Thoughts On The 8/11 Dudley Manlove Performance
On Saturday 8/11 The Dudley Manlove Quartet performed at the Kirkland Summer Festival. I have played hundreds of festival shows over the past thirty years or so, and they usually involve some surprises. One of the absolute given facets of festival events is they will run behind schedule. The band before you will almost certainly start late and therefore they will run late. Fifteen minutes into what should have been our soundcheck we were still waiting for the previous band to leave the stage.
Still, we managed to set up pretty quickly and got ready for line checks. Naturally, when you’re in a hurry things will go wrong. One of my guitar cables, which has performed perfectly to date, decided to retire last night. I always carry spares, so it was a quick matter to switch it out. By the time we finally got to rocking the first song it was already getting toward dusk. Fortunately we have a supportive bunch of friends and fans, and it made for a great beginning for the night. We wound up skipping a couple of songs in the second set due to time constraints. Also, we had a few minor trainwrecks getting songs started… Jeff tried to count off “Summer of 69” when we were supposed to be starting “Power of Love”, and I followed up by biffing the beginning of “Summer of 69” thinking we were playing another song. I’m pretty sure nobody noticed, except that we did announce it in both cases and make fun of each other. Other than that I’m certain we got away with it.
Our set list was:
Set 1
Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You
It’s Not Unusual
Copacabana
Dancing Queen
Let’s Stay Together
Right Back Where We Started From
Always Something There To Remind Me
Venus
Sweet Caroline
I Wish
September
Suspicious Minds
Brown Eyed Girl
Set 2
Evil Woman (skipped)
Don’t You Forget About Me
Let’s Go
Power Of Love
Summer Of ’69
Melt With You
More Than This
Let’s Dance
Rio
Never Gonna Give You Up (skipped)
Little Red Corvette
Take On Me
Video Killed The Radio Star
Don’t Stop Believin’
My Life (encore)
A beautiful evening and always a joy to spend time with my bandmates. On to another show!