Tour Blog 1.0

After nearly two and a half weeks in the Midwest (Michigan mostly) I'm back in the Golden State wishing that I had more gigs booked somewhere...anywhere. Thanks so much to all of you who were able to make it out to one of the shows. I had a fantastic time and the tour was a great experience...and a learning one.

On Saturday June 30 I kicked off my shows back East the easy way, in a cafe in my hometown. I was pleased with the turn out (the place was packed!) and it was great to see so many familiar faces in the crowd. Jacob Longton started the show with a solo acoustic set and sounded great. I was very lucky to have Brian Brodie play bass on 6 songs during my performance. I was in a band with Brodie for years and he recorded and mixed Trouble and Debris so it was really special to perform with him again.

After the Cafe Classics show I had a two day break before heading to Southgate, MI to play at the Modern Exchange. This place is pretty interesting. Back in my day it was a sort of thrift / costume store called Penny Pinchers. Now-a-days the front room is a vintage clothing/used record (as in the kind you play with a needle) store and the back warehouse-ish room where they kept the costumes is now a cafe/concert venue. It's actually a pretty cool spot. There are quite a few comfy couches in the concert hall and the stage is pretty large. There's also a band lounge area above the stage that gives you a really cool bird's eye view of the performance. So the place was cool, as for the concert ............. I was the second of four acts to perform that night. The act that preceded me was a high school duo who were extremely confused as to what type of a band they were. They were mostly punk rockish, however they also tried to do a bit of outlaw country complete with theatrics. So, as I'm sure you can guess, their fans really took to my introspective acoustic ballads as we were so similar. As the night wore on, however it became evident that the duo was actually the odd man out (odd men out?) and the other two bands were sort of similar to me. Band number three was acoustic based and sort of funky (like a Dave Matthews feel) and band number four was female led acoustic based roots rock. Actually, band number four sounded really great and it was a damn shame that there were only 2 people in the room (3 if you count me) whilst they rocked it out.

That brings us back to Monroe for an auto show that my friend DJ put on for the Downtown Monroe Business Network. These gigs are kind of weird because you're just background music (albeit loud background music) for the car enthusiasts. This fact, however, did not deter a small crowd from congregating in front of me during my performance (so what if the crowd was family and my mother's friends? Don't judge me. I'm a hit with the Baby Boomer Generation). It was a fun show because (a) I knew all of the people in front of me who were actually paying attention to the performance, (b) I got to play a bunch of covers, which is usually a good time and (c) I'm awesome.

To be continued...............