Tag: Day Trippers

Taking the Easy Way Out

A bunch of news on the music front. First, it’s time to say goodbye to the Day Trippers, at least for the time being. Here’s one last video from our inaugural gig last August at Heights Fests in Berkeley Heights, NJ.

http://zingman.com/music/daytrippers/DT_HF_montage01.mov

Second, it looks like originals band, Buzzy Tonic is actually getting off the ground. I jammed last weekend with Charlie Guitar, and brought in young Wolfgang on bass. We got thru four songs together and all agree the songs sound good and the project is worth pursuing. Charlie calls Heat Wave “the crazy one”, but Wolfgang had no trouble keeping up. Now it looks like we may have a drummer to complete the lineup. Charlie reached out to a friend of his who listened to my demos and likes the songs, and agreed to come by next session, which will be next week. Not sure how long it’ll take to get a set together, but it’ll be fun. I suppose to really do justice to the records I’ll need to add a sax player, but that’s still down the line a ways.

Third, with Left Hook now getting our set together and looking for gigs, I put together a web page for the group:

http://zingman.com/music/lefthook.php

This part of a new round of updates to my site. Much more exciting stuff soon!

Day Trippers Video Montages

I’ve been going thru a bunch of video over the winter break. I cut together a couple montages of the last two Day Trippers shows, at the Crossroads back in October and at Lexington in December, to give y’all an idea of the sound in under three minutes. The Day Trippers are John Foote on guitar and vocals, Ken Mathews on bass, Rob Cassels on drums, and Yours Truly on piano and lead vocals. Enjoy!

Crossroads
Lexington

Day Trippers this Saturday!

My Beatles tribute band, The Day Trippers, will be playing this Saturday night, December 13, at the Lexington Grille, just over the Tappen Zee bridge in Bardonia, NY. This is our third gig and our ever-expanding repetoire is up to about 30 songs, two solid hours of material covering everything from the early Bealtemania pop to psychedelic blues and everything in between.

Show starts at 9:00. Looks like they also have good food there.

Night Trippin’

Last night’s Day Tripper gig at the Crossroads went quite well. The Crossroads is a really nice place for bands, with a good stage and sounds system, pretty large and pretty full of people. There were two other bands opening for us, and both sounded really good. By the time we got on stage it was almost 11. We did seventeen songs, just over an hour. If we had more songs we could have gone on longer, but that was all we had.

Musically most songs were right there. Good response from the crowd, and we had new people coming in throughout the show. A couple minor issues, coming out of the bridge of Here Comes the Sun, the ending of Lady Madonna, and on the last couple songs energy level seemed to be flagging a bit. We did some of the real high screamers early in the set – Don’t Let Me Down, Band on the Run and I Want You (She’s So Heavy), but my voice stayed strong the thru the end of the set, and I felt I delivered a good performance. My voice continues getting stronger in terms of range, endurance, control and expressiveness. Woo-hoo!

In fact we’re getting good enough now that I feel we need to work on taking it to the next level. Really tighten and polish the arrangements and vocal harmonies, string together the songs in threes or fours without a pause, work on our between-song banter, and generally keep the flow of the show going. As a singer I know the songs well enough now to focus more on performing them at an emotional rather than technical level. Plus we need to learn a bunch more songs. We seem to be learning about 8 to 10 per show, so for the next one we want to get up to the 25 to 30 range.

So I guess we’ll see when the next gig comes up and take it from there. Meanwhile the Crossroads also has jazz, so we may get a gig there with our jazz group.

Down to the Crossroads

My Beatles tribute band, the Day Trippers, will playing Saturday night, October 25 a place called Crossroads in New Jersey. It looks like a pretty cool place. Recently had Stanley Jordan on the bill. The address is:

Crossroads
78 North Ave Garwood, NJ 07027
(908) 232-5666

Oddly, they’re in the middle of a block. Also, our guitarist John put up a facebook page for the band, featuring some photos and videos of our earlier gig:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Day-Trippers-Beatles-Tribute-Band/721842167880962?ref=hl

So come on out and have a good time. Hope to see y’all there.