Another splendid and different week at Pete’s Candy Store. Each one is just jammed packed with lessons as performers. Here’s the inside scoop of some major points.
1) Microphone placement is hard! We tried to put Stefan in the back so he wouldn’t peak out the microphones and so we could get more bass. Didn’t work. Stefan still has a huge sound in that room and the Mic is just crying with clipping. Boo-hoo. And not enough bass. Rrrrg.
2) Push-up contests are weird but fun. I’ve never been too much into the whole frat boy macho thing. I never really took sports or feats of strength too seriously and as a trumpet player I am certainly not the lead player puffed up mold. And yet, the push-up contest that broke out at our show was kind of delightful and silly good fun. Maybe it was the hipster spirit of irony that made a tribecca native of artistic parents engage in push-up battle with a google savant. (long story . . . Stefan went nuts one night and fell off the bar at Burp Castle to the delight of his new techie friends. (longer story . . . bartender says to Stefan, “Please be careful!.” Stefan responds, “I do this all the time.” which is kinda true. Regardless, he proceeds to slip-flip off the bar in flagrante desaxo (Youtube evidence please!!))) Oh,yeah, google won 25-24.
3) In an intimate room like Pete’s you can undersell it a little more. It’s like the difference between live theater and film. Out in the streets we’re doing a 100 yard show, projecting outwards to hundreds of people at a time. Big gestures, loud volumes and huge dynamic and tempo shifts draw people in. At Pete’s that approach is too big. A wink or a whisper is heard an felt by everyone. We could stand to take it down a notch and be more smoldering and less burning for these kinds of rooms. It’s clear on the recordings to me when we are pushing too hard… maybe most of the time!
4) Put fresh batteries in the frickin’ recorder you dimwit! Cheezus. It ran out half way through.
5) We can put on a real good, fun, sloppy show. Which brings us to the featured of the week. To explain some of the ad libs – I was looking around for our friend Kate who was sadly very late in arriving. A guy in the audience jokingly said that his name was Kate and we dedicated the song to a dude named Kate. Why this tune is featured this week: it’s just a fun time. Check out the break in Stefan’s solo. Awesome rhythmic grunting. On my solo, my mute chose to leap from the bell of my horn which startled the crap out of me. It through me off and sent me into an harmonic and rhythmic tail spin. The whole thing is just wild and makes me smile each time I hear it. Enjoy.
If you are reading this in syndication you can listen here.
Next week’s theme: “Slow and Fast”. Creepers and burners. We’ll play a blues that is so slow you’ll have time to do the dishes between each beat. We’ll play a tune so fast that epileptics would be wise to bring a mouth guard. At the end of the night we will play exactly one song that will be extremely and excessively medium in tempo.