New Kid In Town: Back In Town To Try and Love Again

New Kid In Town - The Desperado Quartet of Tim Turner, Brent Whiten, Brooks Smith, & John Hancotte

It was one of those nights where I felt like a desperado on a long run along the border of the fast lane in the city...  ah, the metaphors could just keep on coming!  New Kid In Town, which is Atlanta's tribute to the Eagles, returned to Toccoa's Elks Lodge.  The Elk's Lodge is a private club, but they open it up to the public for special events such as this one.  The big news for this juncture was that we were a 4-piece band.  Hey, the Eagles started out as a 4-piece band.  Well, we were a 6-piece band when we played in June.  Sadly, Jason and Brad were not able to make the gig.  That put a lot of pressure on Tim Turner to learn all of the guitar parts, and then figure out how to play them all at the same time!  Tim was up for the challenge, and without his chops and vocal skills, we might have been sunk.  We also benefitted from the keyboard/guitar powerhouse doubler Brooks Smith.  He also sings, ladies, but he's taken.  Brooks adds so much, he does indeed perform the duties of two.  Of course, Brent donned his Henley drumming gloves and velvet-fog vocal skills to lead us through umpteen songs we all grew up with.  I never heard the recording, but I thought that we did a nice job recreating these exacting soft rock ditties.  We also had a top notch audio tech in Scott Carter with SL Media.  Scott brings the best gear, mixing from his iPad, and makes us feel like the pampered rock stars we try to be.

We stuck to the set list we played back in June.  Hard to add songs when we have personnel changes and sweating it out just improving what we do play.  Hotel California is the one that makes us sweat in particular.  There are many guitars on it.  I had a late in the game inclination to learn that intro on my recently acquired Ovation 12-string acoustic/electric.  I had never learned it right.  I started working on it, and realized that there is more to it than just having a 12-string.  That's not what gives it that delicate voicing.  It's also the fact that it's capoed at the 7th fret.  Thus, the opening B minor chord is fingered as an open E minor chord.  How did I learn that for sure?  One thing was that I could hear that hammer-on during the G chord, voiced as an open C.  Another easy way to be certain is my good friend Google.  Enough posts about this very popular intro and my doubts are minimized.  So I went about practicing that.  But how to play the guitar part and the bass as well?  My solution was to have the bass rotated around to my back, strap on the acoustic, play the 16-bar intro with Brooks and Tim, then, before the song really kicks in with the rhythm and the vocal, we add the drum rhythm from the version on Hell Freezes Over for 4 extra bars to allow me to take the guitar off and get the bass into playing position.  After that, it was business as usual.  From my standpoint, it worked really well.  It wasn't perfect, but the mistakes I may have made were small enough, so I hope.  Hope we can try that again sometime.  Other than that, I stuck mainly to my Fender Jazz bass, although I had my P-bass as well.  With Brooks in the lineup, the crucial keyboard parts are covered.  No need for Brent to switch to keys like he did last time we were here.  Also no need for me to try to capture that synth break in Life's Been Good.  Brooks did some mighty impressive emulation of that difficult studio creation.

Brent handled all of the lead vocals, and very well I might add.  Actually, Tim sang the Joe Walsh tunes, so that made it more authentic.  If anything, we may have been uncertain about delegating vocal harmonies  We put on a very nice show, with an added set of party rock for the dancing crowd.  We laid into the funk and those '80's rock staples to keep the place jumping.  Funny how Dirty Laundry really got them out of their seats earlier.  There aren't a whole lot of "danceable" Eagles tunes, but the crowd seemed to enjoy it.  Thank you to Brent for treating for the supper and for arranging everything!  He wears a lot of hats and looks good in all of 'em!  A hearty thanks to Tim for making the journey north to make this possible with his 6-string finesse and rude slide licks running down all over a good day in hell... and for bringing Suzette, who contributed some great presence and took some killer pictures (thanks for sharing them, too!).  It was a pleasure to play with Brooks, who made it possible for us to be a quartet with his serious musical chops and spot on vocal harmonies.  I'm in a band with these cats!  Nice.

At any rate, I was already gone into the tequila sunrise - actually not, as I was stopped by a police roadblock on the way home.  No worries, it was just a check point just before I made it to the highway.  Maybe they thought I was some kind of James Dean, right?  "Too fast to live, and too young to die..."

Photo by Suzette Sears Baird

Photo by Suzette Sears Baird

Photo by Suzette Sears Baird

Photo by Suzette Sears Baird

Photo by Suzette Sears Baird
I can tell this was taken during I Can't Tell You Why
can you tell why I know that?

Photo by Scott Carter, from behind his Roland digital mixing console (sweet rig).

Brooks and I sign a fan's vinyl copy of EAGLES LIVE.
We then had to explain to her that our parts were indeed overdubbed on opposite
coasts since we weren't on speaking terms and that we were thinking about firing Felder.
She didn't understand any of the jokes, perhaps because we weren't joking.