Day 5: New York, NY
Nau mai
Yesterday we played a show at the Bowery Ballroom.
A small victory was achieved when I managed to eat breakfast before midday. After rising at a fashionably early hour, we walked a few blocks to Forever Coffee where I ordered the breakfast tacos, a trio of corn tortillas loaded with egg, gouda, bacon, pico de gallo, sour cream, jalapenos, and avocado.
At 1pm we departed for the venue. We all had the full body experience that comes from driving along FDR drive, a roadway that delivers a juddering that threatens to dislodge your teeth and disintegrate your bones. While this violent jostling occurred, we took in the beautiful sights through the left-side windows of our van, enjoying the picturesque views of the East River and the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn that this parkway provides. The FDR took us on a straight run down the east edge of Manhattan until we neared the bottom and cut inland for several blocks to our destination in the Bowery neighbourhood.
The Bowery Ballroom was an easy load-in; our van parked a few metres from the front door and then it was quick push to the front of the stage. We found ourselves in a medium-sized hall with timber floors and a mezzanine lined with a wrought iron balustrade that curved around the edges of the room. Natural light streamed in through a tall, arched window in the back wall, providing us a reassuring connection to the outside world.
Everyone threw themselves into unpacking and setting up. This was a day of experimentation, and we wanted all the time we could get our hands on to test our array of new equipment and to prepare ourselves for delivering a set of brand-new songs. Back home Jon had been hard at work putting together a new mixing rig, a compact masterpiece of combined technologies that would vastly simplify and speed up our stage build time. Our in-ear-monitor rig and Gabe’s front-of-house mixer would now be contained within a single machine. Everything could be connected together with a few simple ethernet cables. At some stage I’ll get Jon to deliver a proper, detailed explanation of this marvel, but for now just be assured that this is a game changer.
Everyone also had brand new pedal boards, various pieces of auxiliary percussion, and plastic wind instruments to trial so we spent our full allocation of soundcheck minutes making everything comfortable and optimised.
The afternoon flew by and when we just seemed to be nearing dinner time the audience were already trickling into the venue, and it was time for the show to begin. Marcia Belsky delivered the first fifteen minutes of the evening’s entertainment, a zappy comedy set that had us in stitches as we watched from the stairway next to the stage. She was gracious enough to join us on stage to participate in the second fifteen minutes of the proceedings. Every one of the audience members had been equipped with a recorder upon entering the building (a small plastic woodwind instrument). Jonathan and I, with assistance from Maria and Tristan attempted to teach this amateur ensemble how to perform a sequence of six musical notes, a sequence which they could then contribute in the middle of one of our songs in the set. It is a sound which shall not soon be forgotten, the shockwave of ten score recorders hitting our eardrums for the first time. It was a sound that filled the room, penetrating every corner and resonating deep inside our skulls.
This was the first outing in which performed the full complement of eleven songs from our new album Straight Line Was a Lie, and we were all surprised at how smoothly it went. Julie Hubman captured some wonderful snaps from the evening.
Happy New Zealand Birthday Tristan!