“I remember this show fairly well. It was in the middle of a pretty difficult stretch of concerts and I recall being so exhausted afterward that I was having a hard time conversing with several of our friends that came from long distances to watch and visit with us.

Both the crowd and sound were very good this evening, and as a band, we played well, but the defining moment of this show was the encore. Singing in a band is no joke and being someone who puts every ounce of themself into every performance and song, Franklin looks forward to any chance he gets to catch his breath during the course of the evening. We generally (especially after being reprimanded by a number of German crowds for not performing encores early in our career) split our set into two parts. The first main chunk of the show, then a brief intermission where we can catch our breath and then return to play a second shorter set of songs before ending the evening. The time between the end of the main set and the beginning of our encore usually varies in length, but it generally begins with the end of one song trailing off and then some sort of short musical interlude, usually improvised, before the entire band returns to the stage to begin the next song.

On this particular evening, we hadn’t planned it out very well, and during the long winding hallway that stretched from the back of the stage and about a 3-minute walk to the dressing room, Franklin or somebody selected me (it’s always me) to return and improvise and turn off the equipment of others and do something interesting until everyone returned. So I headed back out only to be completely baffled by the state of the stage from which we had just left. I was looking around trying to find the pedal of Franklin’s that I was supposed to turn off to no avail. I had planned on playing some sort of saxophone thing, but the sax wasn’t mic’ed up correctly and when I went to turn my equipment on, my guitar was still doing some sort of noise and I quickly lost the plot. So I did the only thing that I could think of at that time while I waited for someone to come to my rescue, throw my hands up at the crowd and begin to try to explain that this was not going according to plan. I had planned on taking questions from the crowd as a clever way to continue to engage with people but quickly the rest of the band returned when they didn’t hear any sound from the stage.

If anything, enjoy this moment!”

Lee / October 2020