Red Lion Post-gig recap, a week later….
Here’s how you know it went well. When the sound guy comes up to you as you’re breaking down and says, “This was great. So nice to hear something different than the same ten songs.”
And here’s how you really know it went well. When the waitresses come up to you independently and say, “This is the best Wednesday we’ve had in months. We told the manager to book you back.”
So, it went well. Counting medleys, we played 42 songs in the two sets. My friend Mark Bloom said the sets were much too long for an hour, and I told him not when every song is 2:20. We needed every tune. We played 63 minutes the first set and 67 the second, and that’s only because my lead guitar player, Joe Gagliardi, had a strap malfunction and some cord detangling issues.
The Red Lion is a good spot for us. The stage is big enough and centered, and the sound is great. And 50 people looks like it’s packed. You have to lug some more gear than the other venues we’ve played (I had to rent two amps and a drum throne), but it was completely worth it.
The highlight of the first set was when we nailed “Telstar” and the audience was laughing at the end (as they should) and I said, “How stupid was that?” To which my keyboard player, Mike Berman, protested, “No!”
The highlight of the second set was when I looked up at my wife’s table five songs in and saw a guy who looked like Paul Shaffer. Who turned out to be Paul Shaffer. He stayed for the last dozen songs, came up on stage as we were breaking down and we had this exchange:
“Fantastic! I have heard so much about the Truants I had to come down.”
“Wow. Thanks.”
“What was that instrumental you were playing when I came in?”
“That was an old Beatles song, ‘Cry For a Shadow.’”
“Cry For a Shadow? Cry For a Shadow! That’s before they learned to write titles.”
I should note, we had done TWO shows at Letterman that night, so to have him come down after an 11-hour day to see us was beyond touching. Luckily, most of my guys didn’t see him. “If I’d known he was in the audience,” said Mike Berman, “I would have….”
“Soiled myself,” finished my bass player, Al Sklar.
Got a lot of nice emails and acclaim the next day, but the best was from my friend, Ed Sesteidos, who wrote simply, “I am now a Truant and I need to be disciplined!”
I’m trying to drag this out because, frankly, I don’t know when we’ll be getting back together again. My otherwordly lead singer, Gabriel Fabella, is going to push forward with his talented originals band, the Dilettantes, to try and get them into the recording studio. This is an all-consuming project. I will never get in the way of an artist and his goals. I know he loves the Truants, and we love him enough to wait. Until then, I’ll hang around at jams and maybe do a workshop. A month shy of two years ago, we rehearsed for the first time. Now, nine gigs later, we break. As College Boy so often says in THE RINGER, ”Some guys just live right.”
