Tags: Bronx Zoo, Dave Entwistle, New York Life, Rocknoceros
It was a hot, hot weekend at the world-famous Bronx Zoo, made even hotter by the appearance of Hoboken’s own Fuzzy Lemons! We’ve been looking forward to this show for months, ever since we booked it way back in March. I mean, come on, it’s the world-famous Bronx Zoo! All summer we followed their Web site, checking out the other bands that were playing there. It was a good line-up, including our friends Rocknoceros, and we feel quite honored to be part of it.
The Zoo staff were all fantastic: Energetic, helpful and fun. The only wrinkle we encountered the entire weekend was as gate guard at the entrance on Saturday who hadn’t been told we could drive our U-Haul to the stage. Even that didn’t last long, as a young, energetic, helpful Zoo staffer arrived at Mach 4 to escort us in.
The sound crew was super-cool, and thrilled to find out we’d brought our own sound guy, the redoubtable Dave E. It sure made their jobs easier! They had all the gear we could possibly need—They’d been doing this all summer, after all.
I’ve been to gigs where you had to keep it down because of the neighbors, but this was the first gig I’d been to where we had to keep it down because of the lemurs. The lemur house was across the green from the stage, and we had to keep the sound levels on the mellow side because no one wants a room full of agitated lemurs. Also, we had to be done with sound-check at a certain time because the sea lion feeding was about to start.
In case you’re wondering, I was grinning like a kid the entire morning, even before the first set started.
We ran the Wild City Safari set we’d been rehearsing for weeks, and I think all that effort paid off. As with so many outdoor shows, the crowd tends to linger in the shade, which is rarely in front of the stage. But we had a pretty sizeable group of fans in front of us at any given time. We had ‘em jumping, wiggling and shaking, stomping like elephants, even running in circles.
Meanwhile, Dana had recruited her usual batch of awesome volunteers, and they constantly worked the crowd, blowing bubbles and passing out stickers and hawking the e-mail list. We saw lots of familiar faces from all over NJ, NY and even my family from CT.
There was a near-disaster during one set, when the wind blew the drum shield down on Brandon’s kit, but we managed to slide it off and out of the way without too much interruption of the show. It’s currently in pieces, requiring some serious re-assembly. But other than that I think we played four pretty solid (if sweaty) sets over the course of two days.
New York Life sponsored the stage all summer, and tweeted the following videos:
Some Folks Like The Beach
Please Don’t Cry!
The Zoo staff seemed pretty excited to have us back next year, watch this space!
~ Dave
-- Weather When Posted --
- Temperature: 70°F;
- Humidity: 68%;
- Heat Index: 74°F;
- Wind Chill: 70°F;
- Pressure: 30.15 in.;