(36) Memphis Part 2

Monday, January 26^th: The morning was spent doing work even though this was another full day off. In the afternoon, Jonny, Rudy and I went to Sun Studio where we met up with Carolyn and her Mother. Sun Studio is where a B.B. King, Howlin Wolf, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and a number of other musicians recorded their first albums. There was a guided tour that took us upstairs at Sun Studio where they have old mixing boards and recording equipment that were used when Sam Phillips originally opened Sun Studio in the 50’s. They also have a number of pictures and records from the same time period. Our tour guide took us through the history of Sun Studio including playing original recordings of different artist. We then went downstairs into original studio where those artist made a lot of the most famous recordings of the 50’s and 60’s. Tours only run until 6:00pm because the space is still used as a recording studio today. That night, Caroline, Jill and I went to B.B. King’s Blues Club for dinner. The food was good and the live band was great.

Tuesday, January 27^th: Again the morning was spent doing more work. We had a tech meeting and then went to pick up the truck, which was all fixed up, and then headed to the venue for our load in. We were very excited when we arrived because The Orpheum is a huge and beautiful theater. About 30 minutes into load in the Event Coordinator came up to me and said that there were chances that our show would be cancelled in the morning. It had started to rain and the temperature was dropping quickly but they probably wouldn’t know until around 4am. We continued load in with the assumption that we’d have shows because deep down we were all hoping that we would. Our local crew was amazing and we had a large number of people so my part of load in was done in record time, just over 2 hours. Towards the end of the night, I had a really nice conversation with theater’s Technical Director and we packed up and went home for the night, hoping not to get a show cancelling call.

Wednesday, January 28^th: At just before 7:00am a mass text message went out from Caroline’s phone saying that the show had been cancelled. The plan was to go in at 10:00am to strike the set, so I went down to breakfast around 9:00am. On my way down, I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize. I call was from my contact in Paducah, KY, which is where we were performing next. The ice and snow storm that had closed Memphis schools and cancelled our show had completely destroyed Paducah. The ice had caused a number of power lines and trees to fall. Most of the city didn’t have power and we were told you’d need a chainsaw to cut through the trees to get into the city. I passed the phone call to Caroline, who passed it to David Kilpatrick in DC who decided that we’d make that show up in April on our way back to DC. The next decision was what to do about not driving to or thru Paducah to get to Cincinnati by Saturday night. We got to the venue and quickly loaded out the set. The venue was providing lunch for us, so we had a great chicken parmesan lunch with salad and cookies. It was figured out, between Caroline and David Kilpatrick, that we’d be staying in Memphis until Saturday morning and driving strait to Cincinnati. We also learned that we wouldn’t be able to stay in our current hotel on Friday night. Luckily, Caroline found us another hotel for that last night here. That afternoon, I worked out for the first time in just over two weeks. I’d been feeling a little antsy because of all the driving and days off. The hotel was having a cocktail hour from 5:30-6:30 which ended up being great. They had a sushi platter, cheese platter, vegetable platter, wings and pulled pork along with free drinks, beer and wine. There was enough food to make it dinner! Later that night, the tech crew got together to play poker. I ended up winning $6, Caroline and Rudy won $5 and Eric won $4.