Valentines at the Bakery

Last night was the first Rosewood gig of the new year - a 7-9pm Friday evening (which coincidentally was Valentine's Day) at St. Peter's Bakery. We played the bakery twice last summer, so we knew what to expect - it's a charming and cozy little place, and the staff treats us very well - stuffing us with their pizza and delicious baked goodies.

The first question was whether the gig would actually happen, as we'd had 18 inches of snow the day before. I had my doubts, but we got word early on Friday that the bakery had power and the gig was on.

The second question was whether we could get our PA and sound working right. You might think that a three-piece acoustic trio would be a very simple operation - but it's not. Chip handles this, and I don't know the details of what he does - but both guitars go into a mixer, which feeds a PA system and a monitor. My amp is currently completely separate - I just plug into my amp and set an appropriate volume. My new amp with the XLR output will let me go into the mixer and the PA.

So the setup is fairly complex (at least to my inexperienced eyes), but it's always worked with no issues. Last night when we set up and powered on, there was a loud buzz coming from the PA. We couldn't figure out where it was coming from. We were grasping at straws. Was someone's phone interfering? We turned off our phones. Was a power cord wrapped around another? We untangled them all. This was right up until our 7pm start time, and tension was high.

Hey, that's a smile, right?

I don't think we did anything that "solved" the problem, but we started playing and it mostly went away. But it was a tense and adrenaline-filled warm-up instead of the relaxed warm-up we would have preferred.

I wondered if the snowstorm would have people staying home - and had an image in my head of us performing for Darling Wife and the bakery staff. But I couldn't have been more wrong - the place was completely packed. As we were setting up, the staff was getting extra tables and chairs out of storage.

The stage area is small to begin with, and it was even smaller last night. We couldn't set up three across - it had to be Sandy in front, and the two of us behind her. This made things a little harder. We key off of each other by sight and sound. The bakery filled with people was quite noisy, so we didn't have all of the sound cues we normally have. And not being in a line meant that we also didn't have the visual cues we normally have.

The result is that it was not our tightest performance. It went fine, and I'm sure that no one noticed - but the three of us knew. Our sets were well-received, we got a number of very nice comments, and the tip jar was gratifyingly full.

We played two new songs we've been working on - Carole King's "It's Too Late" and The Boxtops' "The Letter". We also did a mini Beatles set in honor of the 50th anniversary of their coming to the U.S.

We relaxed with a glass of wine before tearing down. The bakery folks gave us each a bagful of goodies and a big loaf of fresh-baked bread. I got the raisin and walnut loaf. Yeah baby.