dan may at the winchester music hall, cleveland ohio

it was our first time in cleveland – we’d played around cleveland a handful of times…and while it was technically lakewood (i believe), it was still our first official time in the area.

if you stop by the winchester music hall’s website, they’ve got an impressive history of solid national acts, and almost always have a great lineup of shows. they also have a section on the site where they weigh in on shows that have happened there, and they’re honest about them – black crowes guitarist marc ford, for example, didn’t get very good marks for his show for perpetually bitching about the room and the sound system and playing ridiculously loud all night long, and they didn’t sugarcoat the circumstances when they wrote it up.

that’s some automatic respect on my part. i love bearing witness to fearlessness in others. 🙂

the drive out was great, uneventful – i was originally supposed to be travelling with dan, but when the offer came up to tech for poco on their dates with loggins and messina, then that meant that i had to leave only hours after the gig to traverse a chunk of ohio and the entire state of pennsylvania to get to the garden state arts center for the show the following night.

the lineup for dan’s show was tommy geddes on drums, kurm on bass, anthony newett and i on guitars and keys, and heather on vocals. since it was in the neighborhood, dan added the percussionist who joins us on dates in that area on occasion, david henry, for this show as well.

the empty stage at the winchester music hall

the winchester is a great room – it reminds me of what i’ve always imagined the jazz nightclubs of the 40’s might have been like, in terms of the way the room was laid out and the general vibe of the place. in terms of general stuff, the sound and soundman were good – friendly, very helpful and knowledgable. i brought my tweed gibson amp for the show, and it didn’t disappoint…although anthony and i continue to have problems hearing one another when we’re spread across a larger stage. i think that’s probably to be expected, to a degree – pulling the guitar amps through the monitors in order to flesh out signal for the two of us could prove to become a dangerous pursuit – the amps have more than ample stage volume for everyone else, and to fold them back through the monitors could be problematic. besides, it’s not that we can’t hear one another, it’s that we can’t hear as much of one another as i think we’d both like, in terms of maintaining some realistic sense of how we fit into the overall mix.

great show, though – pretty solid turnout, nice hang – i couldn’t help but be somewhat focused on the next couple of nights, though.