John Hendow

The Condensed Version
This past weekend, The Dudley Manlove Quartet performed two shows at the fabulous Crystal Ballroom in Portland. I got a flat tire. My niece had a baby. I drank beer. The Seahawks got stomped.

Friday
While en route to this gig the sidewall on my driver’s side rear tire blow out. This is a very unusual type of tire failure and can be extremely dangerous. It happened while on the freeway while going about 60 MPH. I was lucky it didn’t make the car spin or flip. I was also lucky to find a service station (that still actually works on cars) and they had a suitable replacement tire. So despite being inconvenienced by the tire failure I was still in Portland pretty early and succeeded in loading into the venue with plenty of spare time. Enough spare time, in fact, to find a nice sidewalk pub and have a beer. Jeff joined me after a bit, and we happened to see Kristi and Colleen walking by, so they joined us as well.

The gig was a lot of fun. Super Diamond was in great form and they were a delight to hang out with. The crew at the Crystal Ballroom is 100% professional, easy going, and funny as heck. It makes the experience of playing there so enjoyable for us when the crew is having fun too. I discovered that the gain stages in my Pod XT Live had somehow gotten a little too hot, and were adding more distortion to my signal path than I like. I didn’t have an opportunity to adjust these settings on the fly, so I just backed off the volume a bit and went with it.  This was a short set and we burned through it quickly, followed by perhaps the fastest teardown in the history of the band… I think we were offstage with all our gear within 5 minutes of ending our final song.

Saturday
I woke up Saturday and went to visit with family in Portland. My niece was due to deliver her baby at any moment, and I left for load-in at around 1:30. She gave birth at 2:42. I didn’t get to see the newborn girl, but received pictures via iPhone. She’s a beauty and I look forward to welcoming her to the family and reading her “The Stinky Cheese Man”.

The Saturday show at the Crystal Ballroom was a private event, specifically a wedding reception. I arrived early and set up my gear with the primary objective of getting those Pod XT Live gain settings under control. It took about 20 minutes to run through all the banks of patches and make adjustments. We soundchecked with some of the new songs we planned to play that night including a new Paul Simon track. After soundcheck Mack and I took a quick trip to Apple Music where I picked up a regulated power supply for my pedalboard (project ahead… pictures and narrative to follow). Once we got to playing things went beautifully. The crowd got up and danced, and I was surprised to see some friends from Seattle were in attendance. Apparently they are friends with the bride. The show was over early enough that I managed to get back to the hotel, get a late night snack / beer, and flop into bed before 12:30 AM.

Sunday
The morning was a big success. Cornflake-encrusted French toast, excellent French press coffee from Costa Rica, and fine company. The weather was nice and we walked around Portland a bit before heading back North to Seattle. I listened to the Seahawks game on the radio, which at least spared me the added misery of watching them get clobbered by Arizona. Hopefully the bye week will help put the wind back in our sails.