New Year's Eve - Goodbye 2011

Had 2 events to help close out the year.  The 1st was with Crazy Marty, the stunt guitarist Marty Berning who leads the hipper-than-thou MartaY & The PartaY.  Crazy Marty is Marty's persona when he performs at various retirement homes - usually solo.  For this engagement, he enlisted the services of Anne Margaret on vocals, Steve Vincent on drums, and myself on bass.  We played at Dogwood Forest in Alpharetta for their New Year's Eve party.  Being an older crowd, they rung in the new year from 4 till about 6:15, with a special "apple drop" at 6:00 sharp!  Anne opened up the show with some band-in-a-box solo renditions of Andrews Sisters and the like.  I answered Marty's call and helped him load in his gear.  We played a great mix of oldies, swing, standards, rock 'n' roll, and some surf music: Blueberry Hill, Deep in the Heart of Texas, I Don't Know Why (I Love You Like I Do), Can't Help Falling In Love, Miserlou (yes, the Dick Dale surf rock stunt guitar tune from Pulp Fiction), and the Nancy Wilson version of the end-of-the-year standard What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?  I do my best to keep up with Martay's whims.  He likes to keep me guessing, and like many bandleaders, the set list is off the chain cuff!

I had to set up the evening's equipment prior to meeting with Anne & Steve.  That meant 2 distinct sets of equipment.  My old pedalboard, consisting mainly of Boss pedals along with a SansAmp Bass Driver DI fooled me into believing that its troubles were behind me.  It worked for the first 1/3 of the show, then - no output.  I tested it and the gate at the end of the chain was receiving signal, the cable from the gate was okay, but still nothing.  I went direct the rest of the gig.  All in all, the crowd really enjoyed it and it is genuinely heartwarming to play for these elderly folks who depend on the show coming to them.

Anne Margaret warms up the crowd before Martay gets set up.

After the event, I packed up and headed back to where my afternoon had commenced: The Atlanta Athletic  Club in Johns Creek.  It was Platinum Soul, this evening consisting of Dianna Crawford, Glen Perdew, Derek McCoy, Anthony Baker, and myself.  It is seldom that we perform as a 5-piece band.  I would have liked to have had a vocal mic.  I played my 6-string primarily.  It sounded great, perhaps the best tone I've enjoyed in a long time.  I gotta say, out of all of the improvements I've performed on my equipment over the years, those EMG's with the 18-volt preamp have yielded the greatest results.  I even heard some nice compliments about the tone.  Hey, it's just an Ibenez!  I love it - it's the bass I've managed to hold on to the longest!  Lots of better ones I'm sure.  Really, who cares?  Only other musicians who love to drop names.  If the tone is decent, it's all in the spaces between the notes - yeah, and the note choices, of course.  Not to mention, how you treat the other people around you...

When I re-arrived, our soundman DJ gave me a look.  Then he said something along the lines of, "Are there 2 bass players on this gig?"  Oh boy!  He had confused my earlier phone call to him with being from another John, namely the most excellent and highly in-demand Jon Schwenke.  I'm sure glad he was mistaken!  Anyways, we were without Gus once again, which changes things up a bit.  We were in the lounge, as the ballroom was the party HQ for the chil'renz, with a DJ (not Dave Junius, but a Disk Jockey).  We played one song we never discussed before: Barry White's You're the First, the Last, My Everything.  Had to watch Glen for those changes.  I will chart it out and might post it for your reference.  One thing I remember is the form changes during the instrumental break.  Isn't that special.  Glen knew it, of course!  We opened with Grover's Mr. Magic, one that even I took a solo on, after Derek nodded to me.  Anton usually jumps back into the head right away, but he wasn't there that night.  We had them dancing right after that.  The only real train wreck happened on the Jackson 5ive Medley (The Love You Save -->I Want You Back).  For one thing, I am usually quite tight with Glen on the opening riff to I Want You Back.  We weren't - maybe my fingers were tired.  The breakdown was a mess too, but I think Derek did something wrong.  I sang lead on 3: Honky Tonk Women, Sweet Home Alabama, and the Isleys by way of the Beatles' Twist and Shout.  BTW, I came down with the devil bug (Fripp's term) and was sick as a dog the whole day - still am to a degree...

Happy New Year everybody!!!

Fireworks as seen through the window.