The Avondale Estates Autumnfest

Is this is a stunning look or what? You might not be able to read the menue on the food booth in the background but besides hamburgers and fries, you can also get fried Twinkies and Fried Oreos. No, I didn't.
It was a cold day in Avondale Estates, a pretty suburban town a few miles east of Atlanta. We performed for its Autumn festival last year and they invited us back; a good sign. I don't think the temperature got above 50 degrees and the wind was a pretty constant hurricane strength (that's my weather report and I'm sticking to it; others reported it somewhat milder), but it was still warmer than the condo association gig last Sunday night.
We were using their sound system, which only came with three microphones. We use gazillions of them for instruments and singers and just to have hanging around. Fortunately, Mike Nugent brought a good supply of our equipment and set it up before we started and they had a good sound guy who put it all together.
We are getting to the Final Days; not of Armageddon but of producing the much-awaited CD, "Hey Dog." Nugent is working with the production company; he has sent all the copy, spoken on the phone with their artists about design, made decisions about colors, layouts and other looks, and I am sure we are in excellent hands. We were using some pictures of our recording session that I snapped on my phone so, of course there were none of me and they were of questionable quality. I called my friend Don McClellan, who has been a reporter at Channel 2 even longer than I. His son Scott took lots of pictures during the recording session in the studio and Don e-mailed a bunch to me as soon as I called him, then I forwarded them from my Blackberry to Nugent, who shot them off to the production company, all in a matter of minutes! Technology is great when it works. Soctt also shot video of us recording, and when we get the final CD we'll send him and Don copies and then--get this--Don said he will marry the video and the final CD audio mix for a music video. Then if I can put it on this blog...COOL! We'll see; this involves huge leaps into the technological future (okay, it's only the future to me, but still...).

This is our new bass player, Beth Stevenson. Besides being super-nice and a terrific bass player, she has the sweetest old dog who is senile and mostly deaf (except when Mary screamed once for a song that involves a scream and scared the crap out of the dog) (to hear why a scream is needed in a song, get the CD), she also has a huge and really interesting job.
She works at the CDC and is at the center of coordinating the biggest and fastest vaccination effort EVER, for the swine flu. They have to coordidnate production, distribution, information, getting all the doctors and health departments and everyone else on board. And here's the cool thing; she has a Masters Degree in doing all this stuff, and all these PhDs and MDs have to recognize that she really knows what she's doing, so there's a cultural thing going on. She's working really, really hard at that, and still carving out time to play bass with Hicks With Picks in a really cool embroidered western shirt. She's told us the name of the company that makes those shirts TWICE and I forget. Bummer. Since she has to lug a big bass around, we hold all the rehearsals at her house, and she's even cool with us invading every week. So is her husband, John, who seems to be as nice as Beth is. Amazing! Beth also did not eat the Fried Twinkies or Fried Oreos. So shes smart, too.

Wow! We learned!

It's so exciting to find out we can learn! After the gig at the cemetery ("people were dying to get in") we talked about how to improve and came up with a good list.
First, we realized we needed to work more on how songs start, and really get those beginnings nailed, so during the week we worked on any songs that we had confusion about.
Several people told us that when Mary and Allison sang together, Mary overpowered Allison. Not a great surprise since Mary really is louder. We traced the loudness difference in part to being at the mercy of someone else's sound system and having to set up in a big rush. That meant we didn't have good audio in our monitors, so we had a hard time hearing ourselves.
We also realized that was part of a third problem, that we felt disassociated from the group. We all came to the same conclusion about another factor in that, though; in the cemetery, we were lined up in a long row facing the audience.
So last night we had another gig, playing for the condo association of Lullwater condos. It was a real nice event; they set up tables in front of the old mansion that forms the basis for the development, had a caterer bring barbecue, beans, corn on the cob and cobbler, had some portable fire pits out in front of the band (it was WAY cold for an October night), and a lot of really nice people.
This time we brought our own sound system. Mike had repaired cables so everything worked well. I bought a new cart to lug stuff around. We got there two hours early so we would hve plenty of time to set up and do sound checks until we got it right. And we set up in a semi-circle, all very close to each other and standing so we could see each other as we played. Put it all together and we were all very connected.
It made a HUGE difference in our playing! We were much tighter, felt engaged through all the songs and, as a result, really connected witht our audience in a way we had not in the cemetery. This crowd was much more alive. Ha ha. (In the cemetery it was hard to hear ourselves over all the coffin). And we had a lot more fun, too.
Our practice paid off, too, because we really nailed just about every song beginning, and even did a lot better on some of the tricky endings of a few songs (where we stopped the instruments and did a capella harmonies very slowly to end).
Now we have yet another gig next week! What an amazing month. We have a rehearsal Thursday when we should be able to achieve perfection. Of course, repeating that in front of a real audience is another challenge. For my part, I realize my picking goes all to hell when I have lots of people staring at me, so that just means I need to practice perfect and then stick to what I practiced. I think.
Next Saturday, we'll be live around noon (I think) at the Avondale Estates Fall Festival. Y'all come out, now, here?

Making the CD

We didn't exactly raise the dead at Oakland Cemeterey, but none of them got up and walked out on us, either, so we count it as a victory. We had great weather (cloudy and cool with a threat of rain, unlike last year when it was broiling hot) and a good turnout from family and friends. A few people we didn't even know hung around and listened through the whole performance! Who'd a thunk it?
But, as you can see from the picture, we are looking ahead to the CD (and the next gigs we have lined up). That's Mike Nugent in the background on mandolin (my jokes about leaving his guitar out in the rain and drying it on the hot setting wore kind of thin at the gig) and Charles Chaz Gowing in the foreground on guitar during our recording session at Doppler Studio. We have the final mix and now we're going around about packaging. We may have decided to use some of the gig payments to pay for the packaging, rather than donate all that directly to the church, which is our usual warmhearted and generous pattern. Since we give all the proceeds from selling the CD to the church anyway, it seems like an ethically acceptable way to do it, because the packaging costs were climbing pretty high.
We have decided on a pretty ecofriendly package with almost no plastic except for the shrink-wrap, which we all hate but apparently its required for a professional look. We plan to go with a "wallet" design on of cardboard, or at least very heavy paper, that opens like a wallet (hence the clever name) and the CD slides into a sleeve. So there's no plastic jewel case. It would be printed on 4 panels, and we hope to include lyrics on an insert.
The goal is to have this done, printed, packaged, ready to sell, by the church's Homecoming in early November, so times a-wastin'. We hope to sell a bunch that day, and then sell more at the church's Live Nativity Scene leading up to Christmas. What a perfect gift for those people who are wasting their time looking at live animals and religious stuff when they should be out buying presents!
We have several gigs lined up in the near future; Avondale Estate's annual festival in the park, and a home owners association; then we have a Bluegrass Sunday at church November 15. Whew! What fun. We learned at the Cemetery we need to do more practicing on the starts and stops of songs; there's a big difference between handling the tough stuff by ourselves and pulling it off perfectly on the first try in front of an audience. Back to rehearsals!