Robby's Lobby #95

BlogNovember, 2013Inrock.co.jp

Hey Hey In Rockers and welcome to this month's edition of the lobby, and congratulations to all of our friends in Japan and Tokyo for getting the opportunity to host the 2020 Summer Olympic games! It's been a crazy month for me, the Goo Goo Dolls / Matchbox 20 tour has drawn to a close and after a few headline shows in the US (I've included a photo we took with MB20 at the end of the tour). The band took a short break as my Music is Art Musical Education Foundation in my hometown of Buffalo, NY celebrated the 11th annual Music is Art Festival.

At the end of summer tour shortly after we spoke last GGDS got to do a show in Buffalo, it's always a pretty special day with friends and family numbering in the hundreds come to join us for a day as we wind around the country doing shows. Every time we do a show in our hometown I spend half of the show looking through the crowd and recognizing faces from my past and present some of which I've not seen for many years. It makes it pretty tough to concentrate on the songs sometimes, I find myself thinking there's my old next door neighbor, there's the guy that works at the 7-11 down the block, there's someone who looks like someone I used to know . . . maybe it's the mailman from my last. uh. oh what song is this again? But it's always a great show and this one was no different.

After a quick run up into Canada with Matchbox we did a few headline shows and took a bit of a break from the constant touring while I readied the Music is Art Festival with the awesome collection of talented folks on the MIA Festival committee.

The MIA Festival runs on a Saturday, so we spend 2 days setting up 11 stages around the grounds of a prestigious art gallery in Buffalo NY as well as the grounds of an Olmsted (Central Park designer) Park surrounding a lake and huge rose garden. I also do a lot of press for this event locally, all 3 major television networks, 4 newspapers, 5 radio stations and a few internet outlets all scattered amongst my meeting sound companies, staging companies and electricians as we set up for this massive event!

We awoke Saturday morning to thunderstorms and winds, it had been raining all night. But as you could probably imagine, nothing stops a rock festival (especially MY rock festival) and especially not the rain! GGDS best live performance ever was captured in a driving rainstorm in 2004 and I always use that as the standard for making it happen in severe weather. So not too far past our 10 am start time I took the microphone on the Main Stages and yelled into a rainstorm with a few groups of people tightly holding umbrellas ''WELCOME TO THE 11THハANNUAL MUSIC IS ART FESTIVAL !!!!!!!!'' The day proceeded with The 3 main stages, an Americana Stage, an Electronic music stage, a kid's stage, an Indie rock stage, a spoken word stage and 3 DJ stages all lit up with music simultaneously and the 2013 MIA Festival was under way !

We had rock, country, metal, hip hop, jazz, all sorts of dancers, performance artists and even an escape artist throughout the day as well as almost 70 tents full of artists displaying their work and live painters doing murals under tents all around the grounds, all of the talent from our community here in Western New York. I think we rented every single tent within a hundred miles. And it rained, and it rained. It rained the entire day, but rest assured, the people came with rain boots and umbrellas and had a great time with us, and even after all of the chaos, I just can't wait until MIAF 2014.

Still pretty wet from the day before, I boarded a plane the very next morning and headed to Los Angeles, and I'm here right now, sitting in a trailer waiting to shoot a video for the new single ''Come To Me'' on a ranch here in LA. It's a whirlwind, but it's amazing!

Thanks for stopping in and we'll see you next month with more adventures from the lobby . . . . .

Peace
Robby

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