ceciliatan

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

In the end we hired a trumpet player Mitch knew and liked working with and who Marvelle knew from other gigs, a serious-looking chap with round glasses named Lorne Acevedo. He was from New Orleans and had played with Wynton Marsalis. Fran and Clarice booked to come in for two weeks of full band rehearsal in July, after everyone took a break for the Fourth.

I saw Court a couple of times during that audition and rehearsal period in New York–took her to dinner once, that kind of thing–but once she figured out that she could make it to The Hangar for the last hour (or more if we ran late) of our rehearsals, she was there pretty much every night.

One Friday at the end of June, when she’d come by five nights in a row, I asked her if she shouldn’t be spending more time socializing with people from the company where she was working, i.e. shouldn’t she be going out for drinks to schmooze with people or whatever?

She looked at me funny. “Why would I do that?”

“Isn’t the point of an internship that you’re making connections with people you might get a real job with later?”

She blinked. “You’re kind of an idiot, aren’t you.”

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

(Thanks to donations in the Tip Jar topping $100 this week, voila, here’s a Saturday chapter! -ctan)
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I’m trying to figure out how much to tell you about rehearsal. I mean, I think it’s kind of interesting but I’m pretty sure my descriptions of it probably aren’t. We settled into a routine where me, Bart, and Christian spent about six to eight hours a day working on stuff, about half of it prepping for the opening act set we were going to do and about half of it trying out rough arrangements I’d made of Ziggy’s songs.

That usually meant Chris and I worked out when I got up, we rehearsed all afternoon and early evening with a break in there for late lunch or early dinner depending how you wanted to count it. Then after we knocked off in the evening, that left time for us (sometimes all three of us, sometimes me and either Bart or Chris, sometimes with Courtney, sometimes with Colin…) to go catch a show in one of the clubs or a late movie.

And then after we’d come home, I’d go up to my room with my hair reeking of cigarette smoke and write music.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

It didn’t, of course. Make sense, that is. The world still made no sense when I woke up later but at least I had less of a hangover.

I managed to get myself showered and make myself presentable before going downstairs to find out who was there. Courtney was playing hostess to a bunch of folks sitting around in the living room. Chris was in the kitchen brewing more coffee. I waved to the various people I didn’t recognize and moved toward caffeine.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

When Carynne and Bart and Chris went back to Boston, I went with them. There were still two weeks before Team Ziggy would take possession of the audition/rehearsal space, plus Ziggy had some stuff to do on the West Coast, and I really really wanted to get home for a while. Not that I didn’t enjoy living at Ziggy’s, but, you know, that was more like couch-surfing. (Except he had a bed instead of a couch.) I needed to make a lot more phone calls and that was easier to do from home, too, plus I wanted to work on stuff with Bart and Chris…

Yeah. Time to go home for a little while.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

“Your new manager is pretty great, you know that?” Courtney said to Ziggy. “The man first of all is a walking Rolodex, and second of all, not an apparent slimewad.”

“I’ve liked him so far,” Ziggy said with a small shrug.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

Soundcheck went all right. Everyone seemed mellow, and pacing themselves for three days in a row. We didn’t need to overdo it and after six weeks on the road it wasn’t like anyone needed to learn anything new.

After we were done and the other bands were doing their checks, it felt to me like a whirlwind of short conversations took place. I guess because they did. No sooner would I have talked to one person when another one would grab me for a couple of seconds. Martin pulled me into a debate with someone about the superiority of New York pizza; George had a technical question about the placement of one of my effects boxes to ask me about; Louis wanted to ask about Boston.

“Did you say you had a spare room I could crash in for a couple of days?” he asked.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

When you come from the New York area, you grow up learning a certain disdain of tourists. So it was distinctly weird to be staying in a hotel in the city for an honest-to-god vacation. It really hadn’t sunk in for me that we’d be playing tourist in what was, really, kind of our hometown. Well, mine anyway. But there we were, like something from a Christmas movie, waltzing in and out of a lavishly decorated lobby on our way to and from leisure activities like seeing the tree and the windows at Macy’s.

The tree. You all know about “the tree”?

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

I went home. To Allston, I mean. But as I may or may not have established before, I’m terrible at being home. The problem with defining one’s self by what you DO instead of by where you’re FROM is that home becomes this really fraught concept…

Maybe I shouldn’t generalize. Maybe it’s only like that for me.