As we drove up the Henry Hudson Parkway alongside the Hudson river I imagined to myself the sight of an Airbus 320 coming in low to ditch, as happened in January last year. It was described as the most successful ditching in aviation history as all crew and passengers safely evacuated the aircraft. I'm not sure I've ever been up this high in New York City (I'm talking street numbers here), except of course to cross the George Washington bridge as the favored route to Teterboro airport. Today, instead of crossing the bridge we turned right onto 178th street and within a few blocks we pulled up outside this amazing building.



The United Palace Theatre up on 175th Street and Broadway, in the heart of the Washington Heights district was opened in 1930 for vaudeville and movies. It's architectural style has been described as Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-Eclectic-Rococo-Deco. In 1969, as most of the movie houses were being closed down the 175th St. Theatre was saved from demolition by the Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II. Better known as Reverend Ike. He bought the building for more than a half-million dollars and used it as the headquarters for his United Church Science of Living Institute. The theatre was exquisitely restored by the church and is now also used for concerts. Reverend Ike died on July 28, 2009.



Clearly the building is still extensively used for church services as the crew boys pointed out the twin leslie cabinets either side of the stage, something I've never seen before. Leslie cabinets are typically the speakers used with Hammond Organs and we did indeed spot a Hammond C3 tucked away at the side of stage. It reminded me somewhat of the time I went to see the amazing Jimmy Smith in Chicago in a small club. He had six leslies dotted around the room.





Kerry uses the time between sound check and show to make a quick skype call home...



Our good friend Dick Boek from Martin guitars was at the show too and he had bought a selection of hand picked new Martins for us to try out. The scene in the dressing room sounded like a music shop on a Saturday morning. Both Tim O'Brien and Mark are proud owners of their own signature Martins and they posed together on the stage with the guitars.



Tim's acoustic is a beautiful 00-18 which has a slightly elongated scale. Here's an excerpt from Tim's biog about it - Charles Sawtelle once told Tim that "a good instrument will find you." A 1937 Martin 00-18 found Tim some years back and in his own words he said, "I play this gem on lots of Tim & Mollie recordings. It's punchy and sweet sounding." When approached about the prospect of Martin creating a Tim O'Brien model his humility shone through. "It is an honor to be associated with Martin Guitar. It's solid stock. I just want to say that Martin is not like most companies of today. There is no planned obsolescence with Martin Guitars. They certainly make guitars as well as they've ever made them. They've kept that integrity. They define the whole thing. There's none finer than a Martin."



Another guest of Mark's this evening was John Monteleone. The story of their relationship is delightful and Mark had wanted to save the song he wrote about John until we arrived in New York. We had decided to place the song right in the middle of the set and when the time came Mark told the audience of the time he was first introduced to the wonderful world of Monteleone guitars. It went back to a day that Mark's friend Rudy Pensa from Rudy's Music Stop handed Mark a Monteleone Radio City guitar. Mark immediately handed it back after laughing and saying "I'm not worthy of this" and that it was too beautiful to play. Mark went on to research the history of the great guitar makers from italy, the connection with New York City and was lucky enough to visit Monteleone's workshop. Monteleone set about making an archtop guitar for Mark and during the process the two remained very much in contact. In fact John sent Mark many emails talking about the guitar and in them would say things like "the chisels are calling" and "it's time to make sawdust". Here was a man who has such a relationship with his tools, Mark was obviously inspired and wrote a song.


The Monteleone Radio City guitar

Mark finished off by saying that on the record we had used a 40 piece string section but for live, Guy does this all on his own. Somewhat apprehensively, I launched us into the beautiful song and the performance was a real high point of the tour so far. We'd played it many times in sound check but the depth and mastery of the tune only really comes to life in front of an audience, and what an audience. New York can be a tough crowd to please but I think we won them over pretty early on as the show was as relaxed as I've ever known us to be here.

After the show, we were back at the hotel before we knew it and we'd arranged to meet on the rooftop bar at the hotel here but the weather was against us in that it was chilly and very windy, so we ended the day with a few drinks in the more traditional downstairs bar.