The main thing I did on the organ itself was a thorough cleaning of drawbars, tube sockets, and electrical points with de-oxit. To combat 60 cycle hum, I put a layer of galvanized flashing under the transformer/ power amp and ran the AC input wires through leftover EMT conduit from a garden trellis project. A little more oil for the tonewheels, and everything was running nice and quiet.

There were several problems with the Leslie from last tour. Since I hastily made the speed switching control by running AC through a stompbox with a DPDT switch (which I know everyone says not to do) and then through two extension chords to outlets supplying the two motors on the Leslie itself, there were sometimes awful pops coming through the house circuitry in clubs with dirty wiring. Also there was an acute danger of electricution to anyone unplugging the chords in the wrong order. I had tried to fix the former with capacitors at the switch, but there were still some pops on the last tour so I bit the bullet and put in a solid state relay this time around. This also changed the power to the stomp switch from 120VAC to 9VDC- much safer and fewer chords. I also replaced the original old 10″ Jensen speaker with a 15″ PA speaker (salvaged from the PA system of my first band from middle school). The bigger speaker is much more like an actual leslie and sounds fuller in the lows and mids while attenuating the harsh higher frequencies nicely. A new drastically different frequency curve means rethinking all of my go-to drawbar settings for the set; hopefully greater flexibility of tone will lead to an even more exhilarating experience on stage.

wild buffalo

I can’t speak for the whole band, but there were definitely some of us who, upon getting back on the bus and rolling out for the drive to Bellingham last Wednesday night, let out long mournful groans. As we headed North, I took a fistful of melatonin pills, snuggled up in my bunk inside of two sleeping bags, and slept the next 20 hours away. It hadn’t been long enough yet.

Waking midday in front of a stranger’s house, things got much better: Kati’s dad was picking us up in his conversion van and taking us to his beautiful mountain-side house for breakfast. Kati’s dad’s house is always one of the most refreshing places to visit on the road: lots of good food, coffee, showers with windows looking out on the mountains, affectionate animals to pet, and embarrassing snippets of Kati’s childhood such as dance competition uniforms to chuckle at.

Then there were the shows. Bellingham at the Wild Buffalo: the owner happened to be an aging hippie flautist, and he made quite a show of shredding on Van Morrison’s Moon Dance within earshot of the green room. I think we were supposed to invite him to sit in, but everyone knows how socially awkward our band is anyway and I don’t think any feelings were hurt. As I loaded out after the show, I witnessed the said owner cornering Luke and Kati and forcing them to sing 4 part barbershop vocal improvisations with him and the house sound tech.

seattle (ryan messick pic)

Seattle. Better show. Really nice theater. Kate came and we stayed with friends who had left over pizza and a coffee maker that brewed single cups. The options were coconut coffee or blueberry coffee. I picked blueberry and added soy nog to cut it a little. Wow.

Vancouver. Ok show. It was a gross dance club with a VIP area that featured fake snake skin upholstery and smelled like bodily fluids. The club employees’ “we don’t care if you sold your show out because Dance Party night does way better at the bar” vibe was loud and clear. They hurried us out at 10pm as the DJ started, Kate and I headed back towards our hotel, and tour officially ended. It feels good now, but I’ll start missing it in a few days.

Tric set w/ actresses

There’s a popular TV show called One Tree Hill, along the lines of Dawson Creek and 90210, and somehow Blind Pilot spent our day off taping a special appearance for the show’s Series Finale. The day was chaotic. We woke up at 5:30 at an airport hotel in Boston, took a shuttle to our terminal for what was supposed to be a short flight to Wilmington NC via LaGuardia. Approaching New York, our pilot informed us that fog would delay landing and he was entering a holding pattern. After an hour of circling and far too late to catch our connection, we landed instead at Newark. After exiting the airplane and waiting in a long line to reroute our travel, the US Airways staff told everyone that we had technically never been dismissed from our plane and that therefore the flight was still in progress and they had no obligation to reroute us. After some phone work between our management and the airline, we found ourselves on a flight to Charlotte NC. Then we took a third flight to Wilmington, arriving about 5 hours later than planned.

our view

After checking into our hotel (everyone got their own rooms!) and checking out the USS Carolina on the riverfront, we were picked up by a shuttle from One Tree Hill. Arriving at the set, we found a dizzying full scale production facility in an old factory building. After being redressed by wardrobe, getting my latest facial tour-scar covered with makeup (by a man that has done makeup for Janet Jackson and Cher) and having my hair done (the hair guy was dismayed when upon asking me how I like my hair, I just gestured upwards, adding that when I don’t shower for a week it gets taller), we headed inside to do our scene. It turned out that our band was playing at the fictional club that one of the characters owns called Tric. We were actually written into the script as ourselves! The set was incredible- a full scale rock club complete with a bar and lots of fake drinks, sound system, lighting rig, real techs, etc, and they had even rented our full stage set up. The drums were engineered to be quiet- the cymbals had disks welded to their bottoms to deaden their sound and the toms had felt heads. There were several hundred extras to play the role of fans- they were all dressed in club clothes, holding fake drinks and cheering at us more convincingly than any real audience. It was actually really eery- although having never heard of us, the girls were taking their role as adoring fans very, very seriously.

view of uss carolina from hotel

After the character Haley (blonde on left in above picture) did a “give it up for blind pilot” line about 100 times, we were to lip synch our recorded version of Half Moon. We did maybe fifteen takes and it was actually really fun to get a huge crowd response without worrying about playing well. The recorded track has 6 trumpet tracks, so it was interesting playing along with myself- would that I could produce 6 tones in real life. After this was all over, we headed back to the hotel and woke up the next morning at 5:30 to catch a flight to Toronto to meet up with the bus. The flight was smooth but a few band members were brutally chastised by immigration because someone had failed to advance our work visas properly. I was lucky though- I walked right through. Coming off this morning and the general discombobulation from spending our day off in such a manner, last night’s Toronto show was a bit odd, but the 500 folks in attendance seemed to have a good time all the same. Now we’re in Ann Arbor feeling a little ragged but committed to keeping the good shows coming, but I sure am getting excited to get home!

new orleans

Yes yes, I’ve been neglecting to write lately. Life goes on out on the road; we’ve settled into a routine of knocking it out of the park every night with the band.  I’ve got my smile epoxied to my face and hardly stop jumping through the whole set. Good good. Tomorrow we fly down to North Carolina to lipsynch a song from our record for the series finale of the TV show One Tree Hill. Then fly to Toronto and wrap this very long trip up with a final week or so of shows.

Picking up with Brett Dennen, we played a couple great headlining shows in the South, hit New Orleans for Voodoo Fest and stayed for the weekend, and opened for the Local Natives at Duke University. In New Orleans, once the comfort loving hotel dwellers debussed, we parked in front of Luke’s friend Uriah’s house just to the East of the French Quarter. Uriah, in between renovating his 1836 house and playing tourguide in the French Quarter, cooked us a nonstop barrage of rich and fantastic Southern food. We heard great local music, saw one of the city’s biggest second lines- it was pretty great.

nyc

After the Duke show, we met up with opener Gregory Alan Isakov in Philadelphia to begin our run of East Coast shows. Greg and his band are awesome- I definitely recommend looking him up for those of you at home. The next day, we hit New York. The two Bowery Ballroom shows were both sold out and lots of fun. We (again, the tough folks in the band) slept in the bus on Delancy street in The Bowery between the two shows and it was a good time. Sleeping on the bus is a strange portal into any given location- under no other circumstances would we be allowed to sit in the midst of a bustling urban center drinking beer and cooking meals. Pretty cool. The DC show was sold out and great. The Brooklyn show was sold out and great. In a nutshell, things are pretty exciting right now. More to come, and sooner this time..

green room art

Last night we rolled into Des Moines to play at a room called People’s Court. A pretty big square room with a nice stage and an extraordinary collection of ‘fertility idol’ art on the green room walls- nothing too special. However, realizing the club was actually called People’s and in the Court building, some memories crept in- Kieskagato had played at a different location of People’s (apparently an Iowa bar/venue chain) in Ames on our ill fated Minneapolis tour booked by our ill fated record label.

Kieskagato had just made its one record for Iconic Rocket, a label started by a Nike Marketing VP as a pet project and whose roster included only us and The Forth, a long defunct band led by Blind Pilot producer Skyler Norwood. Having released our album in Portland, the label owner’s grand strategy was to have Kieskagato play lots of shows in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, where he was from. It didn’t quite pan out. A week before we were to start the 2000 mile drive from Portland to Ames for the first of our 6 shows, our bass player Adam cut the tip of his finger off at work. Very determined not to hold the band back, he learned all of his bass parts on a second Rhodes piano and hit the road with a formidable bandage covering the spot where they had sown his finger tip back on.

The Grasshopper Takeover

Arriving at People’s in Ames IA, we found an immense bar with picnic table style seating and two stages. The big stage was for the headliner, a Christian rock group called The Grasshopper Takeover, and the small stage was for us. Both bands were set up at the same time and were to alternate sets. To be sure, the Grasshopper Takeover’s loyal Christian meathead following did not appreciate Kieskagato’s music, the fact that we weren’t down with Jesus, or our bass parts coming from a crippled keyboard player. However, they felt the spirit move them in a BIG way when GTO played. The night ended with us sitting in some college kids’ apartment. They had consumed a gigantic jug of whiskey and were thrilled to have us involved in their guitar, bongo drum and rain stick jam session. Oh, the good old days..

For summer tour, I tried every sort of digital Hammond representation I could get my hands on: an M Audio midi controller coupled with a Yamaha Motif rack unit (borrowed from my friend Peter and brought for the duration of tour), a Nord, a Korg CX3, an actual Yamaha Motif, as well as my previous experience with a Roland VK7. They all really sucked compared to the real thing- the magic of a Hammond is in the real time manipulation of draw bar harmonics, percussion, and Leslie tremolo speeds. Some ‘hammond clones’ try to simulate these parameters, but once you get used to a real organ, there’s no going back. It became clear that it was time for my erstwhile tinkering project, also known as a chopped Hammond L100, to emerge from the basement to join the Blind Pilot family.

This organ is ultra bare bones- I’ve removed the vibrato unit and reverb tank, de-tubed the power amp, and taken a line out off the percussion pre amp. The bass pedals are now wired through spst momentary contact push buttons mounted below the drawbars. Still there? Volume control is an Ernie Ball pedal, outside of the organ’s wiring. For a Leslie, I salvaged a unit from an old Conn organ that is just a single unpowered Jensen speaker with a baffle rotated by a 2 speed motor system. Each motor runs on AC, so I built a stomp box to route power to either motor and quickly learned about using capacitors to prevent the motors from kicking back surges into the house wiring. The “Leslie” is encased in a custom built cabinet of plywood sheathing left over from our bathroom renovation. Some members of the band suggested that hardwood would be nicer, but I like the fact that a piece of my house will travel with me as an instrument. The whole mess is powered by a line spliced into the speaker output on Luke’s Fender Blues Junior.

So far this rig has been to the DMB Caravan Festival at the Gorge, Live Wire! Radio, OPB Music (watch here), KEXP Live, The Crystal Ballroom, Kink FM, and Music Millenium, and everything’s sounded great. Playing an instrument that I worked so hard on for a sold out Crystal Ballroom crowd was a satisfying feeling indeed.