Cold beer on a Friday night, a pair of jeans that fit just right and theRockin45s playing on a beach on a cool Summer night. Life really doesn’t get much better. Sometimes I take my life for granted and forget how blessed I am to be able to make music with my friends and share nights just enjoying the little things in life.

Venetian Shores was not our beach growing up. My brother Mike worked there in the Summer of ’67. Wow that was half a century ago. Our hometown beach was Tanner Park in Copiague though. These days Venetian feels like home, even more than Cedar Beach, where I worked in the Summer of ’73.

The new stage is nice but sometimes it feels too big for us. As we make a move back to out roots and attempt to recapture the spirit of where we started, I think more and more that big stages don’t serve us well. We were always a no stage, crowd in your face, reach out and touch us band. I remember once in the early days at Water Lilly’s where would be packed into a small area on the floor the size  of a closet, Bill told me he wanted to play in places that had a stage and I said it wouldn’t work for us. This band has always been about being one with the crowd. So it’s different now because most places we play do have stages, and they are sometime huge.

Last night we did get back to basics in terms of remembering some of the old standards. People who have come to hundreds, maybe in some cases thousands of gigs, tend to think we never change the material. A small trip down memory lane shows how many songs have come in and out of our repertoire over the years though. Last night at Venetian we made a conscious effort to bring back some of those songs, and it was  much fun to revisit our foundational sound.