A week after a twenty year late prom....

Alright, so last weekend was the Dudley Manlove annual 80's prom, and now that I have had a few days to reflect back on it I have a few things to say.

First of all, AWESOME!  Man, it was killer rocking out the stage at Neumos with hits by Journey, Simple Minds, Duran Duran and Asia.  Yes, for all of you peeps out there that said you would come and did not show up, you totally missed it!  I gotta say, this was way better than my prom!  I recommend to all high schools forking out the money to hire our band to come and play prom!  

My close friend Randy Wilhite (If you don't know this guy, you should.  Me and Randy have made some epic memories together that I will never forget.  Shout out to Jeff also for coming to help!  Good guys, good guys!) was taking 'prom pictures' the night of the show and it was hilarious.  You can check some of them out at  this website.  Classic 80's cheezy prom pics!  What a blast.

Neumo's seemed absolutely packed when we were there playing but at the end of the night it turns out that we only had a little over half the venue full, and it holds 600.  It used to hold 800, but hell, I do not know where all those people would go.  Someone told me that they ended up closing the upstairs, and supposedly because it was memorial day weekend it was supposed to be a hard night to get people to come out, but... I blame it on all you retards that said you would come, and then did not!  We wanted to sell this one out bad, and tried hard too!

I might be over re-acting, it was still really fun, and really full.  

14 things that everyone who did not come, missed.

1.  Plastic pants make Mack sweaty.

2.  Kim Virant (one of our special guests) is a great singer, and has a great voice.  But still... True by Spandau Ballet is the longest song ever.  More D- chords than playing So What at 80 bpm.  Oh god, that was a terrible jazz joke!  Thank you Chuck Deardorf for instilling the jazz joke gene inside of me, lol!

3. Lots of make up, and lots of prom dresses, and big freakin hair everywhere I looked.  

4.  It turns out that my outfit for the night (see below) matches perfectly with a tallboy of Pabst Blue Ribbon.  Go to the website above and look for the picture.

5.  Clark Gibson, close friend and total bad ass jazz saxophone player, DESTROYED every sax solo for the night.  They were so epic, and there were so many dips, scoops, bends, reverb and held altisimo notes that I swore I was in heaven.

6.  Chris Ballew of the Presidents Of the United States of America, works a crowd like a madman!  On a side note, I finally got to ask him a question that I have been wanting to ask him since I was an 8 year old boy.  You see, the Presidents cd was the first cd that I ever owned, and my friend Leif LaFuente told me when I was just a kid that the song Peaches was about sex.  No way, absolutely no way.  Well, turns out it is... I took it to the source and asked him in front of everyone!  

7.  Stefan plays a nasty roto-tom.

8.  Stefan plays a nasty A on the old Juno.

9.  Craig sounded great, played more distortion than normal and at one point was rolling around shredding on the ground.

10. I totally forgot how to end a song that we have played a hundred times - blew it mack, you freaking blew it!!!

11.  Jeff wore a very stripy shirt and came up with our new ad campaign for our upcoming club gigs in July.  ("For Two Slices of All American Cheese, come celebrate the birthday of our country at the Triple Door with the Dudley Manlove Quartet!" Haha, perfect.  Nice delivery too Jeff, I have it on mini-disc!)

12.  A un-named friend... Ian Borak... got kicked out of the club because he was supposed to be Prom King, and tried to climb through the DJ to get to the stage!  I tried to get them to let him back in, but that bouncer from Boston is freaking gigantic!

13.  Played a whole set of Keytar.

14.  I was warned against this, and I did not believe it, but the staff at Neumo's started to act like a bunch of tools at the end of the night.  Thats not cool man, were all just trying to have a good time!

These were audience photos, official pics coming soon.

Until next time!

Mack

P.S. Jeff, any video footage on youtube yet?

Looks like I am checking out Stefan, we had a discussion on Facebook about this and that was the consensus. 

Clark is killin it, every time.  I think Craig is singing... lol
Asking Chris my important question.

Getting attacked after the show... who is that?

Bronco's, Herbs, and El Chepultepec... DENVER!

After driving for hours through the midwest - (In Iowa we hit some super heavy wind, which made things interesting... and because we had not slept at all the night before we had to stop at a "Loves" gas station and take a nap for an hour, not gonna lie, it was kind of ghetto!)  we made it to Denver.  

After visiting with some of Clark's old friends from high-school we met up with our friend Dan Schwinnt, who was putting us up while we were in town.  We unloaded our stuff and got ready to head out for the evening.  Now, while we were in Denver for four days we hung out at a lot of the same music venues, so I am going to try to just hit the highlights at each venue, instead of taking you through a chronological monster blog of the whole thing.  I need to be better at updating the blog daily, so that something like this does not happen!

Herbs:  Kind of a dive bar, nice stage though!  Clark is friends with the owner, and the first night we were there we saw a r&b band, AOA.  Man, I thought they were excellent - we do not have any r&b or blues bands up here in Seattle.  They were just playing James Brown, Earth Wind and Fire, some old hip-hop stuff, man I thought it was awesome.  Great players too - the singer was this freakin buff military guy, who could play a good rhythm guitar also.  (Another thing we do not have up here... rhythm guitar players!)  The second night we were here, was after we played a gig at Dazzle's and we were partying.  There was an organ trio playing, this guy Vlad was playing b3, and Laura the owner was playing tenor, and this guy Mark was playing drums.  Met a lot of players at Herbs, everyone was nice.  There was this guitar player - he was blonde, and his name was Andrew.  I had seen him everyday in Denver at the same jam sessions and gigs we were at - he was super cool.  Anyways, we were outside chatting on the patio and this older, sketchy blonde woman in her late fifties came up to us.  She started hitting on us dudes hard core, you know, in a disturbing way.  Then she busts out with - " Yea, I used coke and meth for years. " It was pretty obvious.  Anyways, then Andrew says he is gonna go get another drink and straight up ditches me with this scary woman.  I am too nice, because I just let her talk to me for a long time instead of just getting out of there!  At one point she touched my arm and said "My friends are leaving hun, but I do not have to go with them....." as if to suggest something absolutely terrifying and disgusting.  Anyways, Andrew, if by chance you read this ever, thanks dick.

El Chepultapec - Supposedly this was a super hot spot the whole time Clark was living in Denver.  Apparently it was the shittiest bar ever, and Clark was severely disappointed to see that they had re-done the inside.  Because it was not as crappy, supposedly it has lost its charm, and was now coincidentally even crappier!  We came here basically every night we went out, it was right next to Herbs, and all the other hotspots in Denver.  Each time it was what appeared to be a jam session, which was cool.  There was usually a crowd in The Pec as it is called.  They have some sort of terrible piano, just because it is a grand piano does not mean that it is any good!  A lot of kids from CU would come jam at The Pec, there was an alto player that was killing, and a trumpet player or two that could blow great solos.  The Pec is right in the middle of all the Denver hot spots - so every night there are a bunch of drunk assholes outside looking to get in a fight.  I think they called it LODO, and it was like a combination of the U-district in seattle with pioneer square and belltown.  I was pretty sure we were gonna get in a fight at some point, people are rough drunks down there.  One guy tried to pick a fight with us by stealing our lighter!  Hahaha, what a tool!  He can have it.

Random Boulder Colorado Jam Session - This jam was at a hotel/blues bar.  It sucked.  The players were excellent, at least the house band was.  Mark Simon on bass, and the drum instructor from CU and some hippie pianist named Andy something.  The rest of the jam was filled out by a pretty terrible group of middle aged vocalists, singing jazz choir style, songs like fly me to the moon.  They were not good.  I do not have that much against jazz choirs, but this was pretty terrible.  So sitting in I think I played some vocal standards that got all fucked up and beats were lost and shit got turned around.  No fun, I felt bad the rest of the band were these high school kids and they had no idea what was happening, so I just dragged them through the mess and got out of there.   Funny thing though, Richie Cole the famous alto player just happened to be at the jam session.  What the hell was he doing there?  We talked to him after wards and it turns out he just likes to come out to Boulder and hang some times.  He sounded good when he played, and was happy to hear that we saw Phil Woods play in Chicago.

Dazzle - is a great club.  It is similar to the Jazz Alley of Denver.  Nice Yamaha grand piano in the dinner room, and a Kawaii in the bar.  Music every night, beautiful room and stage!  This is where we played our gig.  The lineup was me on piano, Clark on saxophones, and then Dan Schwindt on guitar, Dwight something or other on Bass and Bill on drums.  This was Clark's quartet from Denver + me for the gig.  They are all excellent players, and they are cool guys to hang with.  We played some heavy hitters at the gig - Joshua, the Miles tune kicked my ass.  Who would have guessed that I was not going to see the little 3x that was written at the end of the section that switches from 3/4 to 4/4?  Well, as you can guess, shit went down pretty hard!  We managed to recover though on the next few tunes.  Lots of Clark's originals and Dan's originals, we played Dear Old Stockholm which was bad ass because I had just learned it.  I love that tune!  Anyways, after our gig (which unfortunately was not as full as we had hoped) we meandered over to the bar on the other side of this wall.  In the lounge section of the club, Dan who just played the gig with us, ran a Tuesday night jam session.  I did not play at this session, I was just hanging out with the other guys from the band the whole time.  This jam went on until midnight, and then we went over to Herbs for a jam session, and then onwards to some 4:00 am breakfast!  

All in all, I had a great time and met a bunch of cats that all sounded good.  That is a great thing to have music in common with people when you go to a new town, it can make you some good friends real fast.  During the days in Denver it was hot as hell, which was nice.  I hung out at the river a bunch, walked around downtown (which is about a third the size of downtown seattle) and went to an aquarium where I watched tigers.  Think that does not make sense?  It doesn't... but it really happened!  

The drive home back to Washington sucked bad.  About 22 hours straight.  The worst parts were Wyoming and Utah.  There is nothing there, except Salt Lake City.... which seemed pretty sucky from the truck!

Anyways, I have a lot more to write about, so peace out until the next blog!  I think it will be about the Dudley Manlove Quartet 80's prom!  What a bunch of trouble makers we are!

Cheers,

Mack

1. Swordfish at aquarium!  What a weird animal.

2. Park that runs along the Platte river, downtown Denver.  Park covers the entire bank of the river in city limits.

3. ......

4. Best friends on the ride home.  22 hrs of hell!  Ahh!

70 hrs of music in Chicago

I arrived at the airport Thursday morning at 7 o'clock a.m. for my 8:45 flight to Chicago. I fly somewhere about once or twice a year, so I do not fly that often, which means that sometimes I forget that it is a pretty brutal thing for someone as tall as me to be slammed into a typical airplane seat. I was excited I got the window seat, but this was quickly counter-acted by the two year old toddler sitting in front of me with her grandparents, and the infant sitting directly behind me. While one small child would cry (the one in front) the one behind me was busy trying to pull my hair. When I sit in an airplane seat, and recline it, I am still too tall for the seat, so my head hangs back further over the seat than the average person. This made it easy for the curious baby to reach out and grab and yank, or to just caress the back of my head.

There were two things that I noticed immediately about Illinois from the plane. There are a lot of lakes, and Lake Michigan is one big mother of a lake. I got off the plane, said goodbye to my young friends, and went out into the humidity to meet Clark in our new home... the black 2002 Dodge Durango. We dropped off our stuff at a cheap hotel just outside of town and jumped in the car at four o'clock on a Thursday evening and started the drive into Chicago. People think that we have bad traffic in Seattle... oh boy are they in for a treat. It took us about two hours to travel twenty miles into town, and then another hour to find a legal parking spot inside the city. Four hour plane ride + Three hour, twenty mile drive = we better have some fun.

Chicago is a great city - it makes Seattle look like the sticks. The downtown area is huge, there are people of all nationalities all over the place, and it sounds like a 'real' city. You always hear trains, subways, people talking or yelling, sirens, horns... then the smells (good and bad). It was slightly overwhelming at first. It reminded me of cartoons I used to watch when I was a kid, and how the cities would be portrayed. It really is like that! The parks and public spaces are kept really clean downtown, and all along Lake Michigan is a giant park that stretches miles and miles - as far as I could tell it bordered the whole lake. The weather was nice - reminded me of Seattle. The city is right on the lake, so it keeps it kind of cool and windy.

We grabbed a bite at a Potbelly Deli (sandwich chain) and then headed out to see some music. The first thing we went and saw was at the "Jazz Showcase" right downtown. The DePaul University Jazz Ensemble was playing, it was their top big band, and their special guest was Phil Woods. The Jazz Showcase is a pretty cool club, kind of reminds me of a lot of other jazz clubs that I have been in. The big band opened up with a few charts, and then called out the Phil Woods Quartet. I forget who was playing bass and drums, but I know Jim McNeely was playing piano. So the big band and the Phil Woods Quartet finished out the set. Phil is a nasty alto player, but he is getting pretty sick. It was happy to see him still playing, but he had to take a couple breaks to catch his breath while the rest of the band played. The highlight of the show that night was a student arrangement of a Phil Woods tune. This trumpet player (2nd trumpet) wrote an arrangement and won the "Downbeat Best Student Arranger" award. It kicked ass. The big band in general just seemed like a good college band to me, they were not as exceptional as Chicago musicians had been built up in my mind. Freaking outstanding vibes player though - best player in the band, and he only got to play on a handful of tunes.

Then we rolled over to the Green Mill - Al Capone's old hang, it was once owned by "Machine Gun" Jack McGum. We were meeting a friend of Chad Mccullough's. We walked into the Green Mill and it was the most bizarre experience ever. It was like we were in the 30's. The act for the night was a swing band, and man they were exceptional. It was another big band, and they played a bunch of traditional swing charts, had a guy and girl singer, and an announcer. It was a large band, a eighteen pieces or so. Stylistically everything sounded exactly like those old recordings of swing bands you hear, except their was no poor sound quality! All the soloists sounded like swing players, nobody was showing off or playing any crazy shit - just pocket playing, and it was great! Not to mention that it was standing room only (200+ peeps), there was swing dancing on the dance floor in front of the band, and between every song they either had the announcer speak to the audience and make jokes/announce the next songs, or they had the singers do these comical thirty second commercials. It was a blast! One more funny thing... Pabst Blue Ribbon is brewed in Milwaukee, which is just north of Chicago. It is a much more respected beer in the mid-west. After this we went back to the hotel and crashed hard.

Next day we visited the University of Illinois, near Champagne. It was a long drive, through very flat farm lands. I was surprised at how green this part of the midwest was though, granted it was May and not August when I am sure everything was brown and burnt. The school reminded me a bit of WSU - except in a bigger town. Everything was perfectly flat also - that was really weird being born and raised in western washington, where everything is a hill. Ate some food, bought some groceries. Clark was supposed to have a meeting with the department chair, but we got stood up (after traveling how far..?) so that was a bummer. On the ride home it started to rain real hard. It rains a lot in Washington, but it rains hard in Illinois.

After getting back into town, we went back to the Green Mill to check out the Victor Goines quartet who was playing that night. Victor was the leader of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra for a while, and also was head of the department at Juliard. Now he is the head of the department at Northwestern University in Chicago (which has a jazz program of 9 students total). This show kicked ass. I mean, they were playing hard, it was great. They just called tunes the whole night, but they could all play at a level which just made it incredible. Dana Hall, the drummer, teaches at the University of Illinois, and is possibly one of the best drummers I have ever seen. Marlene Rosenberg was the bassist, great player and she could groove hard with the drummer. She kind of reminded me of Margie Pos at cornish. The piano player was the weakest link, still great, but I felt he was not at the same level as the rest of the band. Ryan Cohen was his name. Actually, I take it back, he did sound great at first. But half way through the 2nd of 3 sets he did not know the tune All of You, that a special guest singer from New Orleans was singing with the band. From that point on, he was not doing so hot, he lost his confidence.

They played Jitterbug Waltz - it was awesome, I am going to learn that tune.

Their gig got over at 1 in the morning, and at 2 in the morning a jam session started. We stuck around long enough to play, and then split. It is led by a DJ from the local jazz radio station - and although they were a good band, after hearing the best shit I have heard in years they sounded like shit. Me and Clark were sitting in at the same time as some chick singer, which meant we had to play There Will Never Be (in the key of Ab) and There is No Greater Love. Plain. (I did feel kind of at fault though, she wanted to play s'marvelous, but I did not know it. If that is that tune from the musical that goes "Swonderful, S'marvelous, .... " then I am glad I did not know it, that song sucks bad.) Ran into a friend of Dan Kramlich out there, a killin' alto player. Dan if you are reading this, he says hi! I forget his name, but he went to school in Michigan with you, shaggy brown hair, shorter.

We hung out til about 3:30 am (another glorious thing about Chicago - clubs/bars are open til four, serve til four, then open again at six!) and decided to save some money on a hotel, and just start the drive (16 hours) right then... Dundun duh........! Will they make it? Will they survive or will they get lost and wake up naked somewhere in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa, or will both happen?

(pics - 1. Inside the Green Mill, famous club. 2. Everywhere in Illinois outside chicago. 3. Chicago. 4. Definitely not Starbucks out here!