we had such a great show last year that we decided to make it an annual thing, and this was the second in the run – “on a winter’s night” being the theme of the show. last year, we actually did gordon lightfoot’s song for a winters’ night to open the show. hey, man…when we pick a theme, we drive that baby home. 🙂
again, it was craig, backed by tommy geddes and myself, with our brother of the road larry ahearn doing a short set to open the show. we had a great crowd last year, but this year, we still had a bit of the aftermath of the largest cumulative snowfall to ever fall in the area since they began recording such things…plenty of time had passed, certainly enough for the roads to be clear, but you never really know how long people will consider such things as this to be off limits. as it was, we had a solid house, and ed and donna land actually had family visiting from out of town as well.
the first couple of times we played landhaven, ed and donna had an outside guy coming in to provide sound, but in the time since i was last there, they’ve invested in a house system that sounds pretty phenomenal – the only issue we had was with a stray note around 650Hz that was driving the monitors a bit to hard, and caused a bit of a hump in craigs’ acoustic, but that was an easy fix and the rest of the night went by without a hitch in that regard.
i know i’ve talked about landhaven before in prior years, so i don’t really know what to tell you about this room that i haven’t said before – its charm, its time-travel decor, the enthusiastic audience, donna’s incredible cooking – all still very much intact. this is a great room for artists like craig – songwriters whose material really shines without a great deal of adornment. tommy and i go in with craig as a three piece unit, and it’s perfect for that room. i play minimal electric instruments – lap steel and baritone guitar, but mostly dobro and mandolin – and any more than that would be overkill. yet, if he wanted to, craig could play this room by himself and it’d still be…right.
if you’re in the area, stop by their website, pick out a show, and treat yourself. you won’t soon forget it, that’s for sure.
from the rear view mirror 