ceciliatan

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

The venue was a large outdoor place. Have I explained the term “shed and festival” yet? If you do a lot of “shed and festival dates” it means a lot of summer outdoor venues, and the ones like this and Red Rocks, Great Woods, and Lakewood in Georgia are the best, but there’s a seedy end of things, too. You hear sometimes about bands past their prime eking it out on the shed and festival circuit, i.e. playing the local amusement parks, the multi-band bills with bigger names or better draws, that sort of thing. The thing about a place that only does shows for a couple of months out of the year is a lot of them are somewhat–shall we say–rustic in their facilities.

I’m not even talking about the plumbing or lack thereof but that the backstage areas are sometimes literally shed-like. This place was pretty nice, but there are some where you know they get away with stuff being substandard because they know you’re only there for a matter of hours so you’re not going to make a big fuss about it and if they’re the only large venue in an area they know they’ll have acts coming through trying to pack their tour schedules as efficiently as possible.

I’ll tell you about some crappy places later.

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

That night we went to what I was told was a legendary hole-in-the-wall to see Cray’s new band play. I guess you would describe the venue as a honky tonk. It was a club so no-frills that the stage was backed with wood paneling like a suburban TV room and only had two different colors of lights. Like in some of the jazz clubs I’d been to, you didn’t go there for a “show,” you went there for the music. The audience sat in plastic chairs at formica tables and could get pizza from the bar. The ceiling was low and so was the stage itself, which was maybe twelve inches at best. I’d say the capacity topped out at 200 and that would be if they pushed it to the absolute max.

Cray’s band were going to play two sets. Before the first set he came over to say hello. Flip gave him a bear hug just to make him uncomfortable but it didn’t really work because Cray either wasn’t as uptight as he had been in Japan or he he’d gotten better at hiding that he was. We introduced him and Jam, who looked about as out of place in there as a circus clown on a submarine, and they shook hands and then mostly ignored one another.