° Yeah You Rob Blog °

Hello, friends! Rob here.

Today I write you from the lavish backstage area at Norfolk, VA’s Norva Theatre.  Of course, anywhere with an artists-only bathroom seems palatial by our standards, but for goshsakes, pressing “3A” in the elevator takes you to a basketball court, and apparently there’s a hot tub somewhere around here.

Of course, nobody actually uses the hot tub anymore. One of the guys on Gov’t Mule’s crew described it as a “roadie bouillabaisse.”

Speaking of dirty fun, I am pleased to report that The Revivalists survived Wanee Festival with nothing more than a few missed showers and a lot of unabashed hero-worship. I got to see one of my favorite saxophonists ever and my all-time favorite band in the universe, and there are at least a few pictures of all of us with veterans who are way out of our respective leagues floating around Facebook.

The festival itself is an extremely successful production. There are only two stages: the classic festival stage with layers of security and forty-foot stacks of amplifiers booming across a huge open field, and a more intimate ampitheatre-style stage shaded by a canopy of live oaks and Spanish moss. The overall size of the festival’s beautiful campus hits that Goldilocks sweet spot- not too big, not too small. The people were all kind, our set was good, and pretty much everything was fun.

Also, Dave killed it so hard with Galactic to close out Saturday night at Wanee and if you don’t believe me you can check it out here.  There’s a little bit of me on there as well, but who cares because you should actually probably skip to track twelve and listen to mad scientist Skerik take an innocent saxophone solo and gradually twist it into a tricked-out metal odyssey. Anyway, Wanee was cool.

And now we are doing real tour stuff again.

Well, sort of. Right now we’re on night two of eight with Gov’t Mule (and two more shows without them), but I almost feel guilty calling it “real tour stuff” when we’ve been playing seated theatres with catering and basketball courts. Anyway, we are driving to places. And when we get to those places, we play music and then leave. So that is happening.

Speaking of things that are happening, our Clevelandian comrades The Burning River Ramblers (whom I believe I have mentioned once or twice before) are finalists in a vote-gathering contest sponsored by Hard Rock Cafe which, if they win, will put them on an awesome international tour and basically make them rich and famous forever. They totally deserve it because they’re a great band in their own right, but if that’s not enough to move you then please remember that these guys rank among our oldest and dearest band-friends and a lot of why we’ve had such a great time in Cleveland boils down to their hustle and hospitality. So please, for their sake, for our sake, hell, as a personal favor to me, please click on this here link and vote for our friends The Burning River Ramblers:

https://www.facebook.com/hardrockcafecleveland?sk=app_205164529573076&app_data=eyJhcnRpc3RfaWQiOiIxMzk3ODgwIn0%3D

Thanks! Bye.

Hello, friends!  Rob here.

With last Monday night’s rehearsal, Spring Break is officially over for The Revivalists.  Dave has returned from touring with Galactic, we’ve got a nice outdoor show here in New Orleans  today another nice outdoor show on Friday, and then we’ll be on tour with this cool band you may have heard of straight on until Jazz Fest.

And that’ll be our summer in a nutshell, come to think of it: tour, festival, rest, repeat.

Since we’ve all been on break, there is little to report.  Some of the guys did a few side gigs in the area, a few of us spoke at the Loyola Music Industry Forum on Monday.  Zack has been moving, which is awful.

The biggest thing that happened to me over the break is that a local news outlet called the NOLA Defender asked me if I would be interested in contributing a regular column on the subject of life as young traveling musician.  Since I’ve already been writing about band stuff on a semi-consistent basis for over three years, I couldn’t think of a good excuse to say no.

So, starting pretty soon, Blog Wednesday is expanding!  Kind of.  Some of what I write for the Defender will be entirely redundant with what goes on here, and other times those contributions will be more informative as to the oft-unseen technical aspects of life on the road: where you eat, where you sleep, where you poop, how not to kill each other, that sort of thing.

So that’s how I spent my Spring Break.  Still, I’m pretty sure Dave’s got me beat:

Alright, time to go to work.  See you at Jazz Fest.

Hello, friends!  Rob here.

We’re on spring break!  Two whole weeks of not doing anything at all (except for Dave, who is on tour with Galactic)!  I don’t even know what to do with myself.  Well, there’s always hours of video games SAXOPHONE PRACTICE AND CARDIOVASCULAR EXERCISE.

Not that we haven’t earned a break (except for Dave, apparently).  It’s been two weeks since I’ve last had both the time and the energy to check in, and I’m really not kidding about either.  The last week we spent on the road was some of the most hardcore banding we’ve done in years.  We left at about eight o’clock on Monday night, drove until a bit past two in the morning, and checked into one of rural Alabama’s most luxurious motor lodges for a few hours of bed-sleep.  We resumed driving at eight the next morning, which was the result of a turbulently-negotiated compromise between “we’re going to be so late!” and “we’re going to be so tired!”  The one plus to having to leave a hotel at such a blasphemous hour is that there’s usually still breakfast in the lobby.

Our long, hurried trip to Raleigh more or less set the pace for the entire week.  All of the  shows had relatively early start times, so we ended up driving after a lot of them.  We drove to DC after Raleigh, to Brooklyn after DC, and half of us took the van to Connecticut after Brooklyn.  We actually slept in Connecticut after the Fairfield show, but we had to wake up early to get to Baltimore.  And then we had to drive straight to New Orleans from the Baltimore show (a mere sixteen or nineteen hours, depending on traffic) so that Dave could squeeze in another rehearsal with Galactic.  So if you’re wondering where we’ve all been for the last week or so, the answer is mostly sleeping.  And Freret Street Festival.  Everyone was at the Freret Street Festival.  It was awesome and you missed it.

Oh, right, band stuff.  Sorry, sometimes I forget that we’re actually musical performers and not a troupe of professional van-drivers or something.  Anyway, we found the time for five shows during those six-and-a-half days of non-stop vanning action.  In order, we hit Raleigh, DC, Brooklyn, Fairfield, and Baltimore.  We had only been to Raleigh once before, so we weren’t sure what to expect, especially on a Tuesday night.  It was a similar story Saturday in Baltimore.  It was only our second time playing there, and Baltimore Soundstage is a big enough room that it can feel very lonely when you don’t have enough people in there.  Fortunately, in both cities a surprising number of people seemed to know that we exist, and Tuesday and Saturday turned out to be a great set of bookends to the three middle shows.

Now, while we were admittedly a bit more confident about DC, Brooklyn, and Fairfield, I don’t think any of us expected to sell out all three shows. But hey, we did, and that was pretty cool, right? Unfortunately, because of the breakneck pace of this tour, there wasn’t really a whole lot of time for us to get into much trouble.  It was mostly just driving when we should have been sleeping and sleeping when we should have been driving.

Also a hat-trick of sold out shows.  I’m not going to let you forget that.

And now I need to make a bit of a rough transition so I can talk about the musicians we played with on this tour, because they were all really fantastic. Seriously, I’m going to make links out of all of the band names and if you click on any of them you will find music that you like. In Raleigh and DC we were reunited with The Hill and Wood, a blast from our distant past (summer 2009, to be exact) featuring the eldest of the Campanelli brothers. For the next two nights we were joined by some cool retro soul-type music acts, specifically Alecia Chakour (of Warren Haynes Band fame) in Brooklyn and Jesse Dee in Fairfield. And finally, after the Baltimore show, I think it’s safe to say that The Revivalists have a total band-crush on The Stone Foxes, a no-nonsense four-headed rock monster from San Francisco. But in spite of all of this awesome, the absolute show-stealingest music person of the tour was a gifted guitarist named Bobby Paltauf who sat in with us in Fairfield.  Skip to the two-minute mark to hear him rip:

Oh, did I forget to mention that he’s twelve years old?

So that was pretty much it. Good tour, good people… good church, good steeple? Sure, whatever. Good enough for spring break. Until next time, friends!

P.S.  This exists:  http://sportballsreplacedwithcats.tumblr.com/