After being out of the loop for a decade, I’m happy to report that Champaign’s live music scene is still alive and well. I just attended the first of three nights of the Great Cover Up at The High Dive. A bunch of great bands played but the gem of the night was the Mike Ingram band covering local great Lorenzo Goetz. Mike’s a solo artist but he enlisted the services of my fellow bandmates Tom and Guido on the guitar and bass, respectively and … wow. I wish I could put into words just how incredibly good the show was. And I can’t believe how fortunate I am to be playing with those guys again. They are undeniably the best guitar and bass combo in C-U.

The Great Cover Up, for the uninitiated, is a festival of local bands covering music by other artists. The idea is that each band picks a different artist to cover and learns 3-5 songs for the Cover Up. Covered tonight were Buddy Holly, David Lee Roth (Nate Jones from Brother Embassy did a great Diamond Dave!), Beastie Boys, Lorenzo Goetz (local artist) and some DJ and drums combo I’d never heard of. Whatever. It was truly great in all regards. You’d be hard pressed to find a scene like this in a town this size anywhere else in the country.

I hope that YOU support your live music scene, by the way, especially if you’re a yute and you go out a lot. Forget about DJs. Go see a good band.

I wonder about whether it would work to get a couple of decent condenser mics to record the room in the future. Seems like it would give you a better sense of what was actually going on in the room while playing. The board mix, while it sounds good if you’re listening live, is very unbalanced because not everything needs to be boosted as much as other things. For example, board mixes tend to be very vocal-heavy compared to the drums because of their relative need to be amplified.

Two 90s Daughter gigs coming up in December. The first, on December 18, is at Fatman’s Warehouse in Danville. We’ll have another a week later on December 26 in Champaign at the Cowboy Monkey.