Hello Cleveland

What? And Quit Show Business?

9:20 am Thursday, October 2, 2025
Hi Everyone!
As I write, I’m still in my hotel room in Pittsburgh. I need to be in the car park by 10 am with my belongings, which includes my bulky Yamaha MODX8 keyboard that I take to my room each night so I can sleep. It’s tough enough as it is to snooze more than a few hours when I’m on tour without having to worry about theft. 
The other parts of my rig are replaceable, but if some asshole steals the keyboard, I am, as they say, fucked. 
I’d better get moving. 

10:40 am
We’re on our way north to Cleveland. It’s amazing how much room there is in the back seat of this truck when there are no cartons of T-shirts hogging all the space. Dorothy (Andy’s wife) sold $700.00 worth of them last night, and the rest are now travelling in Andy’s car. 
We’ve played in Cleveland many times over the years. We did an outdoor show once in the eighties right by the Cuyahoga River. That’s the same river that famously caught fire in the late seventies. No joke.  It was so polluted with organic substances and fossil fuels that it literally caught on fire. By the time we played there, it had been considerably cleaned up (and doused). 
During the show, there were two boats near us blowing their horns. Gord thought it was me adding some tasteless synthesizer licks.
“Turn down!” he yelled, turning towards me twice with a “you’re fired” sneer on his face. The third time he turned to me, the boat blew its horn, and I had my hands in the air. I couldn’t see his face, but he must have been a little embarrassed. I know Rick was laughing.

1:30 pm
Checking into the Westin hotel in downtown Cleveland. The view from my 14th-floor room is a little different from the Pittsburgh scene I saw yesterday. 

4:30 pm
Soundcheck is a pain in the ass. The people we deal with at each venue are professionals. But, Lord love a duck, frequently (like yesterday and today), when I make a request, for example, for them to brighten up the keyboards in the monitors, they ask me to play while they adjust it, and I do play……. for five minutes, and nothing changes. 
After five minutes, they ask if it’s okay. I say, ‘It’s still the same,’ and I play for another 5 minutes and again nothing changes. They give up and say, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be fine once the people are in the hall.’ And it isn’t. It’s uncanny how often this exact scenario plays itself out.
6:00 pm
We’ve finished all of that, so I have about an hour to an hour and a half of free time.
“Is there a liquor store nearby?” I ask. It’s downtown Cleveland, so of course there has to be. I like to have a little splash of vodka to calm my nerves before going on stage.
“No”
“No?”
“Well, there’s one a few miles away.”
“Most cities have one on every block!”
So much for that idea, I think I’ll find something to eat.
I didn’t find any food . Last night and tonight they were supposed to feed us, it was in the contract. They didn’t. Well, there was a bag of cookies and some rather suspect looking sandwiches.
.Here’s a picture of the hall we’re playing from behind the keyboard. This is just before they let the people in.

SHOW TIME

Music, music, blah, blah, music, intermission, music, blah, blah, encore

10:02 pm
The show is over. It was good, but it was difficult to elicit any laughs from the audience. I eventually did, but it took some work. I did a tolerable job of playing my instrument tonight, at least from my perspective. There was some finger slippage; there always will be. A perfect game in music is next to impossible. I’ve had no-hitters, which means no bad notes, but a perfect game requires the dynamics, the phrasing, and the execution to be beyond reproach. 
Time to pack up the gear and head back to the hotel. Tomorrow, Lansing Michigan.