The Killdevils
April 10: Playing at Billy Goode's in Newport
A Description of a Dream Come True by Jacob Haller
For a long time Chris and I had wanted to get a show at Billy Goode's in Newport, a bar at which we had each seen blues legend Paul Geremia on different occasions. So I sent them a press kit and called them for a few weeks and finally they booked us for April 10. Sweet!
Except it ended up not being quite that simple -- they called me the week before the show and apologetically informed me that they had accidentally booked both us and Paul Geremia for the same night, and since they booked Paul first they were going with him. This was a disappointment.
Fortunately, I have a relative who went to college with Mr. Geremia and still keeps in touch with him, so we managed to finagle it so that we would open for him -- we'd start around 8:30 pm and play for about an hour, then he could use our sound system when he went on. This was nice for him because it meant he just had to bring his guitars and microphones instead of his entire sound setup, which is always a pain. Once he agreed to it the club fell into line and it was on. Woohoo!
We got there around 6:30 pm and started setting up. I had to make a little emergency excursion to buy an electrical power strip, but we had tons of time (setting up usually take us half an hour to forty-five minutes these days) so it was not a problem. (I even had time to eat a little dinner, which was good because I hadn't gotten around to eating much of anything else all day.)
I knew that Billy Goode's has a piano, but I wasn't sure what kind of shape it was in so I decided to bring my own electronic piano too in case of need (the mighty Korg C-150). The piano there was enough out of tune that I decided to use my own.
We started our set pretty promptly at 8:30 pm. We had decided in advance that we wanted to concentrate on the bluesier stuff from our repertoire and we figured we could do about eight songs in the forty-five minutes we had at our disposal, so I had planned out a nice little set list based on this. We were so excited and nervous, though, that we finished all that material in half an hour! (Song tempos tend to go up somewhat when you're nervous if you're not careful.) So we played a bunch of other stuff too.
At a little before 9 :30 pm we announced our last song ("Kind Hearted Woman). When we finished that up the server came over and told us we could play a few more songs if we wanted (it turned out Paul Geremia was late showing up). So we pulled a few more songs out of our hat and continued until about 10 pm -- a nice long set! When Paul showed up my cousin David sat in for a song on piano and vocals and Paul played harmonica. His sister had a camera, so hopefully sometime soon we will have a nice picture of Chris playing guitar with Paul Geremia -- a picture which I think should go up on Chris's website.
There were a lot of people there. About a dozen were people we knew and who came because of us; they were closest to us and were the most enthusiastic, but we got applause all around, and throughout the rest of the night a lot of people did make it a point to stop me and tell me how much they enjoyed our set. It's really nice when people do that! (In addition to liking the material, people seemed to appreciate that we weren't too loud, so that it was actually possible to have a conversation while we were playing. Musicians take note.)
After our set I packed up my guitar (I left the piano set up in case Paul Geremia wanted to play it; he did play two or three songs on it at the end of the first set -- Chris told me, "You can never wash your piano again.") and that was pretty much all I had to do for the evening, other than listen to the music and wait for the end of the night to break everything down and pack it up. Chris, on the other hand, was letting Paul use his sound system, so he had to do some work as soundman. (We had hoped to bring along Shawn Harris, who's done sound for us on occasion in the past, but he unfortunately had a previous commitment.) There were feedback problems here and there (Paul's guitars have pickups and he also mikes them with a condenser microphone, so there's plenty of things to feed back), but the sound was generally good, and at least one person came up to tell Paul to compliment him and say the sound quality was better than usual, so that's cool.
Paul played three sets, finishing up around 1 am. After that we broke everything down, separated out what belonged to everyone, and loaded everything up. We finished all this up at 2 am. Coming home I got slightly turned around, so I got back around 3 pm, at which point it was time to bring all my stuff up to my second floor apartment ... including the piano.
After the show Paul told us that if we ever wanted to open for him again we should give him a call. Yay! And the club owner told us that they thought that the evening had turned out really well and that they wanted to book us for another show sometime. Yay again!
And I got a nice poster with a picture of Paul Geremia that says "Saturday: Paul Geremia / Starting 8:30 Special Guests The Killdevils". Perhaps I will get it framed.
So everything went really well. We were pretty beat by the end of the night, though.
The set list went something like this:
- Been So Long
- Gypsy Woman
- No Money Down
- The JCBFI Blues
- Early in the Morning
- Thorn In Your Side (it was around here that we realized that we had done almost the entire prepared set in half an hour)
- Sin City
- The Local Expatriate
- Rider on the Rain
- Big Road Blues
- Caldonia
- Mick McGuire
- Kind-Hearted Woman