We played this gig last year.
This year the Citadel Outlet Mall seemed to want to make their shopping season kick-off a bigger production. You'll see what I mean a little later on.
I left directly after church to drive to my "help the masses overindulge in excessive disproportionate materialism" celebration. It was a pretty easy drive early on a Sunday afternoon, about an hour.
The outlet mall was well decorated.
The traffic is quite inconvenient getting in and out of such a popular place of capitalist overindulgence.
I navigated to the world's tallest natural Christmas tree and found a huge stage with truss lighting and everything. This is quite a different setup from last year when we were set up on an 8x12" riser.
This is a really nice stage, not cheap.
There was a "school of rock" kind of band on before us. They did a few original songs and some "mom and dad" songs too (Stairway To Heaven, Don't Stop Believing).
These kids sounded good and did a nice job of getting their stuff off the stage quickly. I was impressed. There was supposed to be only a half hour turnaround between the bands. We made it just in time. What floored me about this gig this year is that the mall spent all that money on the huge stage and truss lighting, but did not hire a sound company. The band before us brought their own sound system. The mall told us that they had a system available and we could bring gear to supplement. So that's what Jack did. We ended up using two of his powered Mackie monitor speakers as mains to supplement the mall's version of mains. We got by with only two monitors on stage. It wasn't great but we made it work. I'm glad I brought my "large" rig. I knew we'd be outside without a full sound system. Here's the view from the stage as we got started.
Here's the BassCliff monolith case parked in front of the world's tallest Christmas tree.
And Kelly kicks off the show!
Mario brought his little kit because he thought we'd be in the same dinky stage we were last year.
Kelly entertains the masses.
Here's Daniel performing his big hit with Art providing the devil horns, or are those rabbit ears?
This was all we had for hospitality, a few leftover sodas from the other bands earlier in the day.
Here are a couple of pictures lifted from the social medias, a montage. Hmm, the bass player seems to get the bad lighting.
Here's one from out front.
We were the last band of the day so there was no hurry to get off the stage. I hung around to help Jack with his gear.
As soon as we ended our last number at 5pm the stage crew started tearing down the stage and lights. We kind of had to not waste any time so as to get out of their way. I guess they wanted to get home early too.
And that was my Sunday afternoon gig. Me and the KRB will be at Downtown Disney this Wednesday evening (11/15/17). I'll get to sing "Please Come Home For Christmas" again. I get to sing that song only three or four times a year, and I really like that song. Here's a little clip of that song at Knott's Merry Farm a couple of years ago.
Thank you for your indulgence,
BassCliff
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