Today was our long-awaited departure from Newport, as well as Jesse's return from his conjugal
visit with his wife, Lori. They had quite the adventure. Lori used Jesse's accumulated frequent
flier miles from several European trips to trek to Providence where they rented a car and headed
back down to New York to be tourists. Jesse told me about going back to Ground Zero where a
group of people had gathered to gaze at the destruction. Jesse had turned to a woman standing
next to them to ask how to get to Times Square. It turned out to be Sandra Bullock, which blew
Jesse's mind. Bullock is girlfriend to Bob Schneider who has been playing the same level circuit as
Terry, and whom Jesse admires as a songwriter/performer. Small world...
And with that, we headed up to Northampton in central Massachusetts to play the venerable Iron Horse Music Hall in that college
town. It was about a four-hour trek up there, and we arrived around sunset. Northampton is home
to no less than five colleges, including Smith College and a satellite campus for UMass, so it was
pretty obvious who our audience would be--students and faculty, and their friends.
The Iron Horse Music Hall has played host to a wide range of performers from Jewel to Patricia Barber, to John Hammond to NRBQ, and pretty much every folk, jazz and blues act on the road for the last 20 years. It seemed Terry would be quite appropriate in here. There were three acts on the bill, and although the contract called for two 75's, it became obvious we would only be doing one 90, which was just fine.
Bluesman, Paul Geremia,
opened the show promptly at 7 p.m., and did some nice stuff for about 40 minutes. By the time he
was done, there were about 50 people in the place, with I guessed about a dozen who had come
specifically to see him. By the time we hit the stage the bottom floor of the two-tiered option was
mostly full. It wasn't packed, by a long shot. Since we had had a nice, long sound check, the
sound was excellent--the best so far, and the audience was attentive in a concert atmosphere.
After we were done, the place started packing out to see the Rebirth Brass Band, whose claim to fame was their usage by Frank Zappa on a couple of his albums. I had assumed the ensemble had a trap set drummer, so after we were done, I quickly moved my set off the stage to the floor before breaking it down and putting it into the cases. It turned out the drummers in the band simply held their drums marching style, with separate bass drum and snare drum players, so my haste was somewhat irrelevant.
After loading out, we ended up waiting outside for Terry to collect our pay. After some time, we
heard the horns fire up, so Kenny and I elected to go listen. The house was packed and the dance
floor was gyrating--there was no guitar, no bass, no keyboards, just six horns, a marching bass
drum and a snare. Two trumpets, two trombones, a baritone sax, and a tuba made up the brass
compliment--all young, groovin' black men. Some of the playing was pretty raggedy, but the
good-time groove was there, and the house was rockin'.
Terry emerged with cash in hand shortly thereafter, so we headed out on our trek to Philadelphia. Rumor had it that Philly was 12 hours from Northampton, so we were preparing for that. Somehow that time estimate was way off in my mind. I mean, if it was 14 hours from Detroit to NYC, then how could it be 12 hours from here to Philly?