Mark Lewno Concert Photos

Greetings from Laguardia, Vibes Bound

2009-07-24T08:21:00.000-07:00

Soooo...

Yet another festival begins.

This time, we're off to Bridgeport, CT for the 2009 Gathering of The Vibes.

It's always important to make sure you have your ground transportation arrangements made in advance.

Only in NYC will one find somebody ballsy enough to palm a running stogie INSIDE the airport.

And of course, you always need to know where your spoon is.

ETA to Vibes? Who kn0ws. This is, after all, NYC, where the traffic moves at a snail's pace.

Rest assured, we will arrive.

Rothbury, Day 2

2009-07-04T09:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday...

Was a bit more relaxed, and I had a bit of time to walk around and just sort of absorb the event.

And what a remarkable day it was.

I got quite a bit of stuff, and will try to just get you a feel of the event.

As the attendees had a day to sort of get their bearings (while I'm sure there are a LOT of returnees from last year, there are an awful lot of first timers here as well), the "flavor" of Rothbury 2009 began to emerge.

Meeting old friends (my buddy here shoots for a Canadian newspaper, and we shot Rothbury last year together, as well as running into each other on Dead tour). That part is really cool for me.

Words can't do justice, but those that come to mind include exuberance, joyous and by the end of the night, epic.

The Rothbury "educate while having fun" subtext that I so loved last year is still present everywhere. Here they had a human powered cell phone charging station. Elsewhere they had solar ones as well.

Denaz' spring tour shirts kept cropping up. To me, the "AARP Tour 2009" was really the best part.

But the crown of the evening was unquestionably SCI's "only performance of the year".

These guys haven't been out on the road for a while now. But you'd never know it. I didn't know what to expect, but they just blew the house down..

At some point I may be able to describe it, but at this point I can't find the right combination of words to do SCI's show justice. Suffice to say, that if these guys ever decide to tour again, it will be a must see for me. Some things you hear so much back and forth on, that it's best to hold judgement, experience it for yourself, and then call the ball. Last night, it was pretty apparent that the folks who had come to North Michigan had decided en masse, and for those of us fortunate enough to have been there, it was spectacular.

A friend of mine who was with me whose been listening to the Dead for a solid 30 years and had never seen SCI, was just stunned. File us amongst the "SCI owns" camp in a big way.

We caught a bit of STS9 who were in their favorite late night time slot, serving up their usual mass trance dance fest in fine fashion. We also caught a bit of Girl Talk, and they were cooking with steam as well.

However with a remarkably full shedule on tap for today, us old pharts called it quits for the evening to have some reserve left for tonights Dead show.

Rothbury, Day 1

2009-07-03T09:28:00.000-07:00

So we got here pretty easily. The line in was a bit longer than last year, but not too bad.

Mikey and Dani were having some operational difficulties with the portable hotel.

We missed Keller, so first up for us was Lotus.

Next up, The Disco Biscuits. Pat Hutchinson got an absolutely spectacular mix last night. Even hundreds of feet from the stage very solid low end in the 60hz and under was kicking it.

Sherwood forest was every bit the delight I remember from last year.

The Greencards, From Threadgills, Round 2.

2009-06-26T21:03:00.000-07:00

Man, I just LOVE these guys.

Seriously. They're just fuggin amazing.

If you're getting this now, go google KGSR in Austin, and hit the stream.

And Again, From Threadgills, The Greencards

2009-06-26T20:20:00.001-07:00

Oh yeah. They just stomped the HELL out of the The Avenue.

By the way, you can listen to this show live by going to KTSR in Austin's website. WELL worth doing.

Live From Threadgils, Austin TX - Sarah Jaroscz

2009-06-26T19:40:00.000-07:00

For the second night in a row, I'm on the road with Sarah Jaroscz and the Greencards. This time we're coming to you from Threadgills, in Austin TX.

Sarah's on right now, playing cuts off her debut CD on Sugar Hill records.

Ok, and this I just had to...

2009-06-25T21:25:00.000-07:00

So here we have my little MiniTosh laptop on a bar table, with this very site up and shots of The Greencards ON it while they are playing at the very club the shots were taken less than 5 minutes prior.

Dunno why, but this seriously gets my geek on.

Break out the Jams

2009-06-25T21:01:00.000-07:00

Ok, so now we have got Sarah Jarosz sitting in with The Greencards, and she and Kym are just ripping it up big time.

The crowd is just eating this up. I haven't seen this much animation in Dallas from such a mellow appearing audience since the last time Junior Brown laid waste to Sons of Herman Hall.

And Now (like RIght Now), The Greencards

2009-06-25T20:19:00.000-07:00

Back stage, right before going on.

Doing serious justice to the Avenue.

As I'm writing this, The Greencards are just NAILING the title Track to Fascination, off the new Album. I've waited for months to hear these folks live, and wow. Absolutely unreal. I was seriously impressed with Viridian and Fascination (the last two studio releases) but they don't even begin to do The Greencards justice.

If you have a chance to catch them on this tour, get there. Seriously. I'm just blown away. Ok, enough of this, I gotta just sit for a bit. They are just too damn good.

(Update)

Ok, now this is just freaky. I just checked the admin page, and these posts have had 936 hits, which is more people than are actually watching them play as I write this.

All hail tEh IntRaWebz.

The Live Remote Test

2009-06-25T18:57:00.001-07:00

So I'm at Poor David's Pub, right now, in South Dallas, listening to the delightful and wonderfully talented Sugar Hill Records artist Sarah Jarosz as she's opening for The Greencards.

What's different about this as opposed to most of the stuff we do on the site, is that the photos below are less than 5 minutes old, and I have no wifi here whatsoever, no my normal Mac Laptop.

In fact, the entire rig this is being produced on is less than the size of most small purses.

This is an experiment to see if we can pull this off WHILE the band is playing.

As I type this Sarah is talking to the crowd, and is breaking int0 yet another new song of her Debut release. I last saw her perform at SxSW, and she is amazing talented.

So as the evening progresses, we'll be occasionally updating this.

Huge thanks to Sarah and The Greencards for being my Guinea Pigs on this experiment.

Hippy Clothes Go Mainstream

2009-06-20T21:36:00.000-07:00

So a couple nights ago, after going out to eat, I found myself in, of all places, a Macy's store.

Now I'm not much on shopping, or fashion, or any of that, so it's not unusual for me to NOT be in a department store. In fact, I think the last time I landed in a Macy's or anything along those lines was probably a good decade or more ago. But for whatever reason, there I was.

So imagine my shock when right inside the front door, I am greeted by this:

I mean, WTF?

And it wasn't like it was just a little section, this stuff was all over the friggin store.

I kid you not.

Aisles and aisles of the stuff. It was like everywhere.

This stuff was EVERYWHERE. It was like the entire women's clothing section had been tossed and replaced my mass manufactured HypeeWear™®.

I took a closer look at some of this stuff, and it was REALLY cheaply made. As in, I rather doubt it would even survive a real show. The fabrics were really flimsy, and stitching looked like they used the absolute cheapest thread they could find, and I wondered if some of this stuff wouldn't just completely disintegrate the first time it was washed.

It was obvious they'd done SOME homework, in that the "look" was there (and everywhere you looked), but it just was so incredibly strange to be in what in most shopping centers is normally considered to be a pretty conservative and stalwart "anchor" store, and to just literally be swimming in stuff like this.

Now this REALLY was kind of freaky:

I mean, mannequins? WTF? Ok, so granted I don't get out much (outside of shows, that is) but when exactly, did we go mainstream? When did the aesthetic become a mass manufactured commodity?

And even more interesting to me, is when (or more precisely how) did corporate America decide that this was to be the "in vogue" look for the summer for the masses?

Upon looking at quite a few of them closely, I found that the majority of these were made in China, along with Taiwan, India, Guatemala, the Philippines, Korea, and a very few were made in the USA. This struck me as more than a bit odd, in that all the stuff I've ever seen in the lots have been generally been made by people who at least have HEARD of the music the clothes are generally associated with.

They didn't miss a lick either, the everything got the "Boho Chic" (apparently Hippy still has a dirt connotation that goes with it, so the very name had to be gentrified for consumption), including:

Purses. Lots of purses:

Jewelry. Gotta love the big stores to make sure you can accesorize in matching product lines without having to move more than 20 feet to do so.

I mean, seriously, the entire downstairs floor of the store was just chock full of this stuff.

And it was all on sale too! Drastic reductions throughout the store. Huge, huge, discounts. Big Clearance. (ok, I'm assuming everybody knows the retail game right? You figure out what you want to charge for something, mark the "normal" price up by 30-40%, hope it sells, and if it doesn't you mark it way down to what you were going to charge in the first place, and get what you originally wanted to sell it for, and only it it's TRULY a flop do you dump it on a liquidator to show up in outlet shops so as not to have people realize what the stuff you're selling is actually worth. That's the America Retail Way).

So I can't help but wonder, of any of this stuff was assembled by 14 year old kids working in a sweatshop some place? I'd hope not, after all, this is Macys, right?

Dead Tour 09 - Day 1

2009-04-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

So we jumped on the bus at Albany. This was the first of 8 shows over 10 days, and the first time I'd seen the Core4 together in Albany since 1990 @ the Knickerbocker.

While some things have changed, a lot has remained the same. I remember thinking as we entered the lot scene, the LAST time I was here, I was still older than a lot of the kids I saw last night, and that was when Jerry was still around.

Denez has these tour shirts that are spot on. The Dead AARP Tour, 2009.

True dat. I look in the hotel as we're checking in today (day 2) and there's these gray hairs in front of us checking in. And the one guy turns out to be a principle at a high school. He's got his admin assistant with him, his IT network guy, and all these guys from one school, all here to see the Dead. They were joking "don't let anyone know we're here". Indeed.

So on to the shoot. Last night was beyond weird. I had my camera rig in my backpack rather than my belt pack, figuring it'd hold up better in a tight crowd with a lot of people slamming.

I get to security, and the guy politely informs me that while they have no issue with my camera gear, I can't take my backpack in? WTF? This was a first. The camera's ok, but the bag has to go. Righty ho. I run back to the car all the way on the other side of Rockefeller Plaza, get my 5D MK II out, plop the 70-200 on and leave the rest in the car. What a mess. No spare batteries, and in my rush I didn't think to get my spare CF cards. I'm so used to everything being right at hand that this "bagless" shoot completely took me out of sync with my normal routine.

So it goes. 12 blocks back to the venue (no seriously winded, and making a mental note, that at some point, God forbid, I might even get too old for this shit). The boys were already well into the first set. I managed to get some reasonable shots, not my best stuff, but it was the first time I'd shot any of these guys in an Arena in a VERY long time (I don't count festivals as arenas, they're a different beast altogether).

This morning in the hotel, as a first, I managed to plow through last nights shots AND get the website edited to post them. Those who know me, know I like to take my time going through the shots and generally scrutinize the hell out of them. So ok, we'll do it different this go round. Blitzkrieg mode on.

An hour later, the photos are picked, resized, and integrated into the site.

I attempt the FTP push. Hm. The fine quality Hilton's Wifi could pass for a couple orange juice cans with a string in between them. We're talking sub dialup speeds, hell sub acoustic coupled terminal speeds.

So here I was, all happy that I'd have broken personal land speed record for update times, and only to be held captive by piss poor connectivity. Sigh.

It is what it is.

Major major blast from MY past..

2009-02-12T14:20:00.000-08:00

Every so often, I get reminded about my "young" days in the music biz.

I got an email today from a guy I haven't heard from in well over 20 years. He was the bass player from this band I did a lot of work with in the mid 80's, called Dog Body. They were a local outfit (Lincoln, NE), and did about half originals and half "deadish" covers. I worked with these guys in between whatever road work I had with other bands.

They had a really excellent lead player, and had a pretty good following. They threw annual microfestivals on a farm outside of town, and we gigged around the midwest for a few years.

At any rate, Keith put up a facebook group, and has managed to track down the whole band (except the drummer, thus far).

One of the other guys found several shots of the band, some gig posters, and even one of newsletters we used to send out (that I put together in an alpha test version of the first version of Pagemaker, which would completely ignite the desktop publishing phenomena on a first generation Mac Plus).

There's some live gig shots, as well as some shots in the studio (maybe the only ones left in existence as I didn't even have a camera in those days). Wow we were young.

Ye Olde Photos

And...

Keith even found some old live soundboards with me mixing. Quite frankly I'm amazed how good this stuff was considering the time it was done. I'd forgotten that I used to mix stereo live (common place these days, but back then was practically unheard of). I also used a ton of outboard gear to process the guitars, vox and drums, which was pretty rate in those days as well.

So..

Not Fade Away

(I Want to Live In) America

Midnight Hour

Crying shame there aren't any of the originals. That's where these guys really shined. Leeker was a really excellent songwriter, and a brilliant guitarist. When he was doing his own thing he was close to Mark Knopfler good. I've got their originals on 1/4" Half Track reel to reel, but have no means of transferring it unless anybody has a Studer B77MKII laying around in an attic?

At any rate, it's really a treat for me to see that some of this stuff survived the years, and that most of the guys are still around.

Shooting NAMM, Day 1

2009-01-15T22:04:00.000-08:00

Trade shows. Over the past 15 years or so, I've worked more trades shows than I care to count. Concerts are a walk in the park compared to shooting a trade show.

In this case I got called out to LA to shoot the launch of Dean Zelinsky's new guitar company (DBZ Guitars).

First, the hours. Up at 4:30 AM, a flight change in Las Vegas, in to Anaheim by 12:30 Dallas time. A quick stop at the hotel to dump off luggage (you can't check in to 3PM) and off to the convention center.

As much as concert lighting is a challenge to shoot under, it's nothing compared to a trade show floor. The lighting is god awful horrid. 50' up in the ceilings they have these monstrous halogens with this horrid color temperature that makes everything look pale, lifeless and flat. Whatever lighting they have in the booth doesn't really do much for the product, and there's no contrast to be had anywhere. It's rough making stuff look good.

Then there's the time factor.

I like to take my time (heh) working through concert shoots. The time from shoot to on the web at a trade show does not allow for jack diddly in terms of post shot cleanup. Time is of the essence.

Complicating this, is the lack of decent connectivity. Convention center WIFI's are a joke, and the Anaheim is amongst the worst. I had a 20 mb batch of JPEG's to get to DBZ Guitar's web guy for posting, and it took almost an hour and a half to load. We're talking dialup level throughput. As a result, you have to cut that out of post time, which means in reality, you MAYBE have 20-30 seconds to spend on a given shot. It's bare bones basics.

So the shoot worked pretty much as follows:

I'd crank out 30-50 shots, then drop the card into my firewire reader and pull them off onto the laptop drive. Those get batch imported into Aperture, then I'd spend maybe 5 minutes going through the shots and doing a rough cull.

After that, I'd pick 15-20 of those that were decent prospects, and spend 15-20 seconds doing very rough corrections, and once that was done I'd batch export for web res. I'd load the prospect JPEGS up in preview and run through those with the Dean and get a thumbs up/down.

The approvals then got zipped into a file, and emailed to the web guy, which would take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. While the email was cooking I'd head back out onto the show floor and start shooting again. Rinse and repeat all day long.

Announcement here:

DBZ Guitars Day One

Gallery Here:

Photo Shoot, Trade Show Style:

Tomorrow I'll have a little more control over the shoot, in that I'll be able to get there before the crowds hit, and should have some time tomorrow night AFTER they close the show (and turn off those miserable damn ceiling fixtures) to try to get some decent glamour shots of the product.

Still, even though it's pure chaos, these events are a lot of fun, because I get to run into folks I don't get to see all the time. I bumped into Chad Lee (Rock Concert Fotos), who I haven't seen in a good year and a half. The last time Chad and I shared a pit was to shoot Dave Navarro, John 5, Jerry Cantrel, Mike Inez, Scott Ian, Zakk Wylde and a whole raft of other folks for a 2 day shoot, so it was a blast running into him.

I ran into one of my Luthier friends, Ben Chafin, who announced he'd purchased the Electra Guitar company, which is really cool for me, as my very first "decent" guitar as a kid was an Electra, and while they've been out of production for years now, they still have quite a cult following. Ben's going to resurrect the line, and modernize the concept they pioneered of sticking floor pedal into the actual guitar in the form of interchangeable plugin modules.

He built a couple prototypes he brought to the show, and I got to see that glorious peace sign logo on a headstock on a new guitar for the first time in over 30 years. Neat stuff.

There will be various "all star" events going on Friday and Saturday, so I should be able to catch some actual performance stuff as well.

Like a festival, you have to decide almost as much what you won't shoot as what you will, since they're spread all over town and you can't be everywhere at once.

At any rate, I'm off to bed. I'll try to get some pix up when I get a moment's break.

My Morning Jacket 12/28 Shots up

2009-01-04T16:37:00.001-08:00

The second of the 5 day "shootathon" run is up in my concert photos section.

What a show. What little rust they'd acquired during Jim's convalescence must have been blown completely off the night before. While the Saturday show was excellent, the Sunday show bordered on unreal. Full review to follow.

My Morning Jacket 12/27 Shots up

2009-01-04T13:38:00.001-08:00

The first of the 5 day "shootathon" run is up in my concert photos section.

More to come, including full on reviews.

Getting to Shows, the hard way..

2008-12-28T08:16:00.000-08:00

What a day.

6AM, up and off to Dallas Love field for the "cost saving" southwest flight.

So, compared to American, I saved about $500 on the fare for the DFW->Chi->SF->DFW trip.

The first leg is 3 days in Chicago, 2 nights of MMJ, followed by a night of Umphrey's McGee, then off to SF for the Ratdog/Phil Lesh & Friends for the 30th and New Years Eve.

So I'm sitting in the terminal, we first get "news" that the plane is in "pattern" and will be delayed.

Then they announce it was low on fuel, and rather than land the damn thing in Dallas (it was a whopping 10 miles out), they send it to friggin Austin. WTF? That's like driving in to work to use the bathroom when you're sitting at home.

So now we're delayed at least 2 hours.

1:45 later? They cancel the flight altogether. Fuggin great.

Truth of the matter? Crew had been on longer than 8 hours, which means they would have had to call in another crew and pay the overtime. Rather than do that, they "cost saved" by canceling the flight completely.

So next they tell us that they have 40 seats to Little Rock on another flight, but they're going to have to "raffle" them. This takes another 45 minutes. I lose out on the raffle, but no worries, they come back on the PA and announce that the connecting flight from Little Rock to Chicago has been cancelled as well.

Joy.

Furthermore, they have NO other flights to Chicago with any available seats until (get this) MONDAY.

This is not gonna work.

On the phone to American, lo and behold they have a flight to Chicago, one way, last minute for a paltry $900. More joy. However, as I have all our tickets and unless I get to Chicago my brother's going to be left twiddling his thumbs at the happy assed hotel.

Break out the plastic, and now I have to hop from Love field to DFW. My wife heads back to the airport to shuttle me.

Finally, at my second airport of the day, with a new flight that will put me in at 4ish. Except for one small thing.

The plane to Chicago has landed, but can't "get to the gate" because the "just regated" plane at the gate hasn't left yet. So we sit and twiddle. For like an hour and a half as they load luggage, and meanwhile the people on the inbound flight (that's supposed to be my outbound flight) sit on the tarmac twiddling. Oddly, there were open gates at several other places in the terminal, but it obviously didn't occur to them to use them.

More joy.

So...

They finally get the luggage loaded, and our plane pulls in. My 3rd departure time of the day (1:45) has now morphed into 4:45, meaning landing in Chicago has gone from my original noon arrival into 6:30, and of course the show starts at 7:30.

Getting into Chicago, I share a cab with this woman, and we're both amazed that of all the crazy high speed maniac cab drivers we could have got (and that I would have really liked at this point for time reasons) we land the ONE cabbie in all of Chicago who insists on driving like 25 in a 45 while yakking non stop to his buddy in some unidentifiable (to me) language. My 20 minute cab ride is now pushing the 40 range.

By the time I got to the hotel, the band was due to go in in 3 minutes.

Lovely.

Fortunately for me, in the ONE break I got all day, they were late starting.

So off to Will Call to nab my press credentials. Security was very nice, they even walked me down to the "photo pit" which at this venue means "the aisle on the right of the stage" because there really ISN'T a photo pit.

Somewhat less than optimal shooting location, but oh well.

What followed, made the whole day worth while. The show was, in a word, friggin awesome (ok, that's two words but oh well). Now my bro has this nitpick bit about most shows, (I think he suffers from "been to too many shows and now we have to grumble about them as a function to prove just how many we've been to" disease, but I digress in the interests of busting on him).

=)

They brought it, big time. More in depth review to follow.

Published again, and didn't even know it.

2008-12-10T11:38:00.000-08:00

I completely stumbled across this on the web last night:

Tampa Tribune Story

I remember shooting the event (Dean Zelinsky is a friend of mine and flew me out there to cover the event). I knew that a bunch of my shots from the thing were used by Guitar Player (I got a 10 page spread out of the deal), because the check showed up.

However, it was a bit of a shock to find this thing and go, damn, that shot (the one of Navaro) looked really familiar. Then I saw my name there. Oddly, I have no idea how they got them. GP & Dean used some of the shots, but I have zero clue how the hell a guy from Dallas shooting an event in LA ends up in a Florida paper. Spose I should be flattered, although they didn't do a great job on the halftones. I should call the guy and ask em for a decent digital copy of the story I guess.

This isn't the first time, I had a bunch of folks tell me about some other stuff I shot showing up in Vintage Guitar last year, and I still haven't even seen that one.

Ah the joys of teh intrawebz. Funny assed stuff.

Butchie joins Phumes!

2008-11-30T12:06:00.000-08:00

I'm really thrilled to have Butch Worrell join the Phumes site. It's really great to have a shooter of his caliber here. Butch has been shooting the scene for WAY longer than I have, and a quick glance at his .org photos gives you an idea of how long he's been at it.

As we're still just getting set up, we don't have his stuff here... yet.

Rest assured, once the techie stuff gets ironed out, his killer shots will be here for everyone to enjoy as much as I do.

Again, welcome, and damn glad to have ya.