Thoughts on the 2/16 1 Uppers Performance
On Saturday 2/16 the 1 Uppers performed at the Highway 99 Blues Club in Seattle. We were on a 4 band bill with Liam Fitzgerald and the Rainieros, The Roy Kay Trio, and the B-Stars. One of the guarantees of a multi-band bill like this is that it’s going to run late and be chaotic. It’s always interesting to me to hear other country bands. The B-Stars are based in San Francisco, but the other bands are all local and well-known to us. It was a great night of fun music.
In the past several months I’ve increasingly been focusing on playing baritone guitar in this band. It fits more cleanly into the sonic landscape with so many other instruments. It gets me out the guitar range which allows Kris Geren to stretch out, and it gives me a distinctive range of my own to work within. The more that I play baritone guitar the less I’m inclined to add much in terms of effects, so for this show I didn’t bring my pedalboard. I spent a great deal of time sitting in the bar waiting for our turn to play, and during that time I wondered if I had made a mistake by going without pedals for the show. Once we got into our set I was quite satisfied with my tone and didn’t miss having my pedalboard for any of my baritone guitar parts. I had to do a bit of amp knob twiddling to adjust the reverb for some songs, but overall it was great. I brought the trusty black strat because I knew we’d do a few things that just require me to have a regular electric guitar, including “How Soon Is Now”. For that one I switched my amp into its lead channel – the FIRST time I have ever used it at a gig – to get the grind that I usually evoke from my Wampler Sovereign. That might have been the only time during the night that I really missed my pedalboard. Otherwise, playing “naked” was refreshing and challenging.
Our next show is coming up 2/21 at the Royal Room in Columbia City. I’ll have the challenge of being the band’s only electric guitarist that night since Kris will be out of town. It means that I’ll definitely be bringing my pedalboard and filling up some additional sonic landscape in the mix. A new challenge is always just around the corner! Hope to see you there.