seahorse

We had a really great show this past Friday night at the Seahorse in Sausalito.  The show was put together by Don Zimmer & his record label, Floating Records. Don also played in the opening band Slow Cooked Surprise.  The Seahorse is an upscale restaurant/nightclub on the water in Sausalito.  It’s a big, beautiful venue, much nicer than some of the establishments that we normally play. 

In an effort to make the show special (i.e. try and bring out people), Don asked us to perform our album Breaking Up With Loneliness in its entirety. This is something that we’ve never done before and I gotta be honest, I was kinda nervous about it.  Putting together a set list and putting together a running order of an album are two entirely different things.  We perform mainly in bars.  People want to have fun and forget about their troubles.  They wanna drink beer and maybe dance.  Our set lists usually try to balance those needs with our desire to sneak something artistic into their cerebral cortex.  “Keep It Stupid” usually is our mantra; too many sleepy, sad, introspective tunes does not a happy bar owner like.  Whereas, if you wanna get freaky on your album, go for it!  We compromised: Set one was a bunch of upbeat, fun tunes and some cover songs and set two was The B.U.W.L album.  Would people fall asleep when we played the album?  Would they leave out of sheer boredom?  

1st SET:  I’ve performed at the Seahorse a few times before playing drums with a different band and it isn’t a real late night joint.  People eat dinner and maybe stay for a little while before they gotta get home:  The babysitter is waiting! It is what it is (fav Felsen expression).  The people who were gonna split, split. It didn’t matter how good/bad we were.  Some eardrums were not use to live rock and roll.  It’s never a great feeling seeing someone plugging their ears midway into your 2nd song (twirling hippie woman, you know who you are).  We turned down (a bit).  At times, I could hear the pick scraping across the strings of my guitar, my ELECTRIC GUITAR! Even then it was still too loud for some.  I had to deliver the bad news to our beast-like rock drumming mountainous manbeast of a rock drummer that despite his frustrations at work, he needed to play a bit quieter.  For God’s sake, chardonnay was being served! He took it well.  We toned it down.  We made it through the set.  Managed to play a few new tunes, had people dancing.  People applauded.  CDs were purchased (thank you).  

2nd SET:  A noticeable thinning of the crowd occurred on the set break.  This happens with set breaks.  The people who stayed though really were the die hard music fans at this point.  We had two fans drive up from Paso Robles (3hr 54 min drive) for the show and a few other hardcore Felsen faithful were there.  I joked with the audience about playing the album, letting them know I had some trepidation about doing so, worrying that it might put people to sleep.  Man was I wrong.  I underestimated these folks.  They were with us fully and gave 100 percent.  The rock tunes were easy, those always work, but the quiet stuff???? that’s where this audience really impressed me.  We played Secret Life of Guns, an older couple slow danced.  (Did they know the tune is about the insanity of guns and the epidemic of mass shootings in the US?).  People listened.  We played the title tune, Breaking Up With Loneliness which is about as deep and introspective of a tune as we’ve got.  The bridge says “I dreamed about dying again last night”.  Our hardcore fans were singing along every word.  I went down into the audience and gathered all the people around me and we sang the refrain of that together “I’m breaking up with loneliness”.  That’s powerful to hear a room full of people singing that.  It’s like old time religion and these were the newly converted. It was spiritual.  Did you feel it?  We played a few more easy rockers.  We played Honolulu which again is a pretty deep themed tune.  I’m a cancer survivor.  I had 5 major surgeries due to that shit.  Honolulu is about that awful time waiting for the surgery to begin and you’d rather be anywhere else.  Maybe someplace tropical.  “In my dreams I’d rather be, with a wave crashing over me”.  We finished off with Take Me Back which Felsen has never performed.  We were too lazy and too busy preparing new material to record while touring to work up a proper full band version of the tune, so we stripped it down with acoustic guitar, Dylan on Banjo, Cristian on backing vocals and Art on shaker. All 4 of us went down into the audience.  People huddled around us.  We busked.  It was musical intimacy: all hands on deck with the audience singing along at the end.  It was quiet. Too bad the twirling hippie woman split.  The good people called for an encore and we gave them a debut of a new song Better Thoughts.  I had a front row audience member hold up the sheet of lyrics for me to read--that’s how new the song was.  Lyrics were finished Friday morning.  It was loud, real loud at times, but good, real good.