Vancouver

Wow! Vancouver is beautiful! It's a real metropolitan walking city, ala NYC, mixed with a LA-style larger, driving city. Only it's clean. The amount of strikingly hot women in Vancouver is insane. I just can't make sense of it: do beautiful women flock to Vancouver, or does the quality of life there turn average girls into super models? Even the men are better looking in Vancouver. Everyone looks well rested and thoughtfully "put together." Did I mention the hot girls?

There is apparently some major construction project taking place in Vancouver at the moment. I don't know what they're doing, but it makes the entire section of town shake like an earthquake. The venue (Orpheum) shook like crazy all day. Only half of us noticed it, which is kinda weird. It felt as though we were on a bus or subway, constantly readjusting our balance. When we got to the Four Seasons, some 4 blocks away, I could still feel the quaking. Almost entertaining.

The Orpheum is an historic, elegant theater that seats something like 2500 people. The stage and backstage areas are pretty small, though. So we had to make some adjustments to the show's layout to fit it all in. Monitor world was right on stage, as if I were a sideman keyboardist or something. Bass player Mike Merritt was literally 2 feet away from me. When Conan was announced on the first night, the roar from the crowd was so loud that I had to scramble to find my earplugs. It was one of those "every hair standing straight up" moments. It felt so great to be on stage that I forgot all about the difficult load-in.

Oh- and I had my first monitor rig failure, too. Just before the band entrance, Monty (monitor tech) noticed that the antenna system for the wireless in-ear monitors was dead. No good. Monty went scrambling behind the racks, trying to bring it back to life, to no avail. He got a backup unit to work for 2 of the 5 people wearing wireless in-ears. The horn section had to switch to our just-in-case hardwired in-ear packs. But they didn't know this at the top of the show, because we had no way to reach them beforehand (they enter from the opposite side of the stage). So trumpet player Mark Pender was gesturing that his in-ears weren't working. Now normally when I need to speak to someone in the band during the show, I use a talkback microphone to speak directly into their in-ears. When the in-ears aren't working, you can't do that. So I mouthed the words "I know" to him. Which wasn't exactly reassuring, I imagine. But expecting him to read my lips, while I said something more like "the antenna amplifier died, and we're working on it, so switch to your hardline in-ears" was a non-option. I ended up writing "ALL WIRELESS EARS FUCKED- SWITCH TO HARDLINES" in huge letters and passing it to him. Hats off to Monty for remaining calm and getting us through it. I suppose I owe him a drink.

After the first show, we all went to the Four Seasons to rest up. And again, somehow resting up turned into "Let's meet at the bar downstairs." Most of the band was there, along with Conan, Andy, head writer Mike Sweeney (who paid the tab - thanks Mike!), and another 10 people or so. It was one of those insanely funny drunken evenings where people you'd thought of as reserved turn out to be NUTS. Very fun. A "working girl" spent 25 minutes trying to pick up LaBamba (who was having none of it, but still). Fucking priceless.

Hopefully I'll feel alright tomorrow. Goodnight Vancouver!