John Hendow

On Friday 1/1/10 the 1 Uppers performed at the Conor Byrne in Ballard. This would seem to be a day of destiny with all those 1s in play. We were a little concerned when this show was booked; our assumption was that most people (and possibly the band) would be appropriately exhausted and hung over from New Year’s Eve the night before. Therefore we feared it might be a light crowd. We were pleasantly surprised to find our assumption was incorrect. We had a great crowd and people stayed until the very end of the show.

Because we were playing last on the bill, we didn’t get a soundcheck and had to pretty much wing it for a mix. I actually like the fact that Conor Byrne doesn’t put drums or amps in their PA system. It seems more honest to me, requiring the bands to manage their own mix from the stage. It is interesting to see how people react to the band. We’re an unusual country act, but I’m pretty confident that we present a faithful interpretation of the music we do.

This was the second night using my newly expanded pedalboard. The new Keeley compressor really shines in this context. I found that it really helped fatten up my guitar tone for those parts where the guitar is more exposed. It’s also very pleasing to have such good ears all around me on stage. Lots of interesting comments from my bandmates. Definitely worth every penny it cost to add that gizmo to my arsenal.

New Year’s Eve is always a great party, and this year was especially fun. The Dudley Manlove Quartet spent the evening performing at The Sunset Tavern in Ballard and we had a great crowd with many fine friends in attendance. Events like this are all the more fun when we look out from the stage and see familiar faces. In preparation for the show I went out and purchased a bunch of party supplies including hats, noisemakers, leis, beads and tiaras. Each member of the band had a pile of stuff to hand out to the audience, which gave us chance to fan out and individually greet / thank people for joining us. Among the dozens of bead necklaces were four all-black sets; I set those aside and wore them during the show, although I did wind up giving two away to friends. Receivers of black beads: consider yourselves awesome.

Soundcheck for this gig included a few new songs: “She’s A Lady” and “Thank You For Being A Friend”. The latter turned out to be quite an effort to perform. It has a pretty long arrangement and lots of backup vocals. I thought it went pretty well and we performed it to end the first set. This was the first show where I used my newly expanded pedalboard. The newest additions to my setup include a Keeley compressor and a Keeley-modified Crybaby wah pedal. I also used the “Pork Loin” overdrive pedal for several songs. The new setup is very good and I love the tone. The down side is that it’s a bit bigger than my previous pedalboard – only by about 6 inches – and it’s a bit heavier. Still, it’s absolutely worth the extra effort to haul this beastie and the sonic results are tasty.  Although the trusty black Stratocaster is my primary guitar, I always bring a backup / alternate. For this show I decided to bring my Eastwood; it’s a Les Paul style instrument with P90 pickups. I used it for the first set and it sounded great on the new pop tunes. For the second and third sets I went with the Strat, and as always it was wonderful to play that guitar.

As we closed in on midnight, we performed “The Final Countdown” followed by a fairly traditional “Auld Lang Syne”. Another highlight of the night was seeing our good friend Heather Fenech in the audience. Heather, Stefan and I were all in 80s Invasion together. Always a pleasure to see her.

At the end of the night we were all suitably exhausted from playing and dancing. It was very nice to spend the evening this way. Performing with The Dudley Manlove Quartet is a true pleasure. We’ll be taking a few weeks off to work on new stuff and we’ll be back at it again soon! If you haven’t already visited our new web site, hop on over and have a look… and while you’re there sign up for the mailing list. Happy 2010!

How rare is a Blue Moon? It’s the second full moon in a calendar month, and occurs about once every 2 1/2 years or so. You want to talk RARE??? Once every 20 years or so, we have a Blue Moon on New Year’s Eve. That’s serious magic, friends. This year on New Year’s Eve, you should get yourself down to the Sunset Tavern in Ballard and see The Dudley Manlove Quartet. We’ll be playing a bunch of hits, misses, and some fun new material just for this event. Advance tickets are available and you are strongly encouraged to get yours immediately! This will be a wonderful night of fun with friends and we’ll look forward to seeing you there.

Last night The 1 Uppers played at The Hwy 99 Blues Club in downtown Seattle. This was our first performance in this club and we had a great time. Sharing the bill were our good friends Purdy Mouth, who are sounding better every time we hear them. Our set was a 45 minute cross-section of favorite cover tunes and originals. This gig was the first time I brought my new pedalboard to a gig, but the only device currently wired up is my Line6 Pod XTLive. I don’t want to wire up the rest of the board until I receive my newly modified wah pedal and my compressor; both are expected to arrive soon, so hopefully I’ll be all ready to go on New Year’s Eve.

One of the nice things about the Hwy 99 Blues Club is that the stage is pretty good sized. For a six piece band, this is a significant consideration. It’s nice to have a little real estate to wander around in. I put my amp on a chair, which seems to change the character of its sound. Apparently the ground-plane effect from having it on the floor is rather pronounced, and elevating the amp above the floor has an effect on the low end. I’m going to try using a different type of amp stand that allows the amp to safely tilt back. This might help preserve the bass response.
We opened the night with “Three Picks”, a Lloyd Green instrumental that features Jon Hyde on the pedal steel. We also included “Sad Is The Lonely”, which features Kris Geren on guitar. The night went quickly and we enjoyed ourselves. It’s likely we’ll return to this club and play again. In addition to be a great venue, they have great food and a terrific selection of libations.

On Saturday The Dudley Manlove Quartet performed at The Triple Door in Seattle. This is probably the nicest night club in the city and has a wonderful staff. We arrived in the late afternoon for a somewhat chilly load-in. Once we got set up and changed into our suits, we spent about 45 minutes taking pictures. We’ve been wanting to do a new promotional picture of the band for some time, and this seemed like a good opportunity for us to take a number of shots. Our friend Kristi was kind enough to come down to the club with her DSLR, and after reviewing the first bunch of her pictures I think we’ll have several very good ones for promo purposes.
The club has a backline of great gear available for bands to use while playing there, and I used the club’s ’65 Twin reissue guitar amp. This is a great amp and I’ve used in on numerous occasions when playing the club. For some reason it didn’t sound nearly as good as it usually does, and throughout the night I kept going back and attempting to dial it in. The tone was strident and flat. My guess is it needs new preamp tubes. My bandmates thought it sounded good, so perhaps this was just my perception of the amp’s tone.

This performance was a private party, booked by a corporate client almost a year ago. We performed three sets of material during the night, starting with a string of holiday hits. Once we settled into our more typical set, the audience began to dance – tentatively at first, but as the night went on the dance floor got more full. Nothing like great food, a few glasses of wine, and a fun band.

My pedalboard project is currently stalled while I await delivery of my Keeley-modded pedals. Rather than hauling the incomplete pedalboard to this gig I decided to remove the Line6 Pod XTLive and carry it in the old case. Since my wah pedal is one of the units being modified, I used to the built-in wah that’s part of the Pod. It’s actually not bad although the sweep is pretty big. It’s also a little strange to have my volume pedal be the wah pedal, since this means when I switch functions the volume is maxed out. I have a volume knob on my guitar, but it has a much different effect on the overall tone. Overall, I’m sure it stuff that others notice much less than I do. I’ve become so attuned to nitpicking about my tone that sometimes I obsess over things that probably should be below my threshold of concern.

One of my favorite things about The Dudley Manlove Quartet is that the band is composed of such wonderful friends. Hanging around backstage with this bunch is always a kick. Once we hit the stage it’s a three ring circus of music, humor and interplay. Playing music should be a joyful experience, and DMQ is a great example of how well that translates into a fun gig.

On Friday the 1 Uppers performed at the Skylark in West Seattle. Among the reasons to visit the Skylark is the tasty Mac & Cheese; at some point I’m going to dedicate a categorical thread to Mac & Cheese, but for purposes of this posting I’ll just say it’s mighty fine. We arrived early enough to get our gear assembled on the stage. Fitting a six-piece band onto this small stage is a bit of a puzzle, but we’re good at squeezing in. Jon Hyde and I formed an impromptu “Fender stack” by putting my Hot Rod Deluxe atop his Super Reverb. We performed a good cross-section of our original material and a few covers, starting with “Three Picks” which features the pedal steel. Also in the set was “Sad is the Lonely”, a fabulous instrumental tune written by Don Rich of the Buckaroos. Kris Geren positively slays this song and it’s always a big crowd pleaser.

We sound checked with “Ophelia”, an original song that we hadn’t fit into the set list. It’s consistently a hit, and a few people told me that was their favorite song of the night. I suppose that’s a good reason to be there early when the band is doing the sound check. One of the surprises at the Friday performance was our  countrified rendition of “How Soon Is Now?” by the Smiths. It was fun to see the faces of the audience as they realized what song we were playing.

As always, the band had a great time playing together. It’s such a great joy to make music with friends, and this band is developing a distinctively original sound.

Last night The Dudley Manlove Quartet performed at the Tulalip Casino in Marysville. This was our second mid-week appearance at the casino; it made for a bit of a sleepy Thursday and I hope any future shows there will be on weekend rather than during the week. In order to simplify logistics I carpooled to the show with Jeff, which gave us an opportunity to discuss business strategy and music on the road. Once we arrived at the casino we did the customary check-in with security and were issued badges.

The stage at the casino is very spacious and the room has a great sound and light system. One of my favorite things about this room is that their stage monitors are fabulous-sounding EAW wedges. This means I can have a good guitar mix up front without having to run my amplifier very loud. One characteristic about the Hot Rod Deluxe is that it gets gritty when turned up to its louder settings; it’s a great blues sound when driven hard, and I do take advantage of that when playing with The 1 Uppers. But I prefer a mostly clean tone when playing with DMQ and it’s always nice to have a lower stage volume. A good microphone on this amp provides a lovely tone with rich harmonics, and this means easily controllable feedback.

We performed a number of guitar-centric hits last night including “The Final Countdown”, “Don’t Stop Believing” and “Sunglasses At Night”. I’ve been experimenting with different settings on the Pod XT Live and I’m getting a much more satisfactory tone from the unit, especially at lower stage volumes. Again, this is partially due to the gain stage characteristics of the amp and my usual instinct is to lower the volume and go for a more controlled stage sound. At last night’s gig I was able to verify something that I have been suspecting, but unable to test until now. There have been many times when I’ve thought my amp was distorting or losing clean head room at gigs. I find turn down the gain, lower the volume output from the Pod and yet it still sounds distorted. In our third set last night I began to hear that slight distortion from the amp and I wandered over to it to listen to it clearly. I was unable to verify it was distorting, but from my playing position several feet in front of it I would have sworn it was. The sound was unfocused, slightly dirty and over-driven. However, listening to the monitor feed proved this wasn’t actually happening! The guitar tone from the monitor was clean and sounded great. Apparently what I’m experiencing is some kind of psycho-acoustic phenomenon. I have a fairly high degree of faith in the validity of last night’s experiment since the monitor feed’s source is a microphone directly in front of my amp. If the amp was actually distorting it would have been present in the monitor. So, what does this mean? It’s got to be something that I’m “hearing” on stage that isn’t actually part of my amp signal. Very strange indeed. This might be a question for the band’s patron alien: Dudley, help me with your interstellar wisdom!

I am continuing to plan my new pedalboard, which should take shape in the next few weeks. I’d like to put the Pod XT Live, my wah, wireless receiver, a few select pedals, and pedal power unit all together on a single pedalboard. In addition, I’d like to have a good case for the whole thing. The current top contender for the project platform is the PedalTrain Pro, and I’m beginning to look around for a deal on this system.

This weekend I spent a few hours in the recording studio putting down additional tracks for the 1 Uppers CD project. It’s an interesting process to work on this recording, and one that began with a simple notion. The band was originally started as a project to play classic country songs from the 1950s and 1960s; my good friend Jon Hyde is a wonderful pedal steel player (among his myriad musical talents) and we thought it would be fun to work on this together. We called in some members of his band, and a friend who happens to be phenomenal country guitarist. Harnessing the limitless power of the Internet, we found a local singer interested in the style. Then we put together a list of favorite songs and worked up a few sets of material we could play live. After only a few months the band began to write original music, and our sets rapidly shifted in favor of our own songs. Early this summer we began to record a demo CD of “just a rough recordings of a few tunes”. In classic 1 Upper fashion this blossomed into a full-length multi-track CD project.

The band continues to be a tremendous amount of fun. Playing with the 1 Uppers and The Dudley Manlove Quartet has stimulated a bit of guitar renaissance in my world. I’ve been practicing more styles of music in the last year, and finding new ways to link my guitar playing ideas together. In both bands I’m fortunate to be surrounded by amazing musicians. Every time we get together for practice I find myself bringing home ideas for things to work on. In fact, another great outcome from the 1 Uppers has been all the upgrades on my Telecaster, courtesy of Kris. It’ll be a lot of fun to get this CD completed and pressed. Hopefully we’ll be close to mixdown before the end of the year.

Halloween is my favorite day of the year. The crisp air, the smell of fall, and lots of creepy spooky stuff to enjoy. It’s a double bonus for me when I play music with friends on that night, and this year was one of my favorite Halloween gigs ever. The Dudley Manlove Quartet performed at the Sunset Tavern in Ballard. We had a sold out room full of costumed friends, and it was a wild and crazy event all around.

We kicked off the night with “Ghostbusters” and sailed into a bunch of fun hits. The band has a tradition of performing part of the night as another band. This year we were the B52s. Mack and I portrayed the two female members of the band, which meant shopping for wigs and dresses. We spent over a month working on song arrangements for the night, including the “top 10” worst songs as voted by fans. I was especially surprised by the strong positive reactions to “I Was Made For Loving You Baby” and “The Final Countdown”. The balance of our set was composed of favorites from our regular list.

Setting up the wireless rig on such a small stage seems silly, but it did afford me the freedom to run over to Mack’s side of the stage. And it facilitated a dramatic entrance for our B52s intro. I discovered early in our set that something is strange between the gain structure in my Line6 POD XT Live and my Fender Hot Rod Deluxe. I just had the amp in the shop for a full checkup, which included new tubes and re-soldering the tube sockets. I don’t know whether the issue is with the amp or the pedal, and I can’t seem to get anyone at Line 6 to respond to my email. I’m generally fairly happy with the POD XT Live, but this is frustrating. I dialed back the gain on my amp and made a few on-the-fly (actually, on-the-floor) adjustments during the set. I’ll set up my rig in the music room at home and work on this over the next few days to see if I can determine what’s going on.

The Sunset is the kind of bar that bands and customers LOVE. It’s owned and run by cool, hip people who love music and are in the business for all the right reasons. They provide the perfect setting for a great party. Many thanks to the awesome staff for such a fun night. Seeing friends at these gigs is a real treat. A big thank you to Teri, Wally, Bill, Edgars, Celeste, Kristi and Alma, for their enthusiastic participation in the night’s festivities.

On Friday night The 1 Uppers played at the Rendezvous in Seattle. Among my favorite aspects of this venue is their dinner menu which includes a fabulous Mac and Cheese. I freely admit to having a pathological focus on my lifelong quest for the ultimate Mac and Cheese, and the ultimate French Toast. Everybody has a mission, and this noble cause is mine.

Almost immediately upon loading our gear onto the stage and beginning a quick soundcheck, there was a disheartening “pop” followed by the smell of smoke. Caben’s bass amp apparently decided to take the night off. Fortunately our practice room is a short car ride away, and he successfully procured a stand-in amp before our set began.

While I was enjoying dinner and a beer, the co-billed band “Fasten With Pins” performed a wonderful set of a cappella music. The three vocalists in the band blend beautifully and  it’s always fun to hear them.

We took the stage with the six of us occupying our customary positions on the stage. For a portion of the set, we invited “Fasten With Pins” to join us and sing backups. The stage at the Rendezvous is just about big enough for nine people… good thing we’re a cozy bunch! All of the songs in our set went quite well, and I’d say our rendition of “Maybe Probably” was easily the best we’ve ever delivered. At the end of our set the audience seemed interested in an encore, so we decided to premiere a song we’ve been working on for this week’s show. It was well received.

This was a fun evening. Both of my parents were in attendance, which is a rarity. Neither of them had heard this band before, and I doubt they’d classify themselves as fans of country music. On the way home, they both said they really enjoyed the show. Then again, they might have just been acting polite to ensure I’d give them a ride back to the house.