Bluesfest July 10, Sam Roberts Band

The day has finally come. The boys are coming in and I’m pretty excited to do the show with my old touring friends with Sam, Matt Mays and The Stills. I’ve been looking forward to this one.

 

That excitement turned to stress though, as the band had a 1pm load in and weren’t there. At 2 pm, we found out their gear hadn’t been released by the cargo dept. at the airport and the guys were running late. Really late. Like they-wouldn’t-be-there-for-soundcheck-and-we’re-gonna-have-to-pull-this-one-out-of-our-ass late. SRB has a pretty involved setup and it’s not the kind of thing you do over a 15 minute change over. But, there was nothing we could do about it, so we moved on and got Matt Mays’ gear up and did a quick soundcheck for The Stills and we were ready to start the show. Having worked with the guys from Matt’s band and The Stills numerous times, we were able to put together a workable plan for the show to make the headaches as minimal as possible. Eventually Sam’s gear got trucked to the gig courtesy of an Ottawa Citizen newspaper delivery truck and we were able to start minimal preparations.

 

The Stills and Matt went off with no problems and he we were. 25 minutes to make the impossible happen. You have to understand that pulling this off is the equivalent of trying to pull a full 53’ tractor trailer with a 1983 Ford Escort. Thankfully we all knew each other and understood all our capabilities and expectations. It was a pretty insane changeover with lots of problems and troubleshooting, lots of yelling back and forth and blind faith that it would all fall into place. It took about 45 minutes, so the show started late as a result, but everything worked and after some initial running around all was good and the show was great. There was so much going on that I didn’t even notice the show go by. What felt like 10 minutes was actually 75.

 

It felt so good to finally be able to relax after the show. In fact, I dare say Best Beer Ever. We hung around for awhile backstage, on the bus, went to the Aloha Room then to Dunn’s Deli, where a Paris Hilton wannabe provided some pretty snobby attitude for us to laugh at/about as we ended the night. During the course of all that, I was able to strike a deal to go back on tour with the guys, so after the insanity of Bluesfest is over, I have three days off, and then I go to the airport.