Am I Really In Athens?

Platinum "returned to active service" after being relieved of duty for two short weeks.  When a band has two weekend off, it's really been three weeks.  In that span of time, we celebrated Easter and Passover, endured our dog Buddy being attacked by a pit bull that we were hoping to foster, and refinanced our home mortgage.  Derek and his wife welcomed a second baby daughter into their family - congrats!  It feels like a long time has passed indeed.  I scrambled hard to find a suitable sub for Sweetwater Junction, with whom I was obligated to play on this same Saturday.  It's a bad situation for me, in that I want to honor both bands and cannot absolutely prefer one over the other.  I'm hopeful that all worked out well on their end.  I was busy preparing for this job.

We were back in Athens at the Georgia Botanical Gardens, a glorified greenhouse cum event facility.  Nice and humid, with an understated BO quotient.  It was cool and breezy outside; warm and moist inside.  Yum!  At least I knew what to make of the whole deal this time out.  We worked up a few new ones that we may in fact keep in rotation.  Eddie Money's fun romp Take Me Home Tonight and Roberta Flack's Killing Me Softly With His Song.  Are there two more disparate pop songs you can think of off the top of your head?  Both were huge hit singles for their respective artists, separated by little more than a decade.  They were fun to play, if only to give us something new to keep it fresh.  The Eddie Money song is challenging in the arrangement where you have to count some unorthodox progressions in the key of B flat minor (Bbm).  Roberta's song was, are you ready 'cause I just realized this, also in the key of Bbm.  Okay, maybe it's in the key of F major because that's the final chord, but I don't always subscribe to that.  It's the only time you hear that major tonality.

I stopped at Guitar Center and shelled out some big $$ for a triple guitar stand.  I've been bringing an acoustic guitar for I'll Be and figured I would typically have 2 basses as well on these jobs.  That's my style anyways.  Jack of all trades - master of none.  Well, I like variety, what can I say.  It makes me feel like a big star if I'm not really one after all.  This time, I brought along the Stingray and my lil' Ashbory.  The Ashbory is nice to have for a novelty, in this case it was the hip-hop chestnut Good Feeling by Flo Rida.  Kevin wasn't quite up for the rap, so we turned it into a mash-up with Glen singing Superstition over the vamp in C#m.  It worked, but I really like the song, so too bad there.  Lexxi replicated the Etta James sample and we made it happen.  The Ashbory filled in nicely, with an octave effect for low C# slides.  Virginia witnessed those slides and seemed to enjoy the visual joke - small bass with a big low sound!  I think it was worth it.  I also brought the NS WAV for the 1st set of jazz and light dinner music.  All in all, it was one of the best nights we've had in a while.  No serious incidents - yay!

Oh, yeah, Tony Staffiero (a link to his web site is here) subbed for Anton.  He even brought a keyboard.  Wish I could have heard him a bit more.  Gotta talk with DJ about that one day.