Back at Home

The band has settled down and will take respite from tour life for the next three months until making a long anticipated move to New Orleans. Until then FGF will play shows around Colorado most every weekend, building a fan base and capital to pay rent at our sublet in North Denver which has turned out to be a perfect fit, replete with kitchen, office, rehearsal space, living room for watching Broncos wins, and an extra bedroom for hosting company.

Needless to say, band life is pretty cushy as compared to our frenetic two-month fall tour. We even had this thing called the "internet" hooked up yesterday.

Just because we've found some regularity and even fruit and vegetables in our daily lives these days, doesn't mean we don't face challenges at our job constantly. Although we've worked hard enough to build a local gig schedule that will support costs like living in a house, such an intensive schedule can have its downsides. So many gigs cause a band to walk to the fine line between exposure and over-saturation in a given market. This phenomena really comes down to supply and demand economics.

The "demand" for a given musical act in a geographic region is static at any time. As soon as the supply of live shows by this artist surpasses the demand, attendance at shows will drop.

Most successful bands I've had experience with know this rule. They will play only once every four months to once every couple years in a market depending on their overall popularity, size of the market and size of venues available. This packs out the shows they do play, giving the appearance that the artist would be a sell out every time!

This may seem a sterile, non-artistic way to look at growing a fan base. But realizing the economics of the situation can help a band realize they need to make every show special from the minute it is booked, through promotion to the last note and final curtain.

And I don't mean special to the musicians on-stage. Some bands (Phish, The Allman Bros.) have seemingly defied these laws of music market economics and are capable of holding weekend-long festivals with no support acts, or 15-night runs at theaters, all because they forge a unique experience out of every show. This requires much forethought, rehearsal and many, many songs in the band's catalog. Not to mention musicianship that is as broad as it is deep.

It is this breadth and depth of material which our substanial gig schedule does allow for. We get to hone our skills in many different genres and styles, even if we are playing for ourselves sometimes...

We do get the opportunity to make some shows special in their own way. We took the stage minutes after Barack Obama made history on Nov. 4, playing to an ecstatic crowd at the Fox Theater in Boulder who had four years of optimism on their minds. For our scheduled NYE show in Denver at The Wash Park Grille, we plan on playing the psychedelic soundtrack to a late 90's cult film classic, corresponding costumes and all.

The bottom line is that we are a very young band and it would be impossible at this point to prize quality of production and promotion over quantity of gigs necessary to support ourselves.

A quote by someone who should be an inspiration to everyone in the music industry can help sum up what I mean:

"Now... what ya'll wanna do?
Wanna be Ballers? Shot-callers?
Brawlers -- who be dippin in the benz wit the spoilers
On the low from the jake in the taurus
Tryin to get my hands on some grants like horace
Yeah livin the raw deal, three course meals
Spaghetti, fettucini, and veal
But still, everything's real in the field.."

-Puff Daddy, "It's All About the Benjamins"

Tour... Check!

Frogs Gone Fishin' rolled into Denver on Saturday, weary and tired from 50 days on the road. The mountains have never looked so good. Traveling west on I-70, you don't see the distant purple outline of the Front Range until you are well inside Colorado, a beacon for your arrival in Denver.

The final driving leg of tour was particularly grueling, 23 hours and 1,141 miles in the car after our last gig in Asheville, NC. We stopped for a Halloween get-together with our friends Kinetix, another Denver-based band, in Columbia, MO. Switching off in the driver's seat every three to four hours, I drove the 6 30am shift through that less-than-scenic neighbor state, Kansas. The sunrise over the cornfields was pink and inviting as we approached the Colorado border.

We've had a short break from music since Saturday, but rehearsed yesterday in preparation for our homecoming gig in Boulder tonight at The Fox Theater. This will be our biggest show in Colorado to date, and we couldn't be more excited. We'll have more of an extended break from touring through the winter, as we plan on playing shows within Colorado until we depart for New Orleans for another semi-permanent stay in February.

Some highlights of tour included:

- Making it to Flagstaff for the first gig of tour, after our car failed to start in New Mexico.
- Discovering Bar PM in Lubbock, TX. They treated us well and the kids at Tech know how to get down.
- Austin City Limits (I scored a free ticket!).
- Helping people in Houston feel some sense of normalcy after Hurricane Gustav wreaked havoc on their city. (After going through Katrina in NOLA, I could relate).
- Discovering Lake Charles, LA.
- Everything in New Orleans, always. See the post here for a more complete write-up.
- Playing for the debate watch party in Nashville. For a town as conservative as Nashville, the Democrats really know how to party and get behind their candidate.
- The surprisingly chill atmosphere and creative energy of Dubuque, Iowa.
- Carbondale and Normal, Illinois. Cool people all over Illinois.
- Staying at Carl the sound guy's house in Minneapolis. This house is filled with musicians, sound-guys, light-guys, creativity and energy. A house like this would benefit the music scene in any city.
- Too many car-bombs at the Irish pub show in Milwaukee.
- Thanksgiving dinner, prepared for us in Green Bay.
- Going to sleep back in Nashville after driving straight from Green Bay.
- Collaborating with our friends DJ Bowls and The Green Horns in Tennessee.
- The hotel room in Kentucky, a luxury so late in tour.
- Discovering North Carolina and Asheville, a heady town in a beautiful state.
- The first glimpse of our beautiful home under the mountains, Denver.

To distill all the events and faces of tour down to such a simple list would betray tour itself. In private we will thank everyone that fed, housed, helped, handled, handed-down, and tolerated us for their hospitality.

It takes me several days to adjust to life at home after tour. Sleeping in a bed, eating regular meals and interacting with the same set of people everyday outside of the band all feel awkward. Driving a car less than 30 feet long feels like driving a go-kart. The show tomorrow night at The Fox will help ease us back into the routine... We get to see all our friends at once.

Phans Rejoice

Phish is getting back together. No group performing today has the emotional potency and musical impact that Phish had throughout the 90's and into the new millennium. If you are unfamiliar, a quick history:

Phish is a four-piece (guitar, bass, drums and keys) formed in the mid-80's while the founding members were still in college. Their musical style can only be called eclectic because they do not fit into any one definable genre (except the "jam-band*" label many have stamped on the music). Phish played hundreds of songs influenced by rock, bluegrass, funk, reggae, folk, classical, and jazz. Their oftentimes extended improvisations led to the jam-band label and popular recognition as inheritors of the Grateful Dead legacy. Going from small clubs to theaters to some of the biggest musical festivals ever held, Phish carved out a unique niche market for themselves in a time of MTV and 90's pop-rock radio prevalence. In 2004, Phish broke up and are now reuniting in 2009.

In 2001, I was an angst-driven Rage Against The Machine fan and had yet to discover the life-changing, musical world of Phish. Now, RATM is a fantastic group but it was only so long before my comfortable existence in life would clash with the violent socialist ideals of such a politically weighty group. Phish's music encompassed much more than any political opinion for me. In fact, the music was apolitical and seemed to encompass life itself. With over 620 original compositions, Phish music is literally a microcosmic world in and of itself. Trey Anastasio's guitar playing had (and still has) an enormous influence on me, as did the band's composition and live strategy. Without Phish, there is no way I'd be sitting in this Minneapolis coffee shop, enjoying a day off from tour with my band, analyzing last night's show on headphones.

Given the fact that Phish is an integral part of my musical life, you will be surprised to hear that their reunion is bittersweet for me. This is for a number of reasons. First, a large part of our band's fledgling fan base are Phishheads and will depart for Phish tour at the drop of a hat. What's more, I want to go to, too! On the For/Sure Productions side of things, Phish tour prevents us from bidding on one of our planned acts for Mountainside Mardi Gras: Porter, Batiste, Stoltz with Page McConnell (of Phish), on keys. It is both satisfying and scary to realize how intertwined my existence is with the super-group.

Ultimately, Phish's reunion will force me and the rest of the band to step away from the shadow of some of our favorite musicians and find a unique musical voice. I certainly don't want people shouting "Trey" at me for the rest of my life every time I pick up a guitar. True, there are worse guitar players to be compared to, but I'd like to think that my musical vision is more comprehensive than that...

But, it doesn't mean I won't see you in the parking lot when Phish comes to Colorado....

*A note about the "jam-band" label and associated contexts. I wrote recently about a review we received in a Denver paper. In it, FGF was labelled as "hippie music", as if that was a definable genre of music. Simon and Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles would all be considered "hippie music" by some people, despite how different these bands were. This prompted at least one insightful letter to the editor by an apparently attractive female reader named Whitters, and my decreased respect for Westword as a publication in general. Their reviewers should remember that the word "music" is half of the useless title "music critic".

Summer Tour Wrap-Up

Over the course of the last post-less week, Frogs Gone Fishin' have been wrapping up our Summer Tour '08 in the Midwest. Since playing Dubuque IA, we humped it to Minneapolis (again), Sheboygan WI, through Milwaukee to Chicago where we wrapped up tour two nights ago.

I was very impressed by this part of our country, most of which I had never been to. As I've said before, tour impressions are the most subjective kind because oftentimes, one night is the only time spent in a given place. Nevertheless, we found Midwest cities to be clean, modern and not without a hearty arts scene. In smaller towns, artists and musicians don't carry any stigma of being poor hippies with dirty feet, but are welcomed in some places as relief from the monotony that rural life sometimes produces.

FGF was lucky enough to have several very special Frogs follow us through the last leg of tour, all the way from Iowa to Chicago, even as their families and employers questioned their travel plans. I had not expected to be followed on tour for several years at least and the surprise was wonderful, as many bands depend on a traveling fan base for their very existence as touring musicians.

These tadpoles (some say "Froopies" [Frogs+Groupies], a term I don't necessarily embrace), embody the open spirit of the people living in the smack middle of the US. This spirit as it applies to live music is then indicative of a country-wide willingness to seek out new music and support it.

It has been well documented in United States history that, in times of war or economic stress, live music tends to flourish because the average person needs an escape from the daily grind of making ends meet. I cannot tell you how many times I've talked to a fan after a show, only to have the conversation augment into a wider ranging discussion about the state of our country. If my music is method of healthy escapism from George Bush's America, THAT IS AWESOME BY ME.

I fully believe in music as therapy (that psychology degree is paying off!), whether as a simple escape from the daily grind or a mechanism for literally soothing the cognition of an agitated mind. I'll finish with a story to illustrate my point.

Shortly after starting our last show of tour in Chicago, I noticed a socially awkward individual standing by himself near the stage with a musical instrument case in hand. Now, playing down in New Orleans has taught me to be a musically accepting person, realizing that the benefit of musical inclusion is far greater than the musical discontinuity a random sit-in might bring. Standing in front of the stage, instrument in hand, is the international symbol for "let me get up there". Most bands cringe at the uncertainty of an unknown musician possibly butchering a song in front of people. But, because so many of my musical opportunities have started with an unplanned sit-in, I welcome the risk.

So at set-break, I talked to the ambitious guy with what turned out to be a soprano recorder, and we agreed that John Lennon's "Imagine" would be a good tune for a jam. I don't know if you've ever heard a soprano recorder, but it's timbre is not what you would label as "soothing". The dude joined us for "Imagine" and played what could only be labeled as questionable. Despite his mistakes, our mystery musician received the loudest applause heard all night. He left the stage, and we finished our set.

It was only after the show that I learned that the guy's name was Jonathon. He is a regular bar patron who is also a functioning autistic. Autism is a cognitive condition which severely effects a person's ability to interact socially and verbally with other people. I had noticed Jonathon's lack of eye contact and skittish motions while discussing what song to play and now that someone clued me in to the situation, his mannerisms made complete sense.

Another curious aspect of autism is a need for a high degree of order in the external world. For many autistics, this order occurs in the form of music and sound. I observed that in the silent spaces between songs, Jonathon would become noticeably restless. Yet, when we grooved, he found solace in the regularity and predictable patterns happening in a schema (music) that is easier to perceive and understand than spoken language.

This is why music is truly the "universal language". Jonathon was smiling, happy to have played with us, to have related his way of perceiving the world to the band and everyone else in the bar. The audience, knowledgeable about Jonathon's situation, rewarded us with applause for being musically open.

This type of open musicianship is becoming increasingly rare, especially in genres like jazz, where a higher degree of technicality is needed for jamming. It is ironic that jazz has devolved into an elitist art form. It was the open jam sessions at places like Milton's Playhouse in New York that spawned the careers of artists like Miles Davis.

I want to focus my energy away from any sort of negative attitude on stage. If someone botches a section, the least professional thing anyone could do is say "that's the worst we've ever screwed that up..", especially in earshot of the audience!

I realize I grow long and I said I'd end this post already, but I will do so with a written quote handed to me on a napkin by an audience member at the same show:

"dear Frogs, the good shit never comes easy".... I'm going to remember that.