Frostapalooza

Maybe you knew Brad Frost played the bass? What you might not know is Brad is a monster on the bass. His love for performing music is off the charts.

So for Brad’s 40th birthday he had an idea: throw a concert. It came fully named: Frostapalooza.

The way Brad envisioned it, it was a pretty damn big idea for a pretty damn big concert. Not just a handful of people, but forty musicians in all, rotating on and off stage, playing both original music and covers in a wide variety of styles. Like The Last Waltz, except, you know, in Pittsburgh and with less Martin Scorsese and more GoPros.

This is how Brad asked (via website, naturally):

How do you say no to that?

I said yes, despite a healthy amount of trepidation (I’m a very amateur musician at best). Fortunately, we had a year to get it all together. And by “we”, I mostly mean the core gang in Pittsburgh, meaning Brad, his (rockstar) wife Melissa, and his brother Ian who would be on drums the whole night.

Jeremy beat me to the blogging punch and summarized it nicely:

Over the course of the last year, things began to shape up. There were playlists. There were spreadsheets. Dot voting was involved. Anyone with any experience of playing live music was getting nervous.

You could feel it coming together though. The setlist was solidified. Who was playing on what was decided. Practicing began. Zoom calls happened. There were audio files slinging around that we could practice to and lay our own tracks on top of for feedback and figuring out the right vibe.

Yadda yadda yadda — I’m on a plane to Pittsburgh.

Rehearsals were in Brad and Melissa’s basement music cave. I ran into Jeremy and Jessica the minute I got to the hotel, so we ended up getting some BBQ together and got a car over there together, and we jammed!

The next day Dave and Jessie rolled in from Austin, then we went right back over to the cave to rehearse again.

Here’s Daniel T. Hall on the saw:

I actually didn’t have that much to rehearse, so I was mostly just hanging out. One of my jobs was to make sure that we had cool videos of visualizations to use at the show. See Jeff Robbins was there who makes software called Visibox. Brad’s idea was to have people make Pens and we’d project them during the show. People did that, so I sat around turning them into videos which is what Visibox needed. Jeff ultimately did 99% of the work getting Visibox doing it’s thing during the show, and it turned out super cool.

Jumping ahead a little bit, just so I can show you the visualizations bit, you can see them running above the stage here:

I was also just chilling out outside. I kinda knew this would be one of the best opportunities to do a little lawn pickin’ with the acoustic folks, so we made that happen:

People kept thinking my Thump t-shirt was a Trump t-shirt and that was a little mortifying.

This day was also the official pre-party for everyone, so people started piling into the house. Fortunately the weather held out and we could hang outside. There were tons of web people there.

Then it was show-day. We all got to the venue and had to set up and sound check. I mostly watched everyone working very hard lol. It was something like 48 inputs to the board, all of which I think Brad was going to capture separately for mixing later.

Then, all of a sudden, it was showtime.

A lot of the best show photos were from Will Browar who wonderfully blogged about it all (and apparently was there from hearing about it on a ShopTalk episode, which is neat). I’ve kiped these glamor shots from Will:

Brad and Mellisa’s daughter Ella was on stage as a hype dancer for most of the entire show. Incredible.

The show itself was an unbelievable outpouring of energy and love. I couldn’t help but imagine if anyone in the audience had decided to go on a lark, not knowing anything about it, they would have been pretty damn impressed. This wasn’t just a couple of nerds poking around at instruments (except me), these were some serious musicians giving it their all.

And also Carson Daly was there lol. On video, as one of the benefit organization is Project Healthly Mind of which he’s on the board and he and Brad are basically zoom friends. The other was NextStep Pittsburgh. Both of these organizations were clearly near and dear to the Frost family in the most personal possible ways. I made a contribution to both.

High five to everyone I met there. Sorry I haven’t named everyone, but everyone was extraordinarily kind and interesting and know that you’re involvement made it happen.

Happy birthday Brad!