The same night I played with Stereo Embers a few weeks ago, Sunset Grooves were also offered a show at the Fircrest Golf Club in Tacoma. I didn't want the rest of the mates to not get paid so I reached out to Dave S., who played bass in Point of Sail. Outside of a few messages on FB, I didn't know him but hooked him up with Dusty and crew. Anyway, at that gig, at which Dave was fine, they were offered this gig for a local insurance agency's yearly awards party.
Pay was good and I only had to rehearse once. I brought out the new P bass after I had fixed the input jack last week. It worked fine at rehearsal so I figured we'd be OK. I took off from work a few hours early, came home, took the dog out, then headed down with a 1:15 commute to Tacoma.
Got there, loaded in, and it was like playing in an MPR at work. We had a little stage and that was just fine. They gave us a ready room where we could dress, so that was cool. Before hand, we got to hit the restaurant and I got me a ribeye steak. The guy who hired us told us to order anything we wanted; I took him at his word. It was huge and delicious!
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| very tasty |
After pounding that steak (I did share some with the mates), we got dressed and took the stage around 8pm. I didn't take many pictures but before we started, I did pretend I was the keyboard player.
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| So many notes |
Here's my pedalboard, big deal.
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| Same old, same old, but I put my tuner back on because I don't love the tuner on the wireless |
And then here's outside the windows to our stage right. Once it got dark, it was just black, so this was the best view.
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| There were better angles, but this is what I got |
The gig was weird. Plenty of people, many of whom said how excited they were to see us. We played a few tunes and had a few dancers, but no one was ready to dance the whole time. During one song, Jen stepped on my DI cable and I tried to move it out of the way. When I did that, my bass went out. I still got signal to the wireless, but it wasn't transmitting from the pedalboard. I replugged at the snake and that seemed to help.
A few songs later, bass was dead. Still had the signal, but Dennis came up and swapped XLR cables for me, which seemed to fix the issue. The first set continued and it was... fine. The room was muggy and people were not super interested in us it seemed, so we finished the set and took a quick break.
At the second set, there were some dancers and people started getting into it. I felt weird on stage because it was sort of small and it was just weird energy; it wasn't the type of night to get too animated, it seemed.
Towards the last half of the set, the dancers stayed and some more people joined, so it started to hit its stride. We finished and Larry, the owner, wanted us to play our "favorite" song, but we were tapped out so we played Escape, which we skipped on the first set. It was fine.
Despite the lukewarm crowd, Larry and his leadership team seemed to really like us. They said they're doing it again in Dallas next year and who knows, maybe we'll get an invite. I won't hold my breath, but would be interesting if it happened.
That's it for gigs now. Cass and Robb have DJL in the next month or so, and Cass has Love Battery in December. Maybe I see if anyone needs a sub. In the meantime, I need to work on the Planets' website and see if I can keep that viable.
