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Darkover: On the Mark
We had a moderate crowd Friday night and a bigger one Saturday afternoon. While we'd been trying to spread the word informally, some people didn't know until we announced it that these were our last concerts. Mind, quite a few people said to me things like "yeah, Clam Chowder 'retired' too...", and someday we may play together again, but that's for another time. It won't be soon, and we wanted to go out on a good note.
Here's what we played for our farewell concerts: Friday
- A Chat With Your Mother (Berrymans)
- The Reeds of Runnymede (Kipling/Fish)
- Inner Light (Paramount/Cellio)
- Silly Slang Song (Eric Bogle)
- In a Gown Too Blue (Brenda Sutton)
- My Husband Was a Weatherman (The Bobs)
- Estampie (strings) (Cellio)
- I Can See Your Aura and It's Ugly (Mark Graham)
- Guenevere and the Fire (Fred Small)
- Tesara (15th-c Italian/Cellio)
- Their Brains Were Small and They Died (Mark Graham)
- Plastic or Paper (The Bobs)
- Hide Park (ECD/Van Stone)
- Christmas in the Trenches (John McCutcheon)
- The Ex-Oil Carter (Bob Kanefsky, with a new verse by Robert Smith)
- Gathering Peascods (ECD) (this was a "get people's attention" item, as no one was scheduled in the room before us; that said, the room was half-full when we arrived 20 minutes early, which is quite gratifying)
- Swallowtail Jig/Greensleeves and Yellow Lace (trad; I think Kathy Van Stone and Marion Kee did the arrangements, way back)
- Their Brains Were Small and They Died
- Boys of Bedlam (based on the Steeleye Span version)
- Estampie (winds)
- Some Kind of Hero (Lackey/Fish)
- Rasputin's HMO (Austin Lounge Lizards)
- The Reeds of Runnymede
- Hide Park
- The Goddess Done Left Me (Leigh Ann Hussey)
- A Reason For It All (Eric Bogle)
- I Can See Your Aura and It's Ugly
- Marchesana (15th-c Italian/Cellio)
- In a Gown Too Blue
- Rostiboli Gioioso (15th-c Italian/Cellio)
- If I Were a Moose (Fred Small)
- (Encore:) Your State's Name Here (Berrymans)
We did Estampie with two different instrumentations; we'd been practicing it both ways to decide which we liked better and ended up deciding we liked both. I kind of fumbled this Friday night; I should remember in the future that overhead boom mics cast shadows. (The best way to mic the dulcimer seems to be with two mikces a foot or so above it.)
We also resurrected some older material that we haven't done in a while, including "Some Kind of Hero" (one of my personal favorites), "Inner Light" (based on a Star Trek episode), Bedlam, and Moose. We haven't done Moose since Andrea left the group in, um, 2001?, and it was a favorite of this audience.
A lot of people had clearly heard "I Can See Your Aura and It's Ugly"; they sang along on the first chorus. That was fun; it's always nice when the audience is into the material. :-) (I don't recall ever encountering Mark Graham's material in fandom, but I don't get out much.) One of the things we tried to do as a group was to bring new sources of good music to new audiences; I think we were significantly (though certainly not solely) responsible for introducing the works of Peter and Lou Berryman to fandom, for instance.
"In a Gown Too Blue" went over well. The song is based on a novel by Connie Willis (Domesday Book), which I'll read one of these days. Sometimes songs based on books (or movies or TV shows) assume knowledge; the good ones (IMO) don't. The story (or at least the subset represented in the song) is about a time traveller who overshoots her target by 50 years and ends up smack in the middle of the black death.
Friday night we performed in the main room, which means amplification. The folks running sound were very accommodating ("you want how many mics?"), and though it's hard to judge from the stage, I think they gave us a good mix. (I have hopes of acquiring recordings later.) Alas, while there was much equipment, the setup didn't include monitors. This would be fine in general (we're used to performing accoustically), except that you get better sound by directly plugging in instruments that can do that instead of micing, and those instruments were the bass and the keyboard. I never rely on the bass as a source of pitch (though Robert does), but the keyboard is important. I thought I could hear well enough through the house mix (with some straining), but I gather we had some pitch problems that I didn't detect at the time. Bummer. Note for next time (academic though it be): we should mic the keyboard in that situation. I think we could have; I just didn't think to ask. (Do not read this as criticism of our sound people.)
I went into this convention with a bit of a cold, unfortunately. I went armed with Sudafed and throat losenges, and it wasn't hard to come by hot tea and hot cider, so that helped. But I wasn't 100% on voice, and it threw me off in other ways a little. But an audience of friends adds a lot of positive energy to the mix too.
I had fun, and I think Robert and Kathy did too. Kathy's father and brother came to the Saturday concert, as did Andrea (former group member) and her husband. A lot of other familiar people were there too, of course. People recorded both shows and someone was videotaping Friday night, so with luck we'll have some souvenirs.
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Sorry to see you dis-band, but hopefully you'll re-band at some point in the future.
If things work out in the future I think that'd be great. We'll have to see.