Joanne and I went on a trip in our trailer to New Orleans where we met up with our good friends, Kelly and Joe. The full story will appear on masterofleisure.com, but in the meantime I wanted to make available the videos that we took on that trip. Here they are.

Briefly, we stopped at several places on the way down, but the video I took was primarily of bands that we saw in New Orleans, Memphis, and Nashville. I started taking short snippets of around a minute in lenght, as you’ll see, and then started taking longer and longer videos getting up to twenty six minutes at one point.

There will be video from all three cities here. Since I’ve published this before they’re all up here so that they can be seen as they appear, I’ll remove this sentence when they’re all up here.

New Orleans

In New Orleans, we saw several bands but I only have video from the band, Legend, which we saw at Fat Catz on Bourbon street on September 21st and 22nd. If you go, be sure to visit Frenchman Street where we saw a few great blues bands.

The first video below is from the first day and the second is from the second day. The first video contains the following songs that start at the indicated time in the video:

0:00 – Unknown Song
0:13 – Play That Funky Music (two clips)
1:43 – Some Kind Of Wonderful

 The video below contains the following songs at the indicated time in the video:

0:00 – September – Earth, Wind and Fire
0:57 – Uptown Funk – Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars

Memphis

After New Orleans, we traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, where we saw the Eric Hughes Band, an amazing blues band.

The video below has the following songs:

0:00 – don’t know
1:46 – My Babe – Little Walter
3:39 – I’ll Play The Blues For You – Albert King
5:39 – Got My Mojo Workin’ – Preston “Red” Foster popularized by Muddy Waters
8:14 – Boom Boom – John Lee Hooker

Nashville

We arrived in Nashville on September 27th, 2019. We saw a lot of bands here and I took a lot more video of each band. Below is a day-by-day report of the bands we saw that day.

Friday, September 27

We had a short trip from the Paducah / I-24 / Kentucky Lake KOA to the Nashville KOA campground, taking about two hours. Because we arrived in the middle of the day, we were able to head downtown to Broadway street where there’s a very dense population of bars with live bands.

The first band we saw was at the Nashville Crossroads bar. They didn’t mention who they were during the set, as far as I know, but I asked the bouncer. Since I didn’t want to forget,I dictated the name to Siri. What Siri recorded was “Malak and France”, which may or may not resemble their actual name. Since I’m not sure, I left the band’s name as unknown in the video.

The songs in the video below are:

0:00 – Sweet Child o’ Mine
1:39 – One Way Out
2:39 – Wanted Dead Or Alive
3:37 – Go Your Own Way
4:28 – Africa
8:45 – Fat Bottomed Girls
9:33 – Are You Gonna Go My Way
11:22 – Two Tickets To Paradise
12:38 – Livin’ On A Prayer
14:37 – You Oughta Know
19:11 – Call Me
19:50 – [the guitarist gets out of sync with the singer and reacts]
21:15 – Killing In the Name
22:21 – Enter Sandman

Saturday, September 28

The second band we saw in Nashville was Dean James and the Treatment. This was a polished band with some surprising theatrics that I’ll get into on the second video of them taken the next day. On this day, I shot the video from outside the club looking through a very large, open window. The club, Kid Rock’s Honky Tonk, is a four-story brick building with very large windows that were all wide open on this pleasant evening. There are four floors and the stage is halfway between the first and second floor, as you can see in the video. We could see people on the third and fourth floors but when we were inside the building the next day, we could only see the first two floors–the top two floors seem to be separate from the first two and we never went up there.

Songs in this video:

0:00 – Bennie and the Jets
0:50 – Crocodile Rock
1:24 – Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)

After watching Dean James and the Treatment for a while, we moved on to watch a country band. Joanne had mentioned that here we were in Nashville and we hadn’t really watched a single country band for more than a minute. Now, it’s not that she loves country music–though we’ve been to see Alan Jackson and also Brooks & Dunn at the Canadian Tire Centre here in Ottawa–but she felt obligated to see one. Well, here we were with what I’d call a pure, or traditional, country band. The lead singer pointed out several times that this is how country music is supposed to sound. Well, it wasn’t really our kind of music so, with Joanne’s point addressed, we moved on after about twenty minutes or so.

There’s just one song on this video, and I didn’t make note of the place or the name of the band.

After listening to the country band, we went back to the Nashville Crossroads bar. The bands we saw there played a wide variety of music, though mostly good, ole’ classic rock. I didn’t catch the name of this band, either, but they were pretty good. Especially, check out their performance of With a Little Help from My Friends, which probably had the best vocal performance of the entire trip.

Songs in this video:

0:00 – Me and Bobby McGee
0:33 – Kiss
2:16 – Crying
3:46 – Jessie’s Girl
5:25 – With a Little Help from My Friends
10:01 – Alone
11:57 – Uptown Funk
17:00 – At Last

Sunday, September 29, 2019

The first band we saw on Sunday was one that we heard walking by the bar. They were playing All Along the Watchtower, a favourite of mine. So, we stopped in for the song. It’s the only song in the video below. The guitarist hams it up with him “playing” his guitar with his mouth.

After the first band, we next stopped at AJ’s Good Time Bar, which takes its name from Alan Jackson, a big country music star. Sure enough, there was a country band playing called Carolina Pine (facebook). Again, we’re not big country music fans, but their music caught our ear so we went in to watch them for a few songs. The third song was, I believe, the theme song for the movie, Smokey and the Bandit, a 1977 movie starring Burt Reynolds. We enjoyed that song!

The songs in the video below are:

0:00 – Driving Nails In My Coffin
0:43 – [some country song I recognize but cannot place]
1:33 – East Bound and Down

After Carolina Pine, we went back to Kid Rock’s Honky Tonk to watch Dean James and the Treatment again. We saw them play a couple of songs on the previous night, so we knew we’d enjoy the band. We weren’t disappointed. There was more than just the music to see and hear. They played and sang on stage, on the dance floor, on the bar, and even did a backwards fall into the audience. While on the dance floor, they seemed to be picking out favourite ladies, with the bass player dancing real close–so close, the girl muted his strings and he had to back off a little bit. It all has to be seen to be believed. A lady should never fall backwards into a crowd of drunk men–she had her crotch grabbed as a result and had to move hands away. She had a few choice words for the offenders, and they deserved a lot worse. Throughout it all, though, she kept on singing Sweet Child o’ Mine. What a night! There’s about an hour and six minutes of video below, the longest by far on the trip.

The songs, and the events, in the video below are:

0:00 – [an interlude of some sort]
1:49 – Old Time Rock & Roll
4:57 – On the Dark Side & a bit of another song at the end
8:06 – Go Your Own Way – [Closeup of female singer]
9:00 – Drift Away
9:41 – [Vocalist crosses dance floor to stand on bar]
16:45 – [Guitarist talks to bassist]
12:44 – [Guitarist joins vocalist on bar, runs into wireless range limit for his guitar]
13:58 – [Guitarist leaves bar top to return to stage]
17:42 – Sweet Home Alabama
23:57 – [Vocalist leaves bar to return to stage]
26:27 – [Pan of audience]
26:35 – Bennie and the Jets
30:26 – [Another pan of the audience]
31:53 – Crocodile Rock
32:14 – [Long pan of both floors of the audience]
34:32 – Sweet Caroline
36:00 – I Don’t Want To Lose Your Love Tonight
35:58 – Edge of Seventeen
40:03 – [pan of audience]
40:10 – Sweet Child o’ Mine
41:28 – [Guitarist whispers to vocalist]
43:10 – [Pan of second floor and outdoors]
45:12 – [Prepares audience for her backwards fall]
45:44 – [Vocalist hands guitarist a drink, whispers]
46:56 – [You guys look like a bunch of weirdos. If you can’t catch me I will f**k you up]
47:09 – [She falls backwards and is carried to the bar, molested along the way]
47:27 – [Chastised the guys that caught her]
48:40 – [Interacts with audience including kiss with girl marrying another girl]
50:42 – [some song, almost a jam of sorts with singer on guitar]
51:35 – [some slow song that carries on throughout dance floor antics]
52:23 – [Guitarist enters dance floor, entertains lady]
53:19 – [Bassist enters dance floor at bottom left of frame]
53:37 – [Bassist dancing close with a lady]
54:13 – [Bassist breaks away from lady and returns to the stage]
54:18 – [Vocalist enters danced floor]
54:30 – [Bassist returns to the dance floor and the lady he left 17 seconds ago]
55:35 – [Bassist leaves lady again, joins vocalist on dance floor as song end approaches]
56:04 – Footloose
56:26 – [Bassist returns to stage]
1:00:08 – I Love Rock ‘N Roll – [female vocalist on bar]
1:01:39 – Hit Me With Your Best Shot
1:04:38 – One Way or Another
1:06:12 – [Female vocalist returns to stage]
1:06:21 – [Female vocalist puts leg up on drum sound protector, hits symbols with mic!!!]

Indianapolis Motor Speedway

The last video we took on the trip was at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Wednesday, October 2nd, 2019. When we arrived, we were surprised at how many people were standing around at the fences. It turned out that there was a car on the track testing a new windscreen with overhead protection for the driver to address a couple of deaths caused by debris entering the cockpit. Although this meant that we wouldn’t be able to do a lap of the track in the shuttle bus, we were nevertheless delighted and I tooks some video.

We decided to pay $20 instead of $10 admission so that we could get the tour on the shuttle bus. This was fortuitous: we were able to get footage of the cars (another had joined the first) from the vantage point of the Winner’s Circle, as well as from the Millionaires’ Suites area just above the Winner’s Circle. Then, in our tour of the press area, we came across a press conference with the two drivers of the cars. Finally, we caught sight of last year’s IndyCar series champion, Josef Newgarden, being filmed in a car’s cockpit in front of a green screen, presumably for a commercial or a driver spotlight or something similar. The tour guide was astonished at our good luck.

The video below includes the following:

0:00 – Seven laps taken near the fence. A second car appears in the third lap and they alternate
1:01 – Two cars lapping together taken from the Winner’s Circle
1:12 – Two cars in the pit lane, taken from the Millionaires’ Suites area
1:24 – A pan of the back side of the track, taken from the Millionaires’ Suites area
1:38 – Press Conference
1:50 – Josef Newgarden filmed in cockpit in front of green screen. Commentary is from inside the bus