We played back to back Fri. & Sat. shows at Club 90. It's always our favorite place because there's always a good turn out, and it's exhilarating to see people dancing to the music you're playing. We worked on making our transition flow better, and to playing songs right into each other. Also, this was our first time playing this much with Dean, which helped us groove with better.
Friday was great. The highlight for me was Mark's funny leather shirt.
Saturday was remarkable, if we were playing the game Guitar Hero, we were using star power pretty much the whole night. A lot of our friends and family showed up. Nate was in town and he let loose. He danced the whole night, and helped us sing the last song. April was there as well, Mark's ex-band mate and ex-wife, she rocked the house by playing keys for two sets and singing backup vocals. Rachelle, the venue owner sang with us for a song as well. It was a night of good vibes, silliness, and good music. When I thought that we have a million good shots at Club 90, and we wouldn't need any more, these were taken by Aaron's mom Kirsten and are absolutely great!
Be sure to catch us at Club 90 April 20, and 21!
Nate joins us on stage to sing "I Wanna Rock N Roll All Nite"
Rachelle joins us on stage to sing "Don't Stop Believing"
April killed it on the keys!
Mark's guapo shirt.
Allison did amazing as usual.
It was a lot of fun rocking with this gal.
Nate said "If we can play lead guitar, surely we can learn the Cupid Shuffle"
We played Club 90 11/3-11/4. Like always, it was awesome! There was a good turnout, and lots of people were dancing. This gig was special because it's the first time we integrated keyboards since we've recruited Mark. That means I got to play bass! It was pretty fun.
Nate drove across the country to fill in for Dean, because Dean was attending a wedding on the East Coast. It was good to see Nate again and perform with him. He still had his chops and it's like we never had a 5 month break playing with him. Club 90 has upgraded their lighting; and it was pretty awesome!
We live streamed both shows; both trying to capture the crowd and the band. We had quite a bit of interaction on them. The audio quality isn't the best, so I took them down afterwards, but it's kinda fun; it allows our international audience be part of the show.
Enjoy some of my favorite pics from the show!
Special thanks to Kirsten Fager, who always takes such amazing photos!
We had the opportunity to play at a wedding reception at the popular museum, The Leonardo. We were not only excited to be playing at one of the nicest venues in Salt Lake City, but the museum's Event Planner said that if she liked us, she'd suggest us for future weddings and events at the museum.
Preparation
Dean really stepped up for this gig. He's still getting up to speed, and he had to learn a lot of material for this gig, and he nailed it! While, we knew all the songs, it was essential to practice with Dean to be able to jive with him.
We learned a few new wedding appropriate songs. The bride and groom requested that we play "I Was Made For Loving You" by Tori Kelly feat. Ed Sheeran. We made an acoustic version of "All of Me" by John Legend for slow dancing. Also some other love themed dance songs, "Brass in Pocket" by Pretenders, "Lights" by Journey, "Sugar" by Maroon 5, and "Some Kind of Wonderful" by Grand Funk Railroad.
We got the idea of incorporating lights into our shows. Luckily t
here's dozens of videos on YouTube, and my friend Tyler gave me lots of advice and lent me some lights. I'll discuss more details about what we did for lighting in another blog post. But, the lighting was essential to our success.
The Show
Congrats to Kristy & Steve!
The Leonardo has a large event center on the top floor. We setup early in the afternoon, because the room was going to be used for the actual ceremony as well as the reception. Aaron's cousins, the Ohumukini Twins, offered to be our sound engineers and they did a fantastic job. We were given the entire auditorium as our "green room". A room were we could put our cases, and eat our delicious catered spaghetti meal.
The audience was very kind, lively, and receptive. It was one of the most energetic crowds we've performed to. It was awesome to see all the colorful lights swirling over all of them. One of the guests asked to sing a Backstreet Boys song. The whole crowd loved it!
The bride and groom afterward shook our hands and told us that they loved us.
Conclusion
It was an awesome show, we had fun, the guests had fun, and the event coordinator, Emily said that we definitely made her list for future performances. We also were able to get a 5-star review on GigSalad! Thanks to Aaron's mom, Kirsten for taking some awesome pictures! More of them here.
This was our second time performing at the Utah State Fair; we previously played there in 2015. Last time was our last show with Ryan, the previous bassist. This year was Dean's first show with us. He's only been living in Salt Lake for 3 months, and he's already playing his first gig!
Growing up, one of my neighbors played at the State Fair every year, and he made it sound like it was the dream gig; the most high profile gig that any musician could aspire to get.
With that perception in mind, we were disappointed in 2015. It was on a Wednesday night at 9pm, and we were performing to a nearly empty crowd. We were playing for free. Parking was
$10 for each vehicle, and we had to pay for our family members. And we received no food vouchers. It felt like pay-to-play, as we lost money playing that show.
This time around, it was a little better. We got paid, a modest amount. Almost enough to cover the cost of parking, and bringing in family members. Although it was a weekend, and there were quite a few people who watched us, it still wasn't a great turn-out. Probably because of the late hour, and Saturday is always busier than a Friday.
We were only given one delivery pass, so we met in the parking lot of a nearby grocery store, and crammed as much equipment as we could into Aaron's truck. The rest of us carried the rest of our gear from the parking lot. We got to the stage early, so we wandered a bit until it was our turn to get setup. The band before us was a Beatles Tribute band, made up of some older gentleman with some really cool hippie apparel. While they put on a great show and had every right to feel like a rockstar afterwards, they immediately left the stage to go mingle with friends and family, leaving all their gear on stage. We're only given 30 minutes for them to take down, for us to setup, and soundcheck. Which isn't much time at all. After a few minutes, it was apparent that taking their equipment down was the furthest thing from their mind. I had to wade through the adoring fans and ask each one of them individually to please take their gear off the stage. They seemed a little annoyed, but they did it. I think it was lack of gigging experience, not blatant rudeness.
Their delayed take down, made our setup a little more frantic, but we were able to get started and finish on time. I recorded a FB Livestream on my phone on a tripod. It turned out better than expected. We had quite a few viewers, and interactions. We also got some awesome pictures.
Overall, it was a good show. It was a good motivator for Dean to have a gig to get ready for. Mark assured us that Saturday during the day is much better. It still rubs me the wrong way how stringent they are with performers, they ask you to play for free or at a reduced rate, and then they try to get all the money they can out of you.
It was March 2015, and we were doing really well as a band. We had just released our Starlit Horizons, EP and had been receiving good feedback from it. We were trying to play as many shows as we could to promote our original stuff. Our songs we wrote to be full, energetic, have anthem-like choruses, raging guitar solos, lots of crash cymbals, and harmonic guitars.
Allison's Scandalous Dress
We were invited to play BYU's Restaurant/Venue, "The Wall", part of their semi-annual Battle of the Bands. This was our first time playing in Provo, and we were stoked to be reaching a new audience!
We scoped the competition beforehand by looking at their social media to gauge our chances of winning. There were some good bands playing, and we were lucky to be sharing the stage with such talent.
I probably most-likely overestimated how good we were, at least at live performance. In theory, we had one of the larger followings, probably the best looking web presence (my opinion isn't biased by the fact that I do all of our media, I promise), and our songs had probably the most complexity as far as musicianship was concerned.
Us old geezers at the Wall with our stage banner!
We were pretty stoked, brought all our new stage banner, our fans, friends, and family and we were ready to rock! The first offsetting thing was that we were one of the last performers, and people
looked like they were ready for this event to be over. Everybody was sitting, and it was clear that they weren't going to engage in our high-energy music. Next was the sound guy, he insisted that
we didn't need a sound check. The guitars were so loud and overpowering. It was a small venue, and it wasn't enjoyable to listen to us. The sound guy didn't adjust any level on his mixing board during our whole set. It threw off our mojo every time we'd look out at the empty-eyed, reaction-less audience. (Besides my wife and sister who were jumping up and down by the stage.)
We got our score card back from the judges, and we placed dead last. Most of the comments were, that they couldn't hear us over the overbearing guitar.
Then we got this awesome press in some music blog of one of the concert goers.
It's true, Ryan the bassist at the time was in his early 30's. The rest of us were college-aged; in our early 20's. I just turned 24. I thought that was a weird comment coming from someone attending BYU. Men at BYU go on missions and then begin college at age 21. I'm 6'5", and that might make me look older.
Allison was wearing a modest dress that would be fitting to go to Church. She was moving around the stage, but it wasn't sexualized at all. (You can see how she moves around on the video below)
I hope this blogger's discomfort of women wasn't shared by the whole audience that night. Then there was this gem:
His verdict rage at the end seemed to be directed at us. It's no secret that folk/singer-song writer/indy music isn't my favorite. Even though that genre was extremely trendy at the time, especially in Provo. I grew up on Rush and Dream Theater. More is more. I'm not a fan of super simple guitar or piano riffs, lack of instrumentation, lack of drum fills (if there's even drums), lack of guitar solos, lack of energy and the obsession of trying to be "original", by dressing like a hipster and trying to sound like The Lumineers. *
Whatever the case, we felt like a lot of people were extremely judgmental and it gave us a bad first impression of Provo. (We don't want to discount all the awesome support we got to everyone who went down to that show!) But, we're over it now.
Honestly, the main reason that we don't play down there because we have plenty of opportunity here in Salt Lake City; and we all live in Salt Lake City. When we weren't having as many opportunities to gig, we were willing to make the long drive down to Provo for a 20 - 30 minute unpaid set. We are totally willing to play there again given the right opportunity. In fact, we did a livestream concert at Rock Canyon Studios last June, and it was a blast, you can check out some of those songs on our YouTube!
*My statements on the indy genre were over simplified and generalized. I do appreicate the talent that goes into it, and blah blah blah. If you're offended, get over it. ;) I'm just one guy, what do I know?
We played at an Independence Day party last year at a private party, in Park City. It was really the gig that kick started our band. Prior to that, we only had about 1 hour of cover song material. We had to learn 3 hours worth of songs. Howard, the host really made us feel special; like we were guests of honor. He loved us so much, that he invited us to play at charity event that he had later that month, and he wanted us to play at his Independence Day party, the following year. We graciously accepted. He left us a glowing 5-star review and kept telling us how we were his favorite party band. That was such a confidence booster, and has helped us feel like and act like a professional band.
We played again this year, and it was awesome as usual. One of the party guests remembered us and some of the songs we played and was really to see us again. The food was great, the people were awesome, and the fireworks were spectacular. We got a solid lead for another gig!
This was Nate's last gig with us. He moves out this weekend. It's going to be sad, and we're going to miss him! We're going to be taking a break while we audition a new guitarist, and get them up to speed. We'll be booking again in September.
We had a show, Sept. 23, at a local venue called Ice Haus. We opened for another local band named Eminence Front. We all arrived early so that we could have a thorough sound check. Unfortunately, the sound guy hired by the venue never showed up. Luckily, one of the bartenders was able to help a little bit. He showed Aaron our drummer where the mixing board was and how to use it. We had the drummer of the other band play drums while Aaron mixed our levels. While it was upsetting that the sound guy didn't show up, we did our best and the show went on. I was particularly excited to try out my new Gibson Les Paul and my restored 88' Kramer Strat. Mark was also excited to try out his new Orange amp!
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It was a good friendly crowd, and we had a lot of fun! Unfortunately, I had a sick wife at home and wasn't able to stay for Eminence Front. But, Mark the bassist did and he said that they did an awesome job. It was Aaron's Mom's birthday, and we sang the Beatles Birthday song to her.
While I wasn't able to video tape them, you can stream their music on Spotify!
Thanks to Aaron's mom, she was able to take some awesome shots of us while we played! Check out more of the photos on our Instagram!
We were asked by Prestman Auto to play this gig 4 days ago (Wednesday). Even though it was last minute, we had our 4 hour set list prepared, practiced, and ready to go. I was thrilled that everybody had the availability to do it. Aaron had a military training on Saturday, but they were ahead of schedule, and were looking to give the students a day off. When Aaron talked to them, they decided to make the day off today (Saturday). This is our 4th gig in the past month. We've made enough money to almost cover all the expenses of our various projects, such as our album recording, and our live session recordings. I'm truly grateful for all the opportunities that have come our way!
This event was really cool. It was to celebrate the grand opening of a new car dealership. They had the official ribbon cutting on Thursday, and today they had a carnival. They had bouncy houses, a car show, free food trucks, free drinks, golf, prizes, free swag, and of course, a live band (us). We played in the parking lot. It was a mighty hot day, reaching triple digits at it's peak. We were glad that we came prepared with canopies. Even with the canopies, I still got a pretty good sun burn! We feel like we did an excellent job. The mix was awesome and we were the appropriate volume for playing outdoors. We got a lot of good vibes from the people there, and lots of people were dancing, and we received lots of compliments.
Towards the middle, we got an unexpected gust of wind. All the canopies of all the vendors almost flew away. We fastened ours with bricks after that incident. One of Aaron's mic stands got bent. At the very end, when we were taking all of our stuff down, a flash downpour erupted. We had to scramble to protect all of our precious gear from drowning.
Overall, it was an excellent gig, and we are excited to play there again. Here's some photos, thanks to Aaron's mom!
Our setup in the front
They had lots of cool cars as part of the car show
Aaron liked this one
Renato couldn't decide between the Audi and the Ferrari
After much deliberation, he decided on the Audi. Unfortunately, they wouldn't accept our band swag as payment.
This delicious BBQ Sandwich was one of the many delicious items from the food trucks.
Aaron had a good time on the bouncy houses until his mom told him that he was too old to be playing on them.
Friday was great. The highlight for me was Mark's funny leather shirt.
