Last night The Country Club Band featuring Amanda Kate performed her Carrie Underwood tribute show "Blown Away" at Spaghettini in Seal Beach, just off the freeway where the 22 meets the 405. This is normally a pretty classy jazz place with fine Italian dining. They have been featuring a few tribute acts as of late but we were the first "country" band to perform a show there. I'm pleased to say we were well received and actually sold out more than 85% of the seats. There were several Carrie fans in the house who knew all the words. It was pretty fun.
I've never been to this place but since this it is known for good sound reinforcement and backline gear I was able to travel light, just a couple of basses and stands.
Right at the end of the Seal Beach Blvd. off ramp from the 22 freeway you can see the venue. The steak house next door is supposed to be top notch too, the Kobe Steakhouse.
Here's the front door. There was a stage door right off the patio that made for a pretty easy load-in.
This is the hostess station just inside the front door. Pretty fancy. The staff were all so friendly and helpful. Hopefully they were not put off by our redneck country-fied ways.
There is a dining room behind the hostess station. This is the performance room. There are banquet rooms to the south and east of this main room. There were parties in both rooms tonight. It was kind of busy.
John and Arnie arrive shortly after I did to begin the setup dance. I didn't have a big part in the dance because my rig is already on stage. We'll get a closer look in a minute.
This is Eric, one of the nicest sound guys you'd ever meet. He was friendly, quick, knew his gear, and got us wired up and sound checked with very little trouble.
This was my backline, a nice tc electronics rig. It sounded great after I flattened the EQ. What I enjoyed most about this rig is that the built-in tuner worked even when the amp's mute switch was engaged. Very handy!
Here are my two babes, right up front next to me. It was a tight stage with six of us in the band. Claire was here to help with the harmony vocals and sing a Carrie/Miranda duet, "Something Bad".
I grabbed a picture of the talent just as we were done with sound check. These two did an excellent job tonight.
The stage is all set. Stage left looks pretty junky with all of Jason and Johnny's gear on that side. A couple of people in this band bring way too much crap to the gig.
The staff had prepared a table for the band in the room behind the bar. We all opted for the chicken instead of the burger, pizza, or pasta.
Here we are looking toward the stage from the room behind the bar where we took our meal.
Here's the view from the stage. You can see the other room behind the bar. There was also a party going on in that room to the right, behind the glass doors. This is not a small place and by the time we started there were very few empty seats. Yay band!
This is not a dance club. The patrons sit, listen, eat, drink, and look at us like we are supposed to entertain them. There were tables literally at our feet and those folks loved the show. This was our set list. We added a couple of Amanda's original songs too. The crowd didn't mind at all.
John gets his sounds in order just before we start.
The rest of the band looks like they are ready, I think.
Amanda looked great in her one black sleeve with the fringe.
We played the show, a little over 90 minutes, and kept the pace up so that I couldn't take any pictures during the show. There are one or two guitar intros where I could but decided not to because this was such an intimate setting. But right after the show I took a picture of Amanda in front of the crowd.
We had a great time playing this gig. I missed a couple of changes, nothing major, but the third song Arnie started his guitar intro in the wrong key. As soon as I realized it, I gave Arnie the hand signal for the proper key but the girls had already started singing in the wrong key. So I started playing in the "new" key. Then Arnie gives me the signal to go back into the proper key. The girls looked at us like "What kind of train wreck is this?" We were all on the same page by the time the chorus came around. Whew! The rest of the show was relatively accident free. One customer enjoyed it so much he bought us each a nice bottle of champagne to take home, that's like a $300 tip. My load out was a snap, two basses in cases and I'm ready to be gone.
We stuck around for some meet-and-greet. These are the latest members of the Amanda Kate Fan Club. You'll see them in a little video below.
Amanda packed up her merch table and posed for one more glamor shot.
Everybody loved Amanda and tolerated the bass player. I think it helps when you smile a lot. Here's a collection of cell phone video from the social medias.
Next up is our NYE gig at The Ranch tomorrow. The food is always great and it's the one night of the year that the pay is really good too. That's good. I need to upgrade my computer hardware. So far I'm looking at $988 for my new platform, motherboard (X570 chipset, AM4 socket), CPU (AMD Ryzen7-3700X), GPU (Radeon RX590), SSD (Crucial MX500 1TB), and RAM (DDR4-4400). I'm hoping to use my existing case, power supply, and optical drive to save a few bucks. But I digress. Sorry to get a little geeky on you.
Thanks for looking and Happy New Year to everyone!
Thank you for your indulgence,
BassCliff
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