Home Sweet Home
We spent last weekend playing in our home town of Minneapolis. While I love getting out and seeing new places and bringing our show to new people, it’s pretty awesome to sleep in your own bed at the end of the night. Hell, it’s nice to sleep in a bed period!
Saturday started with a 9am rehearsal. We had some new material for that night’s set and wanted to make sure everything was tight as could be. I’ll be honest, we’ve been gigging so much lately that it feels like it’s been a while since we’ve sat down for a proper rehearsal (with all 8 guys) and hammered out new material. It was a lot of work, but by then end of it we were all saying how much fun it was and that we can’t wait to do it again (which we did on Monday).
We stopped off for lunch at Marina Deli near the rehearsal space. I’ve never been there before, but I LOVE Mediterranean food. I wanted to try a bit of everything so I opted for the buffet. It’s very expensive compared to the rest of the menu, but it was nice to get some fresh fruit and veggies (as opposed to a plate of deep fried this and that). I HIGHLY recommend this place.
After fueling up on gyros and shawarma, we headed down to the Mill City Ruins Park for our show. If you aren’t familiar with this beautiful part of town, I recommend you drop whatever plans you have for weekend and head down there for a bike ride or walk. If you don’t live here, put it on your list of stuff to check out if you ever come through.
The event we were playing at was put on by an organization called Meet Minneapolis. They’re a non-profit contracted by the city to promote Minneapolis tourism. This was an event designed to show off the city (what better location than Mill City Ruins Park) to party planners from around the country. It was a top notch event and from where I was standing it appeared as though they accomplished their goal and then some.
A wicked storm rolled through, but thankfully it left as quickly as it arrived. It didn’t put things too far off schedule. The sound guys were running a digital system and ran into some pretty big hiccups with the monitors. They ended up replacing the entire board, but unfortunately that didn’t fix the problem. Monitors basically came in and out the whole night. The sound guys kept their cool all night and did everything they could to accommodate us. They were total pros! I’ve seen guys go nuts when stuff like that goes down.
We were asked to play a set of upbeat dance music. I think we sort of took it as a challenge. We stitched together a 40-45 minute set of non-stop UPTEMPO dance numbers with no breaks. After that we came back up for a 3 song encore, again, no ballads. It was tons of fun.
The next day we headlined The Red Stag Block Party in Northeast Minneapolis. The other fun thing about playing in town is playing alongside your friends. Between us all, I believe we had friends in every band that played that day. The bummer is we only got to see a few of them.
Even though it was super fun to watch Shiro Dame and E.L.nO. (yep, an AMAZING ELO tribute band), we just coulnd’t escape the fact that it was brutally hot and humid outside. Not good suit wearin’ weather, that’s for sue! I also felt bad for the dudes in E.L.nO., they wore big wigs the whole time.
Anyhow, we took note of the fun we had on the previous night, and we trimmed all but one ballad from the set. I feel like Sonny brought his A game as he found different places in the show to lead the crowd in dances and chants. I’ve said it before, but I’m probably his biggest fan. It’s fun to get to watch every performance up close.
We finished our set with a jacked up version of Cave Man and exited the stage for a quick breather a few swigs of beer before heading back up for a two song encore. I’d say we brought everything we had and left it all on the stage that night. Can’t wait to do it again up at Bayfront Blues Festival (Duluth, MN) on Saturday.
-Eric (drums)
