Brain Dead!

It's been a while and I thought I should post something...

...Have a good one!

Look what we got! Want one?

Christmas for Beer Lovers!

The Great Taste of the Midwest Beer Festival was held on August 12th this year. Some combination of Motor Primitives has played at the festival since they've offered live music. When I hadn't heard anything from Ted, the "Entertainment Czar," by July, I became concerned. One email later we were in! This year, we had the full band plus the most extraordinarily talented, multi-instrumentalist, Ellie Erickson.
The best way to get to beer fest is by bicycle. Though we showed up at different times, the entire band rolled up on two wheels. With our instruments strapped to our back, we pedalled along the bike path, past the cars & shuttle buses and right up to the valet bike parking offered by the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin. The picture above is of the Casbah pedicab rented out for the day for a wedding. Yup, that's right! This lovely couple had a just married sign on the back of the pedicab and they're celebrating their reception at the beer fest. If you look close, you can see the brides veil.
Volunteer musicians are allowed to enter the fest one hour before the masses so, we got there a little early to savor some expertly crafted brew.
As Robin and Kat "warm-up" before our first set, Matthew and I are off doing a little scientific taste testing. The verdict is.....Yuuuuuummmy! I personally loved the St. Louis Brewery Pilsner and the Delafield Brewhaus Pilsner.
Then, after sufficient "testing" the rhythm section kicked in. It's always been a challenge to be heard at this festival. We're supposted to be acoustic and, once the crowd hits its peak, we're typically inaudible.
This year, Ellie brought her battery-powered Crate amp which allowed us to boost our bass and lead guitar. That helped a ton. I still had to yell rather than sing so, by the end of the second set, my voice was toast. But, I felt warm and toasty too!

Here's a good picture of our friends Jim James & the Damn Shames. As per usual, they're getting the ladies to kick up their heels!

BTW-All photos taken by Michael D. Barrett, esq.

More from Night at the King Club

As I had mentioned in my previous entry, we had 6 or 7 people spill in from a wedding reception. A couple of them wanted to dance on stage with us. Well, Tom Ray, from Lorenzo's Music, had his camera phone at the ready and took a couple of shots of our new friend, Terri (Likely spelled with a heart over the "i"). You've gotta love the enthusiasm.


Maybe we can get some of our seasoned elbow dancers to show her a few tricks!

A Night on King Street

It's always a strange night when we play the King Club. We were there, set up and sound checked by 9:15. As the opening act, we had a tight little 40 minute set planned in order to get the crowd pussycat for Modern Addict and Lorenzo's Music. Don't plan an encore! The opening act NEVER does an encore. That would be bad form.

It wasn't until after our sound check that we learned Lorenzo's Music had to cancel due to an injury. Bummer! I really wanted to see those guys play live! Oh well, there's always next time. So, we were told to go on no earlier than 11pm. We negotiated for 10:45 'cause our fans, though loyal, need their beauty rest. We also added an extra 20 minutes of tunes to help "fill out" the evening.

Kudos to our fans for sticking with us and elbow dancing past midnight. You guys are real troopers! We had a good set with an unexpected group of post-wedding reception revelers offering up some stage dancing. Kat had to keep one of them from trying to "sing along" into one of the mics. At the end of our set, they were asking us to play an Alison Krauss song so that there friend, "who had a really good voice" could entertain the crowd. Sorry, we don't know the song. Gomeroke's a couple of blocks down the road. Thanks for dancing though.

Kat is seen here applauding the Solid Gold Elbow Dancers for their efforts.

We loaded out directly after our performance but stayed to hear modern Addict. They're a fun band with tunes that are great to dance to.
As I was sitting there I began to wonder, what does it take to get people out to see live music? There doesn't seem to be any spirit of exploration. People say that they don't want to pay money to see a band that they might not like but, come on...$5! That's how much a cover was 20 years ago. That's a Guinness, plus tip. That's two cups of coffee if you drink the "fruh-fruh" stuff.

My point is that, I knew almost everybody in the room except the guy from the local rockers, Blamm-O!, who introduced himself after our set. I think Blamm-O! and Ka-Boom!Box should play a gig together and bill it as 'Bands of Exuberance' night. But, I digress...
The evening went just fine. We left around 1:15 which allowed us to miss any crap that might have gone down on King street at bar time. But that's a subject for another post...Sometime.