Thursday Night at Ventanas with Platinum Soul

1st set.

The stage during a break.

Back again with Platinum.  Too bad I had to bail on my Thursday in Decatur with TAAG.  I don't like having to get someone else.  They are typically of very high quality and I always feel that I could potentially lose my gig to one of these cats.  A poor self image, perhaps.  I catch myself not grooving, or playing sloppy.  Must watch that.

Did my best to salvage this pic - low res of Chae &
Di cutting up with memebers of KISS.

Anyways, we were at Ventanas in downtown Atlanta, you know, the place with the helipad.  It occupies the 14th floor of a multi-purpose building right near the Aquarium and World of Coke on Harris St.  Floor to ceiling windows, giving a great view of the city.  Impressive at night.  We played to Delta employees in an '80's-themed party.  I had to learn a bunch of tunes.  Didn't get to all of them.  Some real fun ones in there: I Can't Go For That; Sledgehammer; Sign Your Name; Wishing Well; What You Need; Shout (TFF); Wrapped Around Your Finger; Human Nature, Caribbean Queen, Early in the Morning (Gap Band), lotsa Prince: I Wanna Be Your Lover, Little Red Corvette, 1999, Controversy.  We did most of them.  Sounded good too.  I blew the bridge and ending of Every Breath You Take.  The easy ones will fool you.  Also had my usual issues with The Commodores' Easy.  Don't know what it is, but I manage to over think those little bass licks (before the 2nd verse & before the solo).  Drives me mad and hard to keep going without getting upset at myself.

We had the most talented Chae Stephen, on loan from Platinum Soul.  Actually, this was very close to being a Platinum Soul gig, as we also had Dianna Crawford (perhaps Atlanta's finest real estate agent, a very detail oriented and beautiful lady, I must say).  In fact, for a good chunk of the night we had 4 on the front line.  Glen, our recently appointed musical director, led us through the 80's stuff that we hadn't really performed before.  He is a walking song book, that's for sure.

We were allowed to dine from the buffet tables.  It was the best dinner we've enjoyed in a long time: peppered slice steak, salmon, sauteed veggies, mac 'n cheese "martinis" with all kinds of fixin's, it was an impressive feast...

I did fairly well, aside from my snafus outlined above.  I brought 1 bass to the party: my Stingray.  Funny that nobody commented on my singular choice, as I have been bringing multiple instruments lately.  I sounds great for all that we did, and the low B is just the ticket for a song in Eb.  However, for slapping parts, a la Carwash, the top end is just too much.  That was clearly a roundwound strung P-bass.  I should have dialed the horn attenuator back a bit more.  Fortunately, my SWR golight 1x15 tested out okay this week at home.  I set it up in the basement and cranked it up, pummeling through that 2-bar slap solo from You Can Call Me Al at varying tempi.  It was sounding distorted in Birmingham and I thought I had "overwhelmed" the poor fellow.  My rig gets a nice little workout on these jobs.  Bass equipment takes a fair amount of brutal punishment to push that air along.  Perhaps I was overloading the input from my pedalboard?  Gain stages galore - need to keep it at unity.

Untouched photo of Dianna courtesy of Lexxi.