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APRIL 2006 NEWS:
Here's a picture of the band: Casey Driessen, Me, Missy Raines & Jim Hurst Nickel
Creek The tour proper, which stretched from Sept to Dec, was the most extended tour that both Nickel Creek and I have ever been on (except for a grueling 3-month van tour I did in Western Canada with a little known Canadian singer/songwriter named Ray Griff way back around 1982). In an effort to emphasize a more current image of the band as represented by the new CD, we brought a dedicated lighting technician and 4 lighting towers that got set up behind the band. He did a great job doing tasteful but somewhat rock and roll lighting. We also added a production manager. Because of the additional crew and gear we expanded to two buses, each hauling a trailer. This meant fewer folks on each bus so the traditional 12-bunk configuration was modified to 6 very luxurious bunks that my wife referred to as “condo-bunks” when she saw them. I felt like I’d died and gone to the big time! This tour could have been called “The Dance Party Tour”. Many times during the extended load-outs we would invite friends, family, and fans onto the bus for dance parties in the front lounge generally DJ’d by Sean with his ipod – we had the bus rocking with everything from The Band and Flatt & Scruggs to Radio Head. Former Footworks member, Heidi Kulas, brought her clogging mother and grandmother to our Greensboro, NC show and all four of us were clogging together on the bus. Speaking of clogging, we went uptown with that on this tour as well. At my urging, the crew built me a little dance platform – a 4’x4’ piece of 3/4” plywood raised off of the ground with some 2x2’s. Phil installed a pickup on the bottom side so when I jumped on that thing with the black and white “Spectator” jingle tap shoes (given to me by the late Charles Sawtell) it was thunderous! Toward the end of the tour it took very little urging to get Chris to jump up there with me and do a little combination that I made up for us to do together. I believe Sara would have been up there as well but someone had to play the fiddle. Alas, we did not win either of the Grammy’s for which we were nominated (Contemporary Folk and Country Instrumental) but we left shortly after for a 2 1/2 week, mostly sold-out tour of Ireland and the UK. It was a bit of a hardship/camp-out. To keep costs down we hired a tour bus and had only 1 clean-up room each night. It was an older bus complete with manual transmission, only a curtain separating the front and back lounges (party central) from the bunk area, water that kept running out, a smelly, tiny bathroom, and grumpy bus drivers. To keep our spirits up we consumed large quantities of Guinness, tested every single malt we could get our hands on, and sampled fish and chips all across those rainy islands. I kept telling the band about Devon clotted cream and scones and we finally found them right at the end of the tour in Bristol, Eng. (Actually, a few of us lucked into some on a day off in Kenilworth, Eng, where several of us went to see an old castle there and celebrate Sean’s birthday – the weather was splendid, thank you very much!). Some highlights included Galway (trad music sessions in several bars), Edinburgh (treated to another beautiful day there), Brighton by the sea, and a great antique store in Aberdeen where I found a splendid bowler from the early 1900’s (Mark, you’re cut off!). We just launched our Spring/Summer ’06 tour starting in New Orleans (where we did Randy Newman’s Louisiana 1928 in tribute) and ending in Grand Rapids, MI. We will start up again on April 6 and our performances will include some big national festivals including Bonnaroo in Tennessee and Lolapalooza in Chicago and some of our old favorites including Merlefest and Telluride.
The group has never had an abundance of male dancers and it was looking like there were none available for this trip. I volunteered to learn a few more dances to be able to expand the moderate role as dancer that I have had in the past. Before leaving for the UK various members of the group taught me the last 4 steps of the French Canadian Gigue de L’Isle, River Root (another blistering Fiddle Puppet/Footworks style routine), a sweet little traditional Irish waltz (brought to the group by Liam Harney), and I brushed up on The Buck Dance that I learned long ago from Matty Gordon but never performed on stage. Learning the material wasn’t too difficult, but being able to get it up to speed and perform it with some confidence was a challenge. I even worried about whether I could pull it off at my age. While in the UK I tried to find someplace to drill the material every day. Little by little it got easier and smoother for me. Fortunately we had school performances for three days in Long Beach, CA before a full show for the general public. This provided the much needed opportunity to perform the new material several times in front of an audience in a slightly more relaxed environment. It was also good just to be able to perform those routines with the dancers several times after working so hard on the material. It was very exciting for me – lots of costume changes, running back and forth between the dance floor and the bandstand – I was right in my element. The other plus was that Eileen was dancing in a few more routines (she’d had to cut back quite a bit since her leg injury) so we were in several of the routines together which meant a lot to me both because she is my wife and the founder of the company. String
Masters at the Kennedy Center The Kennedy Center presented a country music week and they called Jerry to put something together for a show they wanted to bill as “String Masters”. Jerry contacted the Bluegrass Sessions personnel and everyone was available, so emails started to fly concerning logistics and material. As tune suggestions trickled in I broke out DAT recordings I had made of several shows this band had done when it toured and started to refresh my memory on how everything went. I knew that with the pressure of this very high profile show it would be very helpful to me to be as on top of the material as possible. Jerry wanted to do a tune off of his most recent CD that had received a Grammy nomination called “Who’s Your Uncle”. He apologized up front about some rhythmic twists and turns. I replied that the work I’d been doing for the past three years had prepared me pretty well for such things. Since I did not have a copy of the CD he suggested that I download it from iTunes which is something I’d never done before. Justin, Nickel Creek’s very capable and mild mannered monitor engineer, explained to me how to set up an account and download the tune. I was once more amazed at modern technology. Speaking of which, eventually I transferred that and other tunes I needed to practice off of the DAT tape onto my mini-disc player so I could put that in my back pocket with the controller strapped to my belt loop, with headphones coming out of that – makes it very convenient to work on music with both hands full of a bass. What a world! Everyone came into town a day early (Mon, Apr 3) to rehearse. The Kennedy Center (bless their hearts) put us up in one of the nicest hotels in town – The Four Seasons in fashionable Georgetown. Most of us found our way to the bar before the designated rehearsal time and we had a chance to chat and cut up for a while. Jerry got cornered by a lighting guy who wanted a set list and solo order. He good-naturedly (that’s Jerry) agreed to provide it for him, but I don’t know if he knew at the time how time consuming that would be. He managed to follow through. We had originally requested a room in the hotel to rehearse. There was none available but it didn’t matter because the hotel rooms were as big as half of my house. Sam volunteered his room and the rehearsal was great – there’s nothing quite like standing in a circle and playing with a bunch of acoustic instruments. The only pressure was time – otherwise it was all about helping each other remember how the arrangements went, working out a few new tunes, and enjoying the incredible music and company. Jerry suggested we open with a band version of a duet he had recorded with Bela on “Double Time”, a CD of duets that Bela released many years ago (which included a playful banjo duet that I did with him called “The Bullfrog Shuffle”). They had done it in a band context before but I believe this was the first time I was playing it this way. It wasn’t too hard for me to learn because I’ve always loved that cut so I kind of already knew it. Since my CD was fresh off the presses I had asked about the possibility of doing something off of that. I was pleased that everyone was receptive to this so I suggested “Cajun Stomp”, a good groove number that would be easy to learn and fun to jam on. I also thought it could work without a bass, but Sam volunteered to maintain the low end and thump on the old dog house. Proud of you, Sam. He’s actually quite good at it, as you might imagine (He’s a pretty good banjo player as well – there’s a cut on an old Russ Barenberg CD that Bela produced that has Sam playing banjo and Bela playing guitar – The Snowflake Reel, maybe – I can’t remember . . .). After the rehearsal many of us were joined by Bela’s mother and step dad, Barbara and Joe, and some of our women folk who had joined us for the big event including Eileen Carson Schatz, Jill Douglas, and Abby Washburn, for a lavish meal at the hotel. We were celebrating and living large! April 4, the day of the show, was a long one. We headed to the venue at 2:30P and it was a whirlwind of setting up, sound checking and working out some remaining segments (including the banjo/fiddle/dance number). We had to sort out who was going to use ear monitors or wedges, and we ended up using a mixture of both. There were some technical difficulties with the monitor system, but when they were trying to sort these out we’d just get off of the mikes and gather in a circle to play since we had so many things to run through. Our front of house and monitor engineers, Richard and Zack (who have been with us for most of the BG Sessions shows), ran hard that day, but finally got most of the bugs ironed out and did a great job for us – thanks, gentlemen! The show had sold out days before, and it was quite a rush to be playing at that place with those folks at such an event, and I think we all felt the charge. I had so much adrenaline coursing through me that it took two or three numbers to start to feel the stage under my feet and the groove in my fingers. The first set was rocking with lots of up-tempo numbers. The second set started with a variety of smaller configurations – Sam and Jerry did a duet, Bela did a solo number, then he and Stuart did a fiddle/banjo duet on which I joined them with clogging about half-way through. There were more quiet numbers in this set and more cutting up, including Bela and Sam’s duet “I Know You’re Married But I Love You Still” with Jerry joining in later in the song to sing a trio during which they started unbuttoning each others shirts – nothing like a little old-fashioned antics! I believe Sam is the main culprit when it comes to onstage (and off) mischief, but everyone else can generally give as good as they get (Stuart introduced Jerry’s tune as “Hoosier Uncle”, written for a relative from Indiana). Somehow I avoided getting my pant legs rolled up or my bass pin shortened on this show – Sam, you’re slippin’! So
lots of pickin’ and lots of grinnin’, as is always
the case with this
band. Days later and back on the road with Nickel Creek I’m
still
floating from the experience. I’m a lucky
guy! PRODUCTION Audio
My next undertaking with Final Cut Pro will be to learn to do multi-camera edits. I organized a three camera shoot of Footworks’ 25th Anniversary show at Strathmore Hall outside of Washington, DC in the spring of ‘05 and Dave Wells shot a couple of Nickel Creek shows with three cameras as well on our tour last fall. So there are some exciting projects and a constant learning curve ahead of me.
Updated April 26, 2006 |
