Have Running With Desire Entertain at Your Birthday Party!

MartaY checks out the birthday cake

J.T.'s Gong Crazy Productions scored Running With Desire a nice little sports bar gig: a birthday party celebration.  It took place a Jeffrey's in Alpharetta on Friday the 14th of June.  Good stuff.  Logistically for me, Fridays are great and not so great.  Work sure gets in the way of other facets of life.  I worked until 4, and luckily not much past.  Spencer was being taken care of, Sabina was downtown and hoping to not work past her normal 5:30, which left me having to deal with letting the dogs out.  I raced home - if circumventing the hellish Friday afternoon rush hour traffic can entail racing - to procure a quick shower, wardrobe check, dog tending and feeding, and instrument gathering.  My rig was already loaded.  This was the day after some major storms came through the area and freed multiple branches from our neighbors' trees.  I saw Steven across the street with his chainsaw and felt a bit guilty that I simply did not have a minute to offer for help.  I headed North to 400 and Jeffrey's on Jones Bridge Road.  The fellas were already there, getting set up and checking some sounds: J.T. on lead vocals, MartaY on lead guitar, Sammy Owens on the drums, and myself on bass guitar.  I brought both SWR cabinets for volume, headroom, and the look.  The look is very important when it comes to emulating these masters of Sunset Strip rock.  I occasionally have had both cabs but only connect the top one; closer to ear level and not as boomy.  We had a fine front-of-house engineer who has mixed us before.  He worked with us to help bring the stage volume down a bit.  It's always a concern when the band thinks the stage and room are larger than in fact they are.

Really, we have never sounded better.  I could hear my vocals well and the energy was good.  We had a whole bunch of dirty dancers - hey, this is Van Halen music.  What would you expect?  We also did a set of party hits to extend the night further, selected by the birthday celebrity.  Crazy incident alert - at some point before midnight, the power went out and we lost all of our volume.  Never really got an answer one way or another as to what had happened.  Oddly enough, I learned that we were done.  What a way to say goodnight!  Strange indeed.  Can't say that's ever happened before.  Everybody had a great time, so I could only guess that the party burned brightly and everyone was as tired as I was.  We packed up and loaded out, including all of J.T.'s cool extras and accessories.  With Gong Crazy, you know there will indeed be a gong onstage...  It was indeed awesome, yo.