Recently, I hit some sort of jackpot. I was lucky enough to be part of a house band to play the Pete Seeger 90th birthday/benefit concert @ Madison Square Garden. This event was beyond words. I will blog about the whole experience another time, but to name a few of the artists that performed/I played with:
Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Ben Harper, Dave Matthews, Emmylou Harris, Tom Morello, Warren Haynes, Roger McGuinn (the Byrds), Taj Mahal, Steve Earle, Richie Havens, Band of Horses, etc.
One of the craziest things about this whole evening was the fact that I got my own SOLO Bruce Springsteen performance WHILE he was performing as a duo! Here's the deal, he played a song w/Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine), but I got a solo performance out of this! How?? read on..
For this event, all the artists/performers were sharing the same line/cable to plug their guitars/instruments into. One of these lines happened to be excrutiatingly loud in my monitor (that's a speaker that is set in front of me with my own personal mix of whatever I want going on onstage). I asked the monitor guy to turn the volume down on this one acoustic guitar. The ironic thing is that he turned down the wrong one, A LOT. So, by the time Bruce played "the Ghost of Tom Joad" with Tom Morello, Tom had plugged into the same line that I asked the soundman to turn down. And Brunce's acoustic guitar, vocal and harmonica were SOOOOO F'ing LOUD in my monitor. Here I was, Tom moving and rocking like nobody's business, but he was completely in-audible to me. haha. Quite a sight. Then, There was Bruce. Literally, 5 feet in front of me, as I sit onstage at MSG, with his voice, guitar and harmonica blowing my face off in sheer volume. I will never forget the crispness, the intensity, sheer volume of that man's music blasting out of a speaker by my feet. It filled the entire Garden.
But my song was different. The Garden got a duo. I got a solo Bruce Springsteen performance. The only person that night. That is something I won't forget.
photo credit- Robert Sasso
