on his guitar had suddenly gone horribly out of tune, at least a couple of steps. He paused in the middle of the song to tune it up with a quick twist, but it immediately dropped down again. I’ve never seen anything like that happen before and I’ve been the victim of some weird guitar freakouts in my time. So he just finished the song out of tune. The crowd had been talking loudly through the set anyway, and they gave a smattering of applause and that was that. You had to feel for the guy, really. Especially given the fact that he had driven all the way up from Atlanta to play the show, trying to get his foot in the door of the club. And because he would have preferred to play the show with a band to begin with, particularly when the club was obviously a band club, and the remaining acts (who the crowd had come to see) were all bands.

But mostly I felt for the guy because it was me and that was my show Tuesday at the Slow Bar.

I had a nice time with Adam and Ellen, at any rate.

Just to bring the whole thing thematically to a close… one of the people who played Monday night after me was really amazing, I thought. Her name was Adrienne, she played acoustic and had a gorgeous voice. I talked to her afterwards, briefly, and we complimented each other. It turned out she was playing Atlanta Wednesday night at the Earl, so I went out there last night to see her. We said hello, talked briefly again, I mean, it’s not as if we know each other or anything (but it’s an important, if unsurprising, lesson to keep in mind that High Fidelity was JUST a movie and those things just don’t happen). That was really about it, but I sat at the club during her set feeling out of place once again, ultra-conscious of how I was sitting and that I was alone and felt awkward as hell being there. A culmination of the Nashville experience and the start of genuine touring for me.

Maybe it will help to convey just why I play down the things that are going on right now, because it can be very easy to get caught up in the glow of playing at home in front of 150 people and really crash hard when you travel out of state a week later to play a “New Faces” night at a club that’s never heard of you to a crowd that wants you to shut up already.

21 Sept – Tower Records (in-store, Atlanta, GA)

Well, I honestly didn’t know what to expect from this. When we were rehearsing for the CD release show Pete had told me he was only doing this for me because he really hated doing in-stores. Apparently Uncle Green had endured some hellish ones. Anyone who’s seen Spinal Tap will have some idea of just how bad one can be. I was really sort of just hoping maybe 10 people or so might show, just so I’d have a tiny crowd hanging around for the set, rather than having to play to a HUGE store of people ignoring me.

The band was not the usual setup, Lee was filling in for Rob on guitar, John (keyboards) couldn’t make it, and Lyle played bass for David. We hadn’t rehearsed this configuration and worse still there are some songs that are sort of dependent at times on the keyboard stuff. There was no one at the store to run sound (not surprising, though thankfully they did actually have a PA, not enough mics to mic anything other than vocals but there were floor monitors) so I roped Gina (lawyer extraordinaire) into managing the sound.

We played at 4pm. Normal set. None of us could really hear what the other was doing. The sound was really strange from the stage, reverberating from the back of the store. The store is really big, bigger it seems to me than it can afford to be, given how many customers they had on a Saturday afternoon. We had about 15 people there to see the show itself, a few people popping in and out while shopping. We sold some CDs out of the store. It didn’t go as badly as it could have, and all things considered it went pretty well.

Pete said it was easily the best in-store he’s ever been in. I’ll take that.

I’m off to Nashville today. Tonight I’m playing the open mic at 12th and Porter to try and get my foot in the door there, then Tuesday night I’m playing New Faces night at the Slow Bar. About a 25 minute set around 10pm. If you live in Nashville come on out.