What a treat to be back in the groovy little KZTV studio, located at Mt. Sinai hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The staff (Gerard, Alayna and Deepika) were so cheerful and happy to have us there, and set-up took almost no time at all.
The whole thing felt very comfortable (for me, anyway), as if we’d done it a hundred times, when in fact the opposite was true–we were playing almost completely unplugged (Justin had a bass amp) and unrehearsed, in front of 3 TV cameras, with almost no audience in sight.
I will confess that kept getting distracted by looking at the monitors. It’s hard enough to remember a bunch of lyrics and guitar chords when I’m also trying to pay attention to which way my eyes are focused. I missed a couple of lines of a couple of songs; most notably I forgot to sing the line “Skunks in my shoes” once during the song of the same title… oops! But it actually created an interesting gap in the song, I may “forget” to sing that line again from time to time.
I finished the set feeling really happy, like I’d done something good. It’s an honor to be a part of such a positive project. The people at the KidZone at Mt. Sinai are doing awesome, amazing, inspiring work with kids and I salute them!
We’d been looking forward to this gig for weeks, a chance to get back into Manhattan and rock a proper NYC crowd. And what a venue, a gorgeous patio overlooking the East River. Meanwhile, Time Out NY Kids and a bunch of other sites had listed tonight’s event as their Top Pick (apparently not much happens in town on Mondays).
So it was a real shame when the skies opened up and rained us out!
Waterside’s Community Affairs Director, Yenneca, was super-nice, helping us get parked and making sure we had all the tables and stuff we needed. She even provided a cooler full of ice and bottled water. Then as the skies darkened, she made sure that plastic tarps were available, and just in the nick of time! We were just about ready to sound-check but we found ourselves weatherproofing instead. Some of our stuff did get a little soaked but nothing was ruined. We’ll replace some guitar strings and drum heads and be ready to rock the gazebo at Church Square Park in Hoboken on Wednesday!
While we waited for a break in the precipitation, we captured some video of ourselves jumping in puddles, for use in a video for the song “Jump in a Puddle.” The image quality wasn’t great but maybe it’ll be good enough for YouTube…
Huge props to everyone at Waterside Plaza, they made the experience fun for us despite the rain, and we’re eager to get back there and show ‘em our stuff.
Wow! We just played an amazing show at the Knitting Factory to a huge crowd! What a thrill!
To be honest, we didn’t know what to expect today. Our last few Knit gigs have trended downward, attendence-wise, a phenomenon we attributed to the warmer weather. (Who wants to sit in a bar on a good beach day?) In fact we were scheduled to play a set there in July and we cancelled it, anticipating an empty house.
But then something cool happened: We started getting some good listings, especially in the Holy Grail of kid events, Time Out New York Kids. We’d created an ad for their July issue following the TONY Kids Madison Square Park gig in May, and they re-ran it in August for free! They also listed us prominently in their calendar section, and on their web site, which of course prompted a bunch of other parenting sites in the area to list us as well.
As a result, there was a steady stream of stroller-pushin’ folks when we finally finished sound check and opened the doors! And they were an enthusiastic bunch, too, clapping and singing along and dancing non-stop. We saw a fantastic, spontaneous people-train form during “Don’tcha Wanna Ride,” prompting Kipley to comment that when we ask people to make a train they almost never do, so from now on we’ll let them figure it out for themselves.
It was a huge boost for the band and we can’t WAIT to get back to the Knit next month with our friends ROCKNOCEROS!
Today was the first of our three gigs with This Is It! Productions’ Traveling Kids’ Kingdom, and what a start it was! Deanna Hunt and the good folks at This Is it! really know how to pull out all the stops and put on a great show.
Our friend DJ Mickey G was there, doin’ his thing as MC. He knows what the kids like! We talked about collaborating with him; Dana has a new song that might be a perfect match for his skills at the turntable. I keep mentioning it in hopes that it’ll actually come true.
I also met another surprise character: Matt Wilson, a.k.a. “Harry” on Cyberchase, one of our favorite PBS kids’ shows. I saw his trademark spiky hair and goofy clothes and shouted like a fanboy “Oh wow, it’s Harry from Cyberchase!” Rather than siccing security on me, Matt flashed a huge grin and said “hi,” introduced himself by his real name, and even asked about my kid.
Then he did something so amazing I can scarcely believe it: When I introduced myself as a Fuzzy Lemon, he said “Oh, you guys are great, I love the Fuzzy Lemons!” He’d actually heard of us and liked our music! I can’t imagine how such a thing is possible but I’m going to act as if it’s true.
Matt and Dave
After Matt and his wife Stephanie performed their “Ultimate Rock and Roll Show” (a real crowd-pleaser) it was our turn. We whipped through a super-fast set up and soundcheck. Deanna had hired Mike K. again and he and his team had us up and running in record time.
I love outdoor shows. The wind and sun feel so good, I think they enhance the music in some mysterious way. But the wind also decided to knock the drum shield over, and the sun was pretty darn hot…
In other words, the gig was a mixed bag, as per usual. We played through a state-of-the-art sound system on a huge stage, but we couldn’t seem to hold the festival crowd. I don’t mean to say the place was empty——we had kids dancing, but Matt and Stephanie seemed to have more. As always, I think the sun was a factor. But there’s definitely an opportunity here for the Lemons to really step up our game and find out how to capture folks’ attention, without giving anything away in terms of the songs we write and perform.
We have two more gigs with This Is It! Productions in September and October; I can’t wait to turn it up another notch!
After a lovely hiatus, the Lemons are back to tackle the second half of the summer. And we came back with a bang, rocking the gorgeous gazebo in Victory Park in the lovely little hamlet of Rumson, NJ. I don’t know the full story of how this gig was booked (I rarely do) but apparently there are several Hoboken ex-pats in Rumson, and someone slipped our name to the town Concert Committee*. Thank you, whoever you are!
Rumson is lovely, and apparently a fairly wealthy area. We passed several driveways that disappeared through manicured lawns without ever catching a glimpse of the houses at the end. I think I could just buy a driveway and make people think I had a fancy house at the other end.
Victory Park overlooks a scenic little harbor, and a light sea breeze washed over us all evening. Every gig should be in such a gorgeous setting! We got ourselves situated pretty quickly, with Dave E. in his familiar spot at the sound board. We were encouraged by the local coordinator (I didn’t get his name, shame on me, he was nice) to play our pre-show music nice and loud, as it would draw a crowd. I think it worked, because before long the park was a sea of blankets and beach chairs!
As is often the case, the band had mixed feelings about the set itself. We always have some technical issue or other, on top of our usual self-criticism about mistakes we make while playing. But looking back now as I write this, I have a really good image of the night in my head. Kids running and playing, grown-ups clapping along to the music, some unexpected familiar faces in the crowd, and really enthusiastic greetings from fans afterwards. That’s the true measure of success, when people come up and tell us how much they and their kids enjoyed the music.
Sure, we get some things wrong. But we’re doing something right!
~Dave
* You can tell that there are Hobokenites on the committee because our neighbor Polka Dot is next on the Victory park schedule.
The band has received lots of offers to play at birthdays during our time together, but we’ve had to say “no” due to lack of space, lack of funds, whatever. We decided to change that by creating Lemon Trios, three-person units that can play “unplugged” events anytime, anywhere. (The success of our recent acoustic set at Make Music NY was a big help in this regard.) Justin, Dana and I did a trial run at a birthday party today and it went really well! Being up-close-and-personal with the crowd really allowed us to get interactive and make jokes with the kids. We plan to do lots more of this sort of thing, at parties, in schools, and elsewhere.
~ Dave
Following an exhausting week of summer shows, what could be better than a trip to Ben & Jerry’s? How about a fun show AT a Ben and Jerry’s?
The owner of Hoboken’s scoop shop, Sibel, also runs the shop in Ridgewood NJ., Following our first partnership at the Shipyard concert, Sibel invited us out to the other shop for a little parking-lot jam. It’s a great spot with a nice little deck where Kipley, Dana and I did an acoustic set for the crowd. The event was a United Way fundraiser, you can see us in the background of the video they shot:
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
Make Music New York is a HUGE city-wide music event: Musician of all stripes can be found performing in pretty much every public space in the entire city. We submitted our package months ago, and actually got offered a couple of different slots. We picked Richard Tucker Square on the upper west side, mainly because it’s on the upper west side. Specifically, it’s close to Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, and that awesome Barnes and Noble where we’d played a couple of times.
However, it’s not a very BIG park, more like a traffic triangle off of Broadway. And, as we found out a few days before the event, no electricity. So we drew on the success of our recent set at KZTV and decided to go the unplugged route (Kipley and I both own small, portable, battery-powered amplifiers, so we were able to plug in three mics and the bass guitar).
We were pleased to discover that we COULD hold a crowd and put on a great show without spending 90 minutes on set-up and soundcheck beforehand. Imagine that! A little bit of amplification helped a LOT; not only could the audience hear us over the traffic noises, but we could hear ourselves and each other adequately and no one blew out their voice trying to shout loud enough to be heard (my biggest fear with this sort of gig).
We teamed up with a clothing company called Little Miss Matched for this event, one of our first stabs at the cross-promotion game. They arrived with these awesome little bundles of mismatched socks and handed them out to the crowd while we played “It’s OK To Be Different.” See? Cross-promotion. Clever, no?
It was an unexpectedly successful little show in NYC!
