Wow! What a great weekend. I don’t even know where to begin, so I will tell you the story. From the beginning, my yard has always been a gathering place. A year or two after we moved here, we began the July 4th party tradition. We used to go camping, but the hard part was finding a cooler campsite than my own backyard.

Follow up:

This year, the energy of the whole thing was different. Not bad, just different. The economy forced the City of Lake Elsinore to cancel the big city fireworks show. One of the best around, but at a thousand dollars a minute, it was simply too expensive. That is not to say that we didn’t have fireworks. We could still see several other pro city shows and the village side of the lake was alive as always. Illegal and fairly safe on both sides of my yard as far down as you could see there were small yard shows. Some of them were spectacular, “simulcast” over our live music. No fires, no one hurt, no one arrested, as far as we know.

Anyway, our party started on Thursday as wakitu and I began getting things ready in the house. The boys showed up on Friday and the stage crew got to work. We were jamming before dark as folks started to arrive. I got to do the sound check on the drums after a paparazzi moment of flashes as everyone took a shot of the old man in the goofy hat behind the drums. I’ve never really played drums in my life. It is a highlight of the weekend for me and I’ll never forget it. Watch for the video to come out next week. Mark, one of the real drummers, allowed us all to play his drums. He set them up when he got there and they stayed up all day and night and most of Saturday. This after his Caddy was impounded on the way to my house. Thankfully they left him on the side of the road with his drums and, sadly, a big ticket.

Friday night was full of fun, drinking and playing and jamming with new people. All the while we got most of the video system up and running and the sound and lights were just about ready to go. At some point we lost a whole row of sweet JBL speakers when they were inadverdantly plugged into 220v power. Needless to say, they didn’t like that and we lost some high end. One of the cameras failed as well but we still had plenty. By then we had 3 cameras rolling tape and one B&W up on the stage grid and the webcam dome to the right of the stage. Everything that went to the screen streamed from the website and was recorded onto DVR in the truck.

In the truck we had the video rig with a GVG switcher, a piggyback Panasonic switcher, a few frame stores, the graphics and Josh. He fed the screen some great images, combining the cameras, the graphics and the effects like a pro. With little help from his proud Dad as Ed was needed to run camera one, Josh really stepped up his game and rocked the screen. At one point I think we broke my Ed. We flat wore him out by Sunday. Up and down that hill, in and out of the truck, it must have been 107 in there at midday. It was 101 out in the shade. Great job you guys! Thank you so much. The stage crew, the video crew, the audio crew, the security team, everyone did a great job. Even though they got drunk and BobbyD and I had to finish the tear down ourselves. Actually I got lazy and took an extra day to clear my stuff completely. With echos of the whole weekend playing in my head I enjoyed a sunset and wrapped up the last of it on Tuesday.