Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Home from Ligonier. Tired and dizzy (started feeling dizzy in the car). Yesterday was a looooooong day.

Friday night we got a later than expected start leaving Baltimore. I was informed that my two jobs as passenger were to hand the driver Pepsi from the cooler, and to keep him awake (both very reasonable requirements). So I did not get to sleep in the car on the way up. Got to the hotel at 2:30, fot to sleep around 3:30, was awake again at quarter to eight -- second night in a row of 4-5 hours sleep. The ride would've been pleasant except for how tired I was. As it was, it wasn't bad.

Saturday morning was a too-early start to the day -- we were at Idlewild setting things up by 9:30 (I don't know how long Allon had been there -- the mixer/speakers/amps were pretty much set up when I arrived, so what I was helping with was helping with mic cables and getting one of the other bands through sound check and stuff like that. And the very important task of indulging in pleasant conversation with the members of the other two bands who'd be sharing that stage with us all day, Scantily Plaid and Fieldstone. Many hands, light work, etc. etc. Very quickly, the MC for that stage came to realize that half-hour sets with no setup/teardown time scheduled between bands Just Wasn't Going To Work. Especially when one band (that'd be us) had eight people in it (Jennifer had a schedule conflict and couldn't come), and another had a drum set. The band with the drum set used their entire half-hour just getting on the stage (with half of our band helping them), so they played when we were supposed to, we played a half hour late, and the afternoon schedule got rewritten into something that actually made sense and seemed agreeable to all three bands. (We dropped our middle set, and so did one of the other bands, IIRC, but some or all of the afternoon sets got extended to a full hour long.)

I always feel more relaxed, more secure when Allon is around. We sometimes have to run our own sound from the stage, which is a pain. Many festivals provide their own sound people and equipment, so we've worked with some mediocre sound guys in the past, and we've worked with some mostly very good sound guys who just didn't know what to do with a band as large as ours, and one team of Real Professionals who didn't understand our instruments -- we watched them do a really good job with a bunch of other bands with more usual rock/jazz instrumentation, but they were flailing trying to deal with instruments they didn't know the name of and fretted strings that were not supposed to be the Dominant Sound -- and good sound guys who made us sound great in the second half of our set but took the first half figuring it out ... and we've actually worked with folks who do as good a job as Allon does without already knowing us first, but it's such a craps shoot working with an unfamiliar engineer -- one who can do as good a job with us as Allon does is rare, and you don't know that's what you've got until you're already playing. I feel much more confident when Allon is running the board.

Allon is good. And he knows us. On Saturday I got to see how good he is. I watched him cope with completely unfamiliar bands with different sounds than ours, different instrumentation, and neither one was a trivial folk-trio setup. Uilleann pipes (well, bellows pipes, I presume they were uilleann), drum kit, electric fiddle, folks who play more than one instrument, etc. Well not only did both the other bands do a great job, Allon did a great job running sound for them. What was on that stage yesterday all sounded terriffic. The other bands thanked Allon, and commented to me about how pleasant he was to work with.

There weren't a lot of vegetarian options in the park for lunch. At one point I thought I'd spotted a pizza booth that was open, but it turned out to be a group holding their own picnic on the porch. But they offered me a cheese sandwich, so I accepted. Turns out they're a handbell group -- I would've liked to have caught their 18:00 performance, but had to leave before then, alas.

The afternoon sets, with the revised, sane schedule, went well. We went on last, finishing up at 16:00. At 17:00 we headed back to the hotel, stopping at a shopping mall so I could buy more guitar strings. (I broke three strings yesterday afternoon, another last night, and one more this afternoon. So out of eighteen strings, I broke five, despite having completely restrung the six-string Thursday night specifically to reduce the odds of breaking strings this weekend, since the 3rd string had the winding cut all the way through at almost every fret -- and the string I replaced that with broke yesterday.) Had time to get a quick shower, rinse the patched shirt I'd been wearing in the sink and hang it up, and put on a clean shirt (hoping the holes wouldn't be too conspicuous). Then it was off to the ceilidh, already exhausted.

The ceilidh -- a very dressy affair -- had some organizational messiness regarding the kitchen not having gotten the message that a couple of us are vegetarians, the other two bands not having gotten the program from the MC (and half of our band not having heard that there was a program planned out), confusion over exactly where we were supposed to go, etc., but it all basically worked out once communication happened. Allon kicked butt engineer-wise running sound in the banquet hall as well (different set of challenges, but at that point he already knew the other bands) and got thanked publically by the MC at the end of the evening. The food was okay -- nothing to write home about but neither was it complaint-worthy -- and we had fun chatting with members of the other bands backstage. I also got to say hello to Elke, but we didn't have time to do a whole lot of catching up -- she was busy selling CDs when I talked to her, and just after that it was her time to perform at the ceilidh. Again, the other performers were excellent. We were on last, finishing off the evening, and we got some folks up and dancing (both Scottish set dances and step dancers). Enthusiastic response from the audience, except for one fellow who scowled at me -- I don't think he approved of my playing guitar behind my head. We stopped playing about midnight and got everything packed away and ready to schlep back to our hotel a bit before 1:00. I could tell Mike was pretty tired by how hard he laughed when I said, "Hey, you dropped my ten-string." After putting two more strings on and making sure I had my stuff sort of organized for the morning, I got to bed at 2:00. By that time, even the big muscles in my thighs hurt.

This morning I woke up at 9:30 (after waking briefly around 5:00 to unplug the clock radio which had begun making inexplicable noises, then going back to sleep) and had trouble moving from the hips down. Sharp pains in my thighs and knees, dull pains in me knees and calves, and difficulty moving; ankles just a bit stiff in contrast to the rest. And a headache. The shirt I'd rinsed the evening before was quite nearly dry. We weren't scheduled to play in Ligonier until 14:00, so I didn't rush to get out of the hotel (I figured as long as we were out by check-out time, all was well). Jim and I grabbed some breakfast at Denny's with John and Trix. My headache did not lessen with food, so I took my migraine drugs, along with painkillers for my arms and legs. Got to the diamond in downtown Ligonier to find Allon already there and the sound system about half set up, so we lent a hand with that. The pipe band scheduled for 13:00 decided to play under some trees instead of in the Bright Sunny Warm brick area in front of the bandstand, and asked us to announce that. I'd hoped to finish getting set up in time to shoot the pipe band with anniemal's box camera, but they started a little early, and I still had to tune and plug in my guitars. By the time I was ready, it didn't seem worth dashing over there for a few frames.

We went on as scheduled, occasionally stopping so the gold medal winners of the Scottish national Mod could sing (apparently part of their prize is a trip to the US). Definitely golden voices! We played an energetic set, and I broke the fifth string -- for non-guitarists, that's one of the thick ones, not a string that breaks often, especially in a brand new set -- on my 6-string guitar. Fortunately that was just before one of the gold-medalist songs, and the song lasted just long enough for me to get a new string on there so that I had both guitars available to finish the concert. (Some tunes really want the 6-string sound or are just easier to play on the 6-string; others sound a whole lot better on the 12-string.) We played for an hour, and I'm really glad the person running the event dropped a big cooler of drinking water and a stack of cups at the back of the stage (and refilled it just before we started playing).

The diamond in Ligonier is a rather nice tiny park. There were a fair number of people there -- covering all the benches, plus some folding canvas chairs folks had brought and set up on the walkways, and more people on the grass under the trees, with several folks behind us -- I got to make eye contact with them when I played over my head and turned around. It's a pleasant place, though the occasional group of motorcycles passing by was a bit loud. (And we got some laughs with the jokes we made when the siren for the volunteer fire house went off just as we were about to start a tune.)

So we pulled out of downtown Ligonier at 16:00. And now I'm home, sweaty, and exhausted. And very very very thirsty. I skimmed my email, don't know how long it'll take me to catch up on friends LJ entries from the weekend, wrote this, and let Perrine express how relieved she is that I'm home. (Hmm. She ate very little of the food I left out for her.) I'm sure that later tonight I'll think of a bunch of things I wanted to mention about the weekend ... which means I have material for another entry later. I'll probably crash early tonight. We made a lot of people happy, sold a pile of CDs, and got plenty of exercise. A very good weekend. Now to see how long it takes me to recover physically from it.

Five strings. Out of eighteen. Sheesh. A pair of 0.010s, an 0.23, an 0.37, and an 0.0115. And a small divot chipped out of the acrylic on the nail of my ring finger. I'm not sure I want to take a close look at either pick-guard.